One man's look at the categorical imperative

This article by Dan Polansky looks at the categorical imperative, a principle devised by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

A motivation is that I find the principle quite interesting, with interesting applications, even if somewhat problematic and open to objections.

The imperative was given multiple formulations by Kant. I will consider above all the first formulation, which is given by Wikipedia (and traced to a source) as follows:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

What I take from this is the following application, which is possibly not entirely Kantian. Let us have a situation where I am pondering an action, for which I have a rationale or urge, but am not sure of its acceptability from an ethical or quasi-ethical standpoint. Here, I intend to design a good gate: a statement allowing something. I will act on the rationale or urge only if the gate designed by me allows it. The allowance/gate shall have a reasonable universality; in particular, it is generally not allowed to arbitrarily invoke concrete individual entities, e.g. individual people (to be explained/detailed later). A key criterion on the gate is this: I must be able to support the gate's becoming a part of the physical law. If a gate is part of the physical law, no one can break it, not because there is a harsh punishment (e.g. eternal pain in hell) but because it is physically impossible.

This can be applied to a project or situation with poor or poorly defined rules. Any breaking of the rules is potentially problematic, but I can design a rule update (corresponding to that intended breaking) that I could wish to become an official rule of the project. Another problem is an action that is potentially problematic but a rule is missing. Then, I can try to figure out putative rules governing the admissibility of the action and determine whether the rules could become part of official rules.

We can make a trivial application of the imperative to what one might call contextual or situational ethics, in the context of a wiki. Let us have an editor with the right to delete pages who is pondering to pick a random/arbitrary page and delete it without any rationale or reason. The putative rule we are considering is this:

Any editor with the right to delete should feel free to arbitrary delete a page on a whim, with no deletion summary.

We immediately see that this rule is absurd. Clearly some allowances are unacceptable; no wiki could reasonably accept such a rule/allowance.

Another trivial application is to, say, stealing in a supermarket. We can again consider an absurd rule:

Any person in a supermarket (hungry, not hungry, poor, rich, etc.) should feel free to steal an item, on a whim.

One thing that makes these applications not so convincing is the triviality. At least, we have shown that situational ethics is doable and non-empty at least for some allowances/prohibitions.

Let us consider a more challenging application, by considering the following putative rule:

A person who is hungry and starving (has not eaten for days), in a country that has no food stamps and no refuge/support for such people, not even a charitable chuch support, should feel free to steal reasonable amount of food matching the needs from someone or some entity that has food in excess.

This rule violates the prohibition of stealing but is no longer patently absurd. Here, the categorical imperative does not seem to directly help, or it perhaps helps those whose ethical instincts or sensibility will reject the rule. But what the categorical imperative still does is invite rule making and principle exploration and it invites formulation of reasonably detailed principles. This we can see by omitting some of the differentiating criteria:

A person who is hungry and starving (has not eaten for days) should feel free to steal reasonable amount of food matching the needs from someone or some entity that has food in excess.

This principle is now open to objection: all hungry people in the U.S. have access to state food stamps and therefore, no one is forced by hunger to steal. We do enter the realm of rationality, of rule conjectures and refutations/criticism, even if in part inconclusive. This stands in stark contrast to an unethical position like the following: I will do whatever I want in whichever way I deem fit regardless of ethical principles or some imaginary imperatives conjured up by a continental pseudo-philosopher as long as I can get away with it, and sometimes even when I cannot entirely get away with it as long as the penalty is just the cost of doing business. Thus, for instance, if I am in the business of illegally marketing drugs/medicines off-label, I will proceed anyway and regardless of any harm to patients since any penalty the company risks incuring is handsomely compensated by profits.

I have noted that there was something contextual or situational about the ethics considered. There was no attempt to state ultimate value assumptions implied in the situation. In the wiki example: an arbitrary/whimsical deletion of a page can still be undone so does not do much harm. But it does create some overhead/disruption. The implied rule is this: do not create avoidable overheads for wiki editors and administrators. And more generally: act in such a way as not to harm objectives of the project (wiki or other project). The question why is left unanswered. Be it as it may, for many applications, situational ethics is all we need. And something like the categorical imperative is behind the idea of ethical rule making, as contrasts to unarticulated ethical intuitions. An anti-articulationist/anti-rulist could say: each situation is unique and therefore it cannot be covered by rules. We may find some tentative rules, but they are all too likely to be incomplete, reflecting our limited imagination, experience or rule-design skill. By saying so, the anti-articulationist has already entered the articulation game. A more radical anti-articulationist could just say, forget it. An even more radical one could just stay silent.

The other formulations of the categorical imperative are here left unexplored; they may be explored later.

A related subject is, based on memory, Kant's idea that all action can be reduced to fulfilling duty. If this is correct, one would no longer be just building ethical gates to block some urges/springs to action; rather, all action would be driven by maxims discovered with the help of the categorical imperative. This is left here largely unexplored.

Ayn Rand is an example of a philosopher opposed to Kant's categorical imperative. Exploring her criticism could be worthwhile.

Further reading