Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

"I’ve chosen another book by Kant with a rather forbidding title: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785]. But, basically, this is an introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy. ‘Introduction’ is a misleading term in this context because it’s quite a forbidding read – no one could claim that it is easy. But it lays out the fundamental principles of Kant’s moral philosophy. To go back to something that I was saying earlier, originally a lot of the material in the Groundwork was meant to be in the Critique . It’s interesting to look at the connection between the two works. How was it that a book that was originally supposed to be fundamentally about ethics ended up being the Critique of Pure Reason ? The answer relates very much to the conversation that we’ve just been having. Kant recognised the importance of ethics and he recognised the importance of trying to do one’s duty and to live one’s life in accordance with the distinction between right and wrong. But he was also well aware that recent advances in science, in particular the success of Newtonian mechanics, looked as if it was posing a threat to the very idea of ethics. It was looking increasingly as though everything that happens in the world could be explained as the result of inexorable causal laws. The popular view that more and more people were beginning to take seriously was that the world basically consisted of a lot of tiny billiard balls knocking into each other in such a way that, in principle, you could predict with absolute certainty everything that was going to happen. “Advances in science, in particular the success of Newtonian mechanics, looked as if it was posing a threat to the very idea of ethics” Kant took that picture very seriously. In fact, he didn’t just take it seriously: it was part of his project in the Critique of Pure Reason to argue that every event has a cause, that everything is completely causally determined. But if everything is completely causally determined then it immediately looks as if there’s a threat to the very idea of free will. It looks as if we can’t possibly be free agents. In particular, of course, it looks as if we can’t possibly be free moral agents. The very idea of a distinction between right and wrong looks as if it is under threat as well. And so, that’s why Kant felt that he had to indulge in all that elaborate metaphysical work before he could get on to what was really of interest to him. He somehow needed to be able to reconcile his commitment to Newtonian science, and to the principle that every event has a cause, with his equally ardent commitment to the possibility of free will. That’s the key question. I have been saying he’s trying to reconcile the two but, of course, we need to be told how the reconciliation goes. In fact, it’s a direct application of what we were talking about in connection with the Critique of Pure Reason . He goes back to the idea that there is a fundamental distinction between appearance and reality, between the phenomenal and the noumenal . Everything is completely causally determined in the phenomenal world. So how can there be freedom in the phenomenal world? The answer to that question is: there can’t be. There really is no room for freedom in the phenomenal world. Complete causal determination does indeed rule out freedom, says Kant. Other people have taken a different view, but that was Kant’s view. “We hope we are free agents, because without freedom nothing in our lives seems to make sense” How then does he square the circle? The answer is: by appeal to the distinction between appearance and reality. Our freedom is a feature of how we are in ourselves. This is something that works at the level of reality, rather than at the level of appearance—although it does mean that, just as in the case of the existence of God, strictly speaking we have to regard our belief in our own freedom as an article of faith. It is just like the existence of God—we can’t hope to prove conclusively that we are free agents. We hope we are because without freedom nothing in our lives seems to make sense. Ultimately, however, it’s another article of faith. The Groundwork is divided into three chapters. What we’ve just been talking about dominates chapter three. But in the first two chapters of the book, he’s actually just doing moral philosophy. What he’s trying to do in those two chapters is establish the fundamental principles of morality or – ideally – the fundamental principle . One thing that I think is important to appreciate is that he takes himself to be preaching to the converted. He doesn’t see this as an exercise in trying to persuade anybody of anything. He thinks that, if you want to know what the basic difference is between right and wrong, you don’t read his Groundwork , you don’t consult any philosophical text, you consult your own conscience. He thinks people already know perfectly well how to distinguish between right and wrong. They don’t need Kant to tell them – that’s not his business, that’s not something he sees as necessary or possible for him to do. People already have a sense of the distinction between right and wrong. “People already know perfectly well how to distinguish between right and wrong. They don’t need Kant to tell them” What he can do, as a philosopher, is take this basic knowledge that people already have and systematise it. That’s the aim of the exercise in the first two chapters of the Groundwork . It’s in the course of systematising our moral beliefs that he develops the idea of the categorical imperative. Put very simply, what he’s doing with the idea of the categorical imperative is emphasising that what’s distinctive about morality is that it lays down certain things that we just simply should do, whether we like it or not. So, he draws a distinction between categorical imperatives and hypothetical imperatives. One way to illustrate this distinction is this: suppose I’m watching you playing tennis with a friend, and it’s clear that you’re having a great deal of fun out of this. Both you and your friend are thoroughly into this game and getting a lot of pleasure from your activity. But it’s also clear to me as a bystander that neither of you are very good. So I speak to you afterwards and say ‘Look, Nigel, you really should have some tennis lessons.’ And you say ‘Why ? ’ And I say ‘Well, to improve your game.’ Now, if you turn round to me and say ‘I’m not particularly interested in improving my game. All I was interested in was having fun and my friend and I were both having a great deal of fun , ’ then there’s a sense in which that’s absolutely fine. When I said you should take tennis lessons, it was all based on the assumption that you would be interested in improving your game. But if that’s not something that you’re particularly keen to do, then so be it. But if I overhear you telling some outrageous lie to your friend and I take you to one side afterwards and say ‘Look Nigel, you really should stop telling these ridiculous lies,’ and you say to me ‘Why?’ and I say something along the lines of, ‘to be a better person’ —if you then turned around to me and said ‘I’m not particularly interested in being a better person’, there does seem to be a difference between the two cases. In this case, it looks as if your reply is inappropriate; whereas in the first case, you were well within your rights to tell me that you didn’t particularly want to become a better tennis player. But if you tell me that you’re not particularly interested in becoming a better person, I still have a comeback. I can turn around to you and say, well, you should be. “What characterises morality is that is does involve this fundamental categorical imperative: there are certain things that we should simply do, full stop” There’s this basic distinction Kant is drawing between things that you should do whether you like it or not—those are what underpin the categorical imperative—and things that you should do only if you have certain aims and aspirations—which are mere hypothetical imperatives. He thinks that, by the time we’ve thought about the basic difference between right and wrong, we’ll see that what characterises morality is that is does involve this fundamental categorical imperative. There are certain things that we should simply do, full stop, irrespective of our aims and aspirations. That’s right. In a way, that’s part of the very idea of a categorical imperative: it’s something that applies to you whether you like it or not, simply by virtue of the fact that you’re a rational agent. The sheer fact that you’re somebody confronted with choices about what to do means that, among other things, you must do x or you must refrain from doing y . It’s in these terms that Kant thinks he can formulate a fundamental principle of morality because he says that if you’re in a position where you are trying to decide whether it’s legitimate for you to do something—for example, if you’re wondering whether it would be reasonable or legitimate for you to lie in a particular situation—whether that is so or not must ultimately depend on whether what it is that you’re about to do could be generalised. If you think it’s legitimate for you to do x in these circumstances, are you prepared to sanction a universal law to that effect so that anybody else in these or relevantly similar circumstances would be entitled to do x as well? Kant believes that as you think it through you’ll begin to see that a lot of things that we are tempted to do will straightforwardly emerge as wrong because it simply wouldn’t be feasible for everybody to live their lives that way. So, the lying example is a classic example. Here I am, I’m tempted to tell this lie and I ask myself what would it be like if everybody did that. I think to myself: ‘Well, hold on a second. If it were well known that you could get away with lying in certain circumstances, after a while communication itself would just break down. We wouldn’t be able to trust the things that people are telling us; we wouldn’t know when to think that they were telling the truth and when to think that they might be lying, and so forth.’ I’m missing out a lot of the details and when you spell out the details a lot of people think that Kant’s argument is unsuccessful, but there you get a flavour of the sort of strategy that he adopts. He did bite the bullet. Whether we agree with Kant or not—and obviously a lot of people would straightforwardly take issue with Kant on this—the fact that he’s prepared to bite the bullet is very striking. It’s another indication of the rigour that underpins his moral philosophy. He’s completely uncompromising in his ethics. What characterises it is its uncompromising nature: what you must do, you must do. Full stop. That’s dictated by these universal, exception-less principles that apply to all people in all circumstances. It’s the very antithesis of consequentialism, which is a view in moral philosophy according to which what’s important about what we do are the ultimate consequences and the ends can justify the means. Kant is the arch-opponent of that view. For Kant, the ends never justify the means; the means are themselves what really matter. It’s what you’re about to do, considered in and of itself, that is crucial."