kant confusion | tls

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Onora O’NeillACTING ON PRINCIPLEAn essay on Kantian ethics279pp. Cambridge University Press.Paperback, £18.99 (US $28.99).978 1 107 67553 7

Published: 2 July 2014

“Afternoon Quiet Hour” by Paul Gauguin Photograph:© The Protected Art Archive/Alamy

Kant confusionMICHAEL ROSEN

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In Birds of America Mary McCarthy sends her callow hero, PeterLevy, to spend a year as a student in Paris. To take with him on histravels she gives him a copy of Kant’s Groundwork to theMetaphysics of Morals. Yet Peter finds it hard to lead his life onKantian principles. Too many everyday dilemmas can, it seems, beargued both ways. Staying in a cheap hotel, for example, hewonders about the ethics of tipping:

“I tried asking myself what Kant would do in my position: “Behaveas if thy maxim could be a universal law”. If my maxim was not totip because the next guy didn’t, that would be pretty hard on thechambermaids of Paris, I decided. So, if he was true to hisphilosophy, Kant would tip. Of course he didn’t have to face theissue, never leaving Königsberg. But you could also argue thattipping made it tough on the nontipper (which I could produce

some empirical evidence for), and therefore Kant might be against it. If I understand him, he is saying that an actionshould be judged by its implications, i.e., if everybody did what you are doing, what would the world be like? Well, aworld in which every student gave a five-franc gratuity to the woman who cleaned his room would be OK, but whatabout a world in which every other student did it?”

In the end, Peter concludes ruefully, “Maybe the categorical imperative is not the best guide for Americans abroad”.

Peter is not the first person to have found turning Kant’s moral philosophy into practice a frustrating business. In theextended chess tournament of the secondary literature, almost every conceivable analysis of the Groundwork has beentried out over the past two centuries, yet all have been found wanting in some way or other.

The standard opening is well agreed. Having declared that moral commands must be “categorical”, Kant tells us thatthere is only a single categorical imperative. He formulates it first as follows: “act only according to that maxim whichyou can at the same time will as universal law”, then slightly modifies it to read: “act as if the maxim of your actionwere to become a universal law of nature by your will”. Kant next divides duties along two axes: duties that we owe toourselves against those owed to others, and duties that are, as he terms them, “perfect” (“and admit of no exceptions”)



in contrast with those that are “imperfect” (ones that are no less obligatory yet may be balanced against other claims).

He goes on to present the reader with examples of the four different kinds of duty that result and some reasoning aboutwhy he thinks each is supported by the categorical imperative. His example of a perfect duty to ourselves is the dutynot to commit suicide. A perfect duty to others is the duty not to make a “lying promise” – a promise that one doesn’tintend to keep. We have the imperfect duty to ourselves to “develop our powers”, while we also have the imperfect dutyto help others if they are in need.

In each case, Kant tells us, the attempt to will the contrary as a universal law would involve a “contradiction”. Suchcontradictions are of two kinds, however. Contradictions in the case of “perfect duties” involve what he calls “acontradiction in conception” – we cannot even conceive the contrary as a universal law. “Contradictions in will”, on theother hand, involve situations that, while we can conceive them as universal laws, we nevertheless cannot will.

The problems, though, are all too obvious. Take the case of promising. What, Kant asks, if people were to makepromises without intending to keep them? In that case, the practice of promising would surely break down. Yes indeed,it would be terrible if promising were to vanish from the social world. But that is because the practice of promising is avaluable one. What if it were, say, the practice of duelling? Or taking a bribe? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if they were todisappear? Using the test of “contradiction in conception” seems to work only on the assumption that the institutionunder threat is worth defending. This classic objection (it goes back to Hegel, at least) has led interpreters from JohnStuart Mill to R. M. Hare to claim that Kant ought really to be seen as a kind of rule-utilitarian – someone who thinksthat what matters is following whichever rules will “make things go best”.

Or consider suicide. If everyone killed themselves there would be no people left alive. But no one, surely, could thinkthat that was the contrary of the prohibition on suicide. Most people who believe that suicide is allowable affirm theprinciple that human beings should be permitted to choose to end their own lives when they no longer see those livesas valuable (or something like it). It isn’t at all clear, however, that there would be any contradiction in conceiving of aworld in which that rule were in place. This brings attention to the action-guiding rules (the “maxims”, as Kant callsthem) that people are following. Isn’t it possible by a bit of judicious “maxim-shopping” to fit a whole range of moralprinciples under the “contradiction in conception” test? Why not a principle that we should always keep our promisesexcept when (for instance) the loss to the person promised to is very small but not keeping the promise would let us dosomething very good for someone else? Yet, in that case, wouldn’t we be back in a utilitarian world?

As for “contradictions in will”, Kant gives the example of someone who has a talent that, with cultivation, would makehim, as Kant puts it, “a useful man in many respects”. But he is lazy and not inclined to make the efforts necessary todevelop his powers. That, says Kant, brings him into contradiction with the moral law. “He asks, however, whether hismaxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is calledduty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law although men (like the SouthSea islanders) should let their talents rust and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, andpropagation of their species – in a word, to enjoyment; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law ofnature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct.” If what we can or can’t will is a psychological matter, Ithink that the wistful expression I see on the faces of my students when I read them this passage in January orFebruary is enough to show that willing a world of pleasure-seeking idlers is quite possible.

These problems seem so glaring that it is hard to believe that a philosopher of Kant’s extraordinary gifts didn’t noticethem. Did he think that the replies were too obvious to need stating? One of the many reasons to welcome the secondedition of Onora O’Neill’s Acting on Principle is that it sets out to confront the objections head-on.

As O’Neill recalls in the preface to this new edition, Acting on Principle grew out of the doctorate she completed atHarvard under John Rawls in the 1960s. Rawls was not yet the immense figure he was to become with the publicationof A Theory of Justice in 1971, but then, as later, thinking about and teaching Kant was central to his work. O’Neill wasone of the first of many of Rawls’s students to become distinguished interpreters of Kant’s moral philosophy. She isnow Britain’s most important public philosopher, combining academic work in ethics with major roles in political life(she is currently a member of the House of Lords and Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission). What



drew her to Kant?

O’Neill explains that she was both attracted and repelled by utilitarianism. On the one hand, she shared withutilitarianism the view that moral theory should be something precise and determinate that guides actions – that oneshould look for (as Rawls put it in the title of his very first published article) “a decision procedure for ethics”. Yetutilitarianism’s own decision procedure is one of ruthless aggregation. Kant’s moral theory, by contrast, looks to be away of defending the individual from instrumental subordination to collective ends. It is, to use the Rawlsian technicalterm, deontological. Finally, Rawls and his students took for granted that a Kantian ethical theory must be asthoroughly secular and compatible with natural science as its utilitarian rival seemed to be. Hence they focused onKant’s formulations of the categorical imperative as a “moral law” and not his – avowedly metaphysical – ideas abouthow human beings’ moral agency ties them to a “noumenal” realm of freedom.

Acting on Principle remains the most incisive and thoughtful defence of Kant along these lines that we have. It is not abook to read quickly. O’Neill does not shirk the enormous complexities of Kant’s theory. Nor, however, does shemultiply the difficulties unnecessarily. Indeed, she writes with a kind of brisk lucidity that is entirely admirable.

O’Neill turns her attention first to the word “maxim”. “Maxim” is a Kantian term of art, hard to pin down in detail. Thebasic idea is fairly clear, however. For Kant, human beings are rational agents. When they act, their actions can be seenas the product of a reasoning process in which at least one of the premisses is general. If I get myself a drink of water,for example, it is the outcome of a piece of reasoning in which something like: “when you’re thirsty, get a drink” figuresas one of the premisses. This makes the question of what principle I am acting on more determinate than it firstappeared. It isn’t just a matter of finding some general rule that could be applied to my action to cover it but whichmaxim I was actually using to guide me as I acted.

The second step is to look at what Kant means by “contradiction”. As O’Neill points out, it is one thing to ask whether aworld where a maxim is universalized would or would not be an attractive one, another to say that it involves acontradiction. Reluctant to abandon Kant’s idea, however, she proposes that we notice the force of Kant’s formulationof the categorical imperative as requiring that we will a “universal law of nature”. Her claim is that a maxim thatinvolves a “contradiction in conception” is one in which there is a conflict between the intention of the person actingand the existence of a world in which the maxim is realized as a “law of nature”.

False promising can be shown to involve a contradiction in this way, she argues. If everyone promised falsely and falsepromising became part of a system of nature, the intention behind false promising – deception – would be bound tofail. Public confidence in promises would diminish and finally disappear. The maxim of keeping promises, by contrast,can be successfully universalized. So it follows that promises should be kept. Similarly, a “contradiction in will”requires us to think about the will from a rational point of view. If you engage in an action you ought also to will themeans that are necessary for its successful pursuit. It is this that the neglect of one’s talents contradicts.

Still, I am not convinced. If no one accepted bribes, the practice of bribery would atrophy and my intention to enrichmyself by taking a bribe would fail. In a world in which bribes are accepted, on the other hand, it could succeed. So byparity of reasoning would that not mean that I should take a bribe? As for developing one’s talents, it surely dependswhat one’s ends are. No doubt, the inhabitants of Slacker Island will need to be able to get coconuts from the trees andspear fish, but that hardly requires the kind of dedicated self-improvement that Kant regards as obligatory.

Yet if even O’Neill’s sophisticated discussion fails to persuade, what are we to think? Derek Parfit, who devoteshundreds of pages of his recent On What Matters to pursuing the twists and turns of various interpretations of thecategorical imperative, reaches a pessimistic conclusion. It is, he believes, impossible to fit Kant’s claims together:“Kant simply did not have a single coherent theory”. If this is the final verdict on a philosopher who said that beingconsistent (consequent) was a philosopher’s first duty, however, it is a huge setback.

My own belief is that we can indeed see Kant’s moral philosophy as consistent but that to do so we have to approach itfrom a radically different starting point.



According to Kant, values are of two kinds: “dignity” and “price”. Dignity is “unconditional and incomparable”, incontrast to price in which trade-offs can be made. Only one thing, however, has dignity: “morality, and humanityinsofar as it is capable of morality”, or, as Kant also calls it, “personhood”. Personhood is an aspect of human beingsthat transcends the empirical realm and makes us, as it were, citizens of two worlds (“so that a person as belonging tothe sensible world is subject to his own personhood insofar as he belongs to the intelligible world”). It is from thisinner, intrinsic value of personhood that all other values must descend.

Yes, you might say, but how? If personhood is a transcendental inner kernel that all of us carry within us, then it is, itseems, something that can’t be increased, diminished or destroyed. How is it supposed to guide our actions? Theimmediate answer is that personhood is something that we have an absolute duty to respect. Yet that, of course, mightseem to do no more than kick the can down the road in front of us. We know how to respect things that can be violated,like the right to free speech, but how do we respect an indestructible transcendental kernel?

My answer is that, for Kant, to respect personhood requires us to respect or promote various more empirical features ofhuman beings: their happiness, their choices and the natural purposes that (so Kant believes) they find withinthemselves. We must also act in ways that are expressive of our respect for that value of personhood, so we must notallow ourselves to behave in a supine or submissive manner and we must not demean or disparage others. Betweenthem, I think, these different ways of respecting humanity in our persons cover Kant’s views about the different dutiesthat we have.

If I am right, the picture of Kant that emerges is a long way from the one that originally attracted O’Neill, however. It isnot just that it is metaphysical in the sense that it places its central moral value – the only real, intrinsic value –somehow beyond the empirical world. Worse perhaps, from her point of view, it does not offer the kind of sharpcriterion for resolving moral dilemmas that could compete with the utilitarians’ greatest happiness principle.

Kant, for example, had a view of sex that was prudish even for an elderly Prussian bachelor. For human beings to usetheir bodies for sexual pleasure is, he tells us, “to make him or herself into a thing, which conflicts with the right ofhumanity in his or her own person”. But why should we not instead see our loving enjoyment of one another’s bodiesas an affirmation, not a denial, of our humanity?

If the categorical imperative were a universal, algorithmic decision procedure it would resolve that question one way orthe other. If it is rather, as I suspect, a matter of deciding between different conceptions of what counts as showingrespect for humanity in one’s person, the matter is much less straightforward: there is no unambiguous, independenttest. In short, the price of a coherent account of Kant’s moral theory may be giving up one of the principal features thatdrew Rawls and his students to him in the first place. Consistent Kant or congenial Kant? Perhaps we can’t have both.

Michael Rosen is the author, most recently, of Dignity: Its history and meaning, 2012. He teaches in theDepartment of Government at Harvard University.

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