The Categorical is Not Imperative... I'm not dissing Kant

I'm fighting against hard-coded objective claims to morality. While its always daunting to deal with Kant, here's the next best thing:

In Onora O’Neill’s 1986 article, entitled “A Simplified Account of Kant’s Ethics,” she attempts to demystify – quite accurately – several of Kant’s more bewildering ethical constructs. In particular, O’Neill defines Kant’s supreme principle – the categorical imperative – within the context of one of his many formulaic paradigms. Namely, her article deals with the altruistic Formula of the End in Itself, a systematic guide to human relationships and social order which holds that people should always be treated as ‘ends-in-themselves’ and never as ‘mere means.’ While both of these concepts may seem slightly enigmatic for a pragmatic moral philosophy, O’Neill offers Kant’s simplified definition of both concepts: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same times as an end” (May 45).

It is my contention that O’Neill, using Kantian ethics as the crux of her position, has created an ineffective and inflexible moral paradigm that does not necessarily recommend the best course of action in every foreseeable scenario. More simply, the categorical imperative, as employed by O’Neill, is not the best ethical choice for a person seeking a fundamental maxim by which to guide his moral actions. This essay will demonstrate situations in which the categorical imperative would improperly inform the individual towards immoral action. As well, the categorical imperative’s introspective and self-contained nature allows for moral pliancy, leniency and backwards rationalizations as its employer sees fit.

The first general criticism of O’Neill’s theory on Kantian ethics is centered on a tension between universality and autonomy. Kant firmly believed that the categorical imperative was intrinsic to the human soul; a quality which is just as firmly a part of the individual’s constitution as sensory perception, emotional response, and physical need(s). Yet at the same time, Kant asserts that the individual is the ultimate sovereign of his own morality – the same morality which is informed by the universal categorical imperative. If indeed this were the case, how does Kant’s paradigm correctly account for two different, albeit “moral” responses, to the same ethical stimuli? Surely different people will make different decisions which they deem moral in the same circumstances. And yet, this tension seems difficult to account for, considering they ought to be operating under the same fundamental maxim, and therefore ought to arrive at the same moral choice. Moreover, Kant’s theory in this regard seems to be ignorant of cultural boundaries, which may suggest that the categorical imperative does not manifest the same way in every individual. Suppose culture A – operating under the same intrinsic and fundamental categorical imperative as culture B – has normative values which undermine or offend the sensibilities of culture B. Though O’Neill must argue that culture A is wrong to offend culture B, because an individual in culture A would not be treating his foil in culture B as an ends-in-himself, I think that ethnic differences do not make culture A’s practice implicitly immoral. It appears that Kantian morality leaves little room for cultural relativism. Let’s use an example :

In the United States, it’s a common practice to make eye-contact with someone you’re talking to. It’s a sign of respect and surely O’Neill (and Kant) would value treating someone which respect as a necessary iteration of the Formula of the End in Itself. However, in Chinese culture, looking someone directly in the eye, especially a superior or an elder, can be construed as aggressive, hostile body language. It is respectful, in Chinese culture, to look at the person you’re addressing below eye-level. If a Chinese person, visiting the United States, showed respect to an American he met by looking at his feet whilst talking to him, the American may misinterpret this as a sign of disinterestedness, disrespect, or rudeness, though none of the like were intended by the other’s glance. Respect, therefore, and the cultural manifestations of conveying respect, seem to be an integral part of treating people as ends-in-themselves, yet are devoid of any practical common denominator – the same denominator that Kant asserts is fundamental to all human’s constitution. The categorical imperative is designed to transcend cultural boundaries – Kant claims it is part of our very nature – yet it turns a blind eye to culture differences, often which become the basis for different interpretations of moral schema. Indeed, if the categorical imperative were innately part of each human, surely the American would not misinterpret the Asian’s signs of respect and admiration. (Again, this is purely hypothetical; as I see it, we’ll probably be showing the Chinese respect in just a few short years).

The second and more direct criticism of Kant’s ethics seizes upon an over-reaching claim about the nature of lies and promises that O’Neill makes in her essay. The polar opposite of treating someone as an end-in-himself, naturally, is using him as a ‘mere means.’ This supposes that one manipulatively uses another, without their consent, to achieve selfish ends (such as theft, murder, or slander). Yet O’Neill asserts there are other less obvious situations where victims can be used as mere means:

“For example, one person may make a promise to another with every intention of breaking it. If the promise is accepted, then the person to whom it was given must be ignorant of what the promisor’s intention (maxim) really is. … The person who is deceived is as it were, a prop or a tool – a mere means – in the false promisor’s scheme. … In Kant’s view, acts that are done on maxims that require deception or coercion of others and so cannot have the consent of those others are wrong.” (46-47)


In short, O’Neill and Kant are vehemently against lying. False promises – a form of lying – always necessitate the use of individuals as mere means to particular ends. Understandably, using one as a mere means to achieve selfish ends (i.e. scamming a gullible investor out of their money in some faulty business proposition) is wrong and hence immoral, almost by all standards. However, the claim that lying and false promising in all forms is wrong symbolically reflects the inflexibility and impracticality of Kant’s ethical paradigm. Suppose a lie is told for selfless ends, such as preserving social order, maintaining intimate relationships, or (most drastically) saving a life. Suppose a promise is broken because it is later revealed to be either a silly or dangerous promise. Do these look like immoral actions? I’ll use examples to further illustrate by point:

Assume Sally, a friend of mine, suffers from chronic depression. She is slightly over-weight and not attractive. Her problems mainly stem from a lack of confidence, yet she is my friend and I do care about her. She approaches me one day, wearing a particularly hideous dress that reveals her awkward figure in a way that is absolutely repulsing. When she looks directly at me and asks, “What do you think of my new clothes?” – what should I reply? If I were operating under a principle that said that all lying, deception, and dishonesty is bad, I may tell her exactly how I feel about her new outfit. Let’s say I do exactly this, and she bursts into tears, runs back into her dorm room, and doesn’t come out for days because of my blatant disregard for her feelings in an attempt to maintain my fundamental ‘honest’ maxim. Have I acted morally here? It seems that I’ve acted more selfishly, using Sally as mere means for the preservation of my moral maxim – a philosophy which operates under a categorical imperative that says ‘lying – in all forms – is wrong.’ In fact, this grand plenipotentiary maxim (the categorical imperative) has informed an action which many would deem immoral. I ought to have told Sally that she looks nice and I like her clothes, treating her in an end-in-herself, even though this directly conflicts with the categorical imperative. Interestingly, using deception can sometimes be a necessary means to maintain an intimate relationship, an example where the Formula of the Ends in Itself does not correlate smoothly with the categorical imperative. Kant obviously never had to please a woman.

But the examples of Kant’s shortcoming regarding lying and false promises do not stop at simple white lies. Should righteous gentiles hiding Jews in their attic not have lied to the Nazis who stormed into their house searching for them? Should I not lie to the murderer who is looking for his prey, supposing I know where his victim is hiding? Should I not make false promises, appeasing those who seek to harm me? Should a ruler not lie to his people for the purposes of maintaining social order? The point here is not that lying and false promises are good, yet sometimes they are necessary in order to produce the most amount of good. The categorical imperative does not allow for the flexibility needed to accommodate the complicated moral gray areas of international, social, and intrapersonal relationships. In Kant’s ideal world, there is no murderer, no Nazis, and no excessively depressed overweight girl who puts her fate at the hands of a casual comment. Yet we do not live in Kant’s idealistic universe and these things do exist. It seems, quite simply, that the categorical imperative does not leave room for a right to lie.

My last and most sophisticated criticism of Kantian ethics as propagated by O’Neill is the room that his ethical system leaves for rationalizations. As Kierkegaard so eloquently put, “if unchecked, people tend to be lenient in their own case” (Kierkegaard 27). Because of this far-reaching truth about human nature, the categorical imperative lacks fixedness and objectivity when formulated solely in one individual’s mind. Because only the individual can have knowledge of his true intention, the open-ended nature of a moral philosophy that concentrates on ‘intention’ over ‘action’ potentially allows for anything to be rationalized into ‘moral’ behavior. Generally speaking, people are not morally hard on themselves. We usually feel entitled to the extra chocolate bar, or cigarette, or drink because we’ve somehow earned it. Entitlement, however, is a dangerous introspective consequence of manipulating one’s intention. Entitlement allows the individual to grant himself the right to do something; an unchecked justification of right intention. And, if indeed right intention is the key to the Formula of the End in Itself – “in what follows I shall take the terms ‘maxim’ and ‘intention’ as equivalent” (May 46) – the door is opened for immoral behavior to become moral via the rationalization of said intention. Again, examples tend to illustrate these points best:

Al is socially and financially functional alcoholic. He makes enough money for a comfortable lifestyle as a lawyer, and he is devoted to public service. Al spends many hours working to root out corruption and lawlessness both in society and in the legal community. As a result, he de-stresses by drinking alcohol when he is not at work. His family suffers; his children do not have a proper father figure; his wife is left lonely and uncared for; his social/personal life is virtually non-existent, either because he is working or in a drunken coma. Yet every day when Al comes home from work, he pours himself a drink, and feels entitled to it because of all the ‘good’ he’s done for the world in a single day. Moreover, he does not feel that his actions are immoral, because he operates under a strict code of honesty and professional integrity; Al legitimately believes that his intensions are always just and beneficent. In his own mind, Al certainly follows all the values of the categorical imperative – he may never even treat others as mere means. Yet when it comes to the way he treats himself, particularly in the vein of his drinking habits, he is overly-lenient, not holding all aspects of his ‘self’ to the same standard of morality, tending to use backwards rationalizations to substantiate his lifestyle choice. His self-abuse may therefore be rationalized within his sense of the categorical imperative, yet we find it hard to believe that Al’s alcoholism is moral behavior.

This is not merely a rant against the irresponsibility of alcoholics; it uses Al’s lifestyle as a metaphor for something, at one moment or another, everyone does. People are naturally lenient about their vices, and if indeed the categorical imperative does not inform us how to treat our ‘selves’ (what with so much emphasis on treating the other as his own ends), the result may be dangerous feeling of entitlement, a lack of self-examination, and a deeply problematic denial driven relationship with one’s self. I believe that, in this regard, the categorical imperative is both theoretically inaccurate, – via its emphasis on ‘intention’ over ‘action’ – and practically dangerous to the self – as demonstrated through the nature of human vice and our proclivity towards self-leniency.

In a perfect Kantian world, there would be no problems with his moral philosophy. I could be honest to Sally, not worry about offending natives when I am a tourist, and Al’s drinking – if he did at all – would not be antithetical to his relationship with his self. Unfortunately, this idealistic vision is completely unrealistic, and the object of a moral philosophy is not to forcibly superimpose an idealistic conception of how the world ought to be; rather, it is to teach the individual to maintain moral high ground in the word as it is. I believe that while the categorical imperative and the Formula of the Ends in Itself are fairly helpful moral approaches that can teach the individual how to deal with many situations, as long as we live in a milieu of anomie, these rules are not the be-all end-all moral fibers of human constitution. There are so many additional scenarios which I have not brought up in this paper that go beyond the reaches of the categorical imperative. Most notably is when you have a case of negligence, where the ‘intention’ may be been benign, but the ‘action’ was haphazard, and the ‘result’ was detrimental – is there no guilt or liability because the intention was not to use another as ‘mere means’? Perhaps we could synthesize the categorical imperative given the mitigating factors that limit its relevance and application to other types of moral dilemmas. This might be a safer vision of Kantian morality. In fact the categorical imperative is and can be useful, it just isn’t ubiquitous, and therefore it isn’t imperative.