Revisiting Kant's Universal Law and Humanity Formulas

Sven Nyholm

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110401400
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

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1 Introduction: The Human Nature Formula

1.1 Why Yet Another Book on How to Interpret Kant’s Ethical Theory?

Our topics in what follows are Immanuel Kant’s “universal law” and “humanity” formulations of the categorical imperative, the exact relation between these ethical formulas, and various objections that have been raised against these two ethical principles. The former reads, “act on the basis of a maxim that could hold as a universal law”1; the second “so act that you treat the humanity in your own person, as well as in every other person, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means only.”2 How should we understand these ethical principles? What is the relation between the two? And how should we evaluate the various different objections that have been raised against these formulas? These are our main questions.

Since my choice of topic is in itself everything but groundbreaking, the first thing I need to do is to motivate this choice. I shall limit myself to offering two main motivating reasons. Before doing so I will, however, first note another limitation I have placed myself under: namely, to engage exclusively with the normative discussion of Kant’s ethics within Anglophone moral philosophy, and in particular fairly recent contributions to this discussion. Our topic can therefore be restated as follows. We will be evaluating the ways in which the universal law and humanity formulas, and the relations between the two, are being understood and criticized within contemporary moral philosophy, with a special focus on Anglophone “Kantian ethics.” This leads directly to the first motivation behind the discussion that follows.

Firstly, although Kant’s ethical theory is very widely discussed and often severely criticized both by those who sympathize with Kant and those who don’t, Kant’s ethical theory is not, I believe, well understood within contemporary moral philosophy. This means that many of the criticisms that are directed at Kant’s ethical system misfire and that, insofar as Kant has anything to teach us, many of Kant’s intended contributions to ethical theory go unappreciated.

That Kant’s ethical theory isn’t well understood within contemporary moral philosophy isn’t surprising. It does of course most of all have to do with the fact that Kant’s texts are simply hard to understand.3 It is, to use our own main topic as our example, not at all obvious how subjecting ourselves to guiding principles (or “maxims”) that could hold as universal laws is equivalent, as Kant argues that is, to always treating the humanity in each person as an end in itself, and never as a means only. As we will see in the chapters to follow, most commentators believe that these formulas have different practical implications, and therefore find this claim to be, as one commenter puts it, “puzzling”.4

But Kant’s ethics’ not being well-understood within contemporary Anglophone moral philosophy also has to do with how many of Kant’s readers read the ethical works by Kant that they do read (which is often limited to a subset of these) in light of contemporary discussions of ethics within Anglophone analytical philosophy (which tend to focus exclusively on the mere permissibility of candidate courses of action5) along with all the preconceptions about Kant’s ethics therein. This is not always conducive to achieving a fair understanding of Kant’s views.6

When Kant, for example, says that the morality of an action is not determined by the consequences of this action, most contemporary readers immediately start thinking about current debates about consequentialism7 and understand Kant as claiming that the consequences of our actions are morally irrelevant. But by the “morality” of an action Kant means the relation the agent’s decision making has to the moral law: i.e. whether the agent acted as she did out of respect for the morallaw or whether she acted for some other reason, not taking into account anything morally relevant.8 And that what the agent’s prior deliberation itself is like isn’t determined by the consequences that actually result when she goes ahead and takes action does not necessarily mean that in deliberating, she is morally permitted to disregard all considerations having to do with what consequences her actions might have. Soon the basis of Kant’s claim that the morality of an action is not determined by its consequences we cannot, as so many commentators do, conclude that Kant thinks that the consequences of people’s actions are morally irrelevant.

The first major motivation behind the following discussion of Kant’s ethics, then, is simply that Kant’s ethical theory is widely misunderstood, which I find unfortunate (especially since there at the same time is universal agreement that Kant is among the greatest philosophers within our tradition). Here I am of course merely asserting that Kant’s ethical theory—in particular his universal law formula—isn’t widely understood. In the chapters to come I will explain and argue for that claim at great length.

Secondly: we need, I believe, to investigate and clarify all major alternatives to the methodological intuitionism that dominates so much of contemporary moral theory. Much under the influence of writers such as John Rawls (in particular his “reflective equilibrium” methodology9) and Derek Parfit (with his extensive use of fanciful thought experiments10), agreat deal of contemporary ethics is heavily intuition-driven. It is widely assumed that there is no alternative to this approach. It is assumed that by thinking about different general ethical principles, particular examples and situations, and our own dispositions to make certain moral judgments under certain circumstances, the chief aim of ethical theory is to work towards a state in which there is a match between the implications of general principles “we”—and it is not always clear who the “we” in question are—are inclined to accept and the intuitive responses we have with regard to how one ought to conduct oneself in particularsituations. T.M. Scanlon, for example, goes so far as to write that:

this method, properly understood, is.. the best way of making up one’s mind about moral matters. [...]Indeed, it is the only defensible method: apparent alternatives to it are illusory.11

This common conception leads many philosophers to either become intuitionists about ethics in the sense of taking their own intuitions about general principles and particular cases to serve as a reliable guide to how people should live their lives, or to become skeptics about ethical thought.

The grounds for skepticism tend to depend either on the observation that people differ in their intuitive responses to particular examples as well as in their considered judgments12, or on theories (some of which are empirically based) of the nature and natural history of our intuitive responses and judgments.13 I share some of this skepticism about intuition-driven moral reasoning, partly for these reasons. But I disagree with the conclusion that this should lead us to general skepticism about moral reasoning. And the reason for that is that I don’t share the view that it is illusory to think that there are alternatives to intuition-driven searches for reflective equilibriums. The general type of theory of which I believe Kant’s theory to be an instance—namely, what I will follow others in calling “constitutivism” in ethical theory 14—is precisely an example of a type of theory that doesn’t take intuitions about cases as the basic input and ultimate arbitrator of ethical reasoning. So to decide whether all suppose dalternatives to reflective equilibrium-seeking intuition-drivenmoral reasoning reallyare illusory, one of the things we must do is, I believe, to thoroughly investigate how exactly to understand the theory that Kant puts forward, since it might be one of the non-illusory alternatives that Scanlon and others overlook.15

Our topic, then, is how to understand the basics of Kant’s ethics—particularly the relation between the universal law and humanity formulations of the categoricalimperative—and the two main motivations prompting our discussion are: (1) that Kant’s ethical theory, for various reasons, unfortunately isn’t widely understood within Anglophone moral philosophy; and (2) that Kant’s theory seems to offer an alternative to the intuitionist—and therefore sensibility-relative—methodology at the heart of most contemporary philosophical discussions of both the foundations and applications of ethics. In this introductory chapter I will roughly outline the reading of Kant’s ethical theory I will argue for in subsequent chapters and then also outline the main chapters of this book.

1.2 Korsgaard on Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant

The reading of Kant’s theory I offer in this book draws heavily on recent work by Christine Korsgaard in which she presents a way of thinking about ethics that synthesizes ideas from Kant, Plato, and Aristotle.16 My reading of Kant does, however, also greatly differ from Korsgaard’s in important respects—both regarding how to understand the universal law formula and with regard to how to understand the humanity formula—and much of what follows in the chapters below circles around critical engagements with Korsgaard’s treatment of various aspects of Kant’s ethics. I will, however, take the aspects of Korsgaard’s recent work that I draw on as the starting point of my discussion, namely her work on what she calls the “Constitutional Model” of human agency, and how it relates to the principles of morality.

The constitutional model of human agency is contrasted with the “Combat Model” under which human actions are outcomes of struggles between different forces within the agent, such as competing desires, impulses, and passions. The clearest example of this combat model is probably Hobbes’s theory according to which a person’s will is identified with the last desire that a person has before taking action, and on which deliberation is viewed as a struggle between different desires that all, so to speak, try to become that last desire that constitute the person’s will.17 In contrast to this type of view, Korsgaard presents the “Constitutional Model”, which is her own preferred model, in the following way:

What distinguishes action from mere behavior and other physical movements is that it is authored—it is in a quite special way attributable to the person who does it, by which I mean, the whole person. The Constitutional Model tells us that what makes an action yours in this way is that it springs from and is in accordance with your constitution. But it also provides a standard for good action, a standard which tells us which actions are most truly a person’s own, and therefore which actions are most truly actions.18

In short, on this model, “... the function of action is self-constitution.”19 But, what exactly does this have to do with morality? Korsgaard writes:

[As] Plato .. taught us, in the Republic, ... the kind of unity required for agency is the kind of unity that a city has in virtue of having a just constitution .. Following [Plato and Kant’s] lead, ... I argue that the kind of unity that is necessary for action cannot be achieved withouta commitment to morality. The task of self-constitution, which is simply the task of living a human life, places us in a relationship with ourselves .. We make laws for ourselves, and those laws determine whether we constitute ourselves well or badly. And ... the only way in which you can constitute yourself well is by governing yourself in accordance with universal principles which you could will as laws for every rational being.20

Now, the requirement to act on guiding principles (or “maxims”) that could qualify as laws for all rational beings is, on the Kantian conception of morality, the most fundamental imperative of morality;this is the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative. It therefore follows, if Korsgaard is right, that:

... a commitment to the moral law is built right into the activity that, by virtue of being human, we are necessarily engaged in: the activity of making something of ourselves. The moral law is the law of self-constitution, and as such, it is a constitutive principle of human life itself.21

So in order to at all exercise agency, as opposed to merely behaving or reacting to things that happen to us, we must, Korsgaard argues, follow the moral law, which is thus the constitutive principle of all human agency: the principle that must govern our choices if we are to count as acting at all.

Is this how to understand ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Content
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Human Nature Formula
• 2 Reinterpreting the Universal Law Formula
• 3 Kant’s Argument for the Humanity Formula
• 4 Permissibility, Virtue, and the Highest Good
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes