Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

Even if by some particular disfavour of fate, or by the scanty endowment of a stepmotherly nature, this will should entirely lack the capacity to carry through its purpose; if despite its greatest striving it should still accomplish nothing, and only the good will were to remain (not, of course, as a mere wish, but as the summoning of all means that are within our control); then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4: 394

1

Being straightforward about Kantian ethics, let alone Kant’s ethics, is a nearly impossible challenge. The interpretative disputes around everything from Kant’s metaethics, to the actual content of the categorical imperative, not to mention matters of moral standing, moral motivation, whether the categorical imperative is a procedure or not, etc., make swift starts basically impossible when rigour is at stake. At the moment, though, it isn’t. Thankfully, then, I’ll be able to dodge all of that for today.

Let’s grant two points about Kantian ethics, by which I mean, let’s grant both that Kant actually held them, and that they’re plausible stances. First, that a maxim of action is morally permissible if and only if it can be endorsed by rational agents generally. Second, that the way to check whether a maxim can be endorsed by rational agents generally is by applying the categorical imperative, in its various formulations. All of this can be dissected, debated, doubted, and I’ll be happy to witness the dissection, debate and casting of doubt over what these premises. I, however, consider them reasonable enough that I can take them as given and proceed from here.

The earlier quote from the Groundwork is typically Kant, the sort of thing that Kantians secretly (or overtly) love, and which enrages everyone else. Do consequences not matter at all? Surely that can’t be right. At this juncture, all manner of thought experiments can be posited to burn Kantianism to the ground. Let’s say you have to choose between a harmless lie or letting nine billion trillion innocent people die, do you stick to your principles? Fiat iustitia et pereant trilliones? Moreover, if a good will shines like a jewel even if it accomplishes nought, why should we even bother to make our wills more successful? Isn’t it, in fact, imprudent and immoral to waste time in becoming more efficacious as an agent, when the indifferent world can just take it all in a strike of bad luck? (Man plans and God…)

2

The last point can be refuted quite easily. Sure, a good will shines even if it never succeeds, but what is a will? The faculty of desire, Kant says, is that by which we are, by means of our representations, “the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations”. A good will makes no sense if there isn’t even the intention of causing things in the world, because that’s what willing in general is. To neglect our capacities can hardly be squared with our commitment to promoting our own standing as a rational being, i.e., as a being who can will according to rational principles.

It is the apparently more outlandish scenario that is harder to contest: dilemmas between letting a ridiculous amount of harm happen and violating a petty though perfect duty. We may want to consider other apparently problematic cases and see what analogies can be drawn.

A classic example casts doubt on the tenability of the categorical imperative by pointing at maxims that, though harmless, can only be followed by a limited number of people. For instance, “I will book a table tomorrow at 20:00 to have dinner with my partner”. Hopefully, this is fine! But obviously not everyone could will to book a table tomorrow at 20:00, because then they’d exceed the capacities of any and all restaurants. The key to solving these puzzles is to get the maxim right. It is universalizable, for instance, to go and find an appropriate time to have dinner, especially assuming that there are mechanisms and institutions in place to help organize the ends of many different people. Can we construct a clever maxim to avoid the awful conclusions from earlier? Maybe a maxim such as “I will not lie, unless to save a million lives” is actually universalizable? It seems like a reasonable course of action to endorse.

The problem with such an approach, however, is apparent. If this works, what is to stop us from reducing Kantian ethics to utilitarianism? Can we not plausibly argue that there’s a “rational endorsement” available for all utility maximising policies? If we don’t, then why is the previous maxim, in earnest, universalizable? Lying to save a million lives is, still, using someone as a means. If we intend to use the dignity of rational agents as an actual filter for acceptable maxims, it isn’t clear that we can fine-tune it for the cases we’re interested in.

Neither will Cumminskey’s (1996) consequentialist reading of Kant be tenable. The categorical imperative cannot be a direct mandate to promote rational nature maximally. Whilst rational nature is the source of all value in our reading, the duty to defend rational beings comes from the fact that maxims to destroy rational beings, or not to defend them, cannot be rationally endorsed. But that is equally the case if one or one million rational beings are in danger; we cannot formula-of-humanity our way into an additive conception of rational value.

3

The key will ultimately be in the former point about rational wills and causing effects in the world. The implausible notion that ethics should not care about consequences is that, implausible. Not only is the rational will, qua will, essentially oriented towards causing consequences, but maxims generally are incomprehensible if not for their intended consequence. If Nero intends to murder someone, his maxim cannot be rationally endorsed precisely because its putative consequence is unwillable. It’d be stupid, but maybe morally fine, for all of us to will that we fail to murder someone. Willing a kill, though, is willing that a real destruction of a person happens. Consequentialism doesn’t seep into Kantian reasoning, because the dignity of persons stands in the way of maximizing utility, or what have you. But consequences are always there.

Aside from this, we ostensibly have general duties to promote our qualities as agents, as I foreshadowed earlier. For one, being reckless or clueless about the possible effects of our actions and just hoping that our intentions translate neatly into the world is an active sabotage of our proficiency as rational doers. Likewise, not attaining new tools and knowledge to expand our abilities is an uncalled for restriction to our nature as creators of our courses of action.

But what about the dilemmas? Sadly, there isn’t a satisfactory answer. Some points are in place, though. First, we cannot simply choose either of the horns of the dilemma, when they redound in our accepting as a consequence of our actions that the dignity of a rational being is going to be crushed. That is completely off the table, so these prima facie dilemmas remain prima facie (as Kant famously doesn’t think there are genuine dilemmas) because we have to direct our actions towards an overarching goal that transcends the unacceptable alternatives that we’ve been imposed. This cannot be done by mere wishful thinking, however – that’d be a counter-rational vice, willfully ignoring what we know the state of the world to be.

Even under desperate circumstances, and this is the second point, our only course of action might be to aim for an idealistic goal and figure out what it could mean for us to get as close to it as possible. With trolleys, with threatening demons that want us to lie, we are to try to save everyone, and what trying means will mean different things in different situations. Thus we reach the final point. If the situation is truly one of moral bankruptcy, where some collusion of factors is such that we cannot in all honesty pretend to have clean hands, our commitment to respecting the dignity of all, together with our collective goal of building the supreme good and kingdom of ends need to be our guiding stars. It will still be a case of moral bankruptcy, a wrong will have been committed anyway, but it isn’t mere indifference between courses of action. Instead, it is an attempt, as if in the middle of a bloody war, to take things back to our one track. This isn’t a concession to consequentialism, since these aren’t goals that can be quantifiable in any way. Rather, insofar as we can keep our moral pretensions in a time of necessary evil, we can only justify what we do in terms of abiding by those overarching, timeless ends of our morality.

In a revolution, the overthrowing of a tyrant isn’t lawful, but once it happens, if necessity has had it so, it establishes a new state, now properly grounded in law, finally legitimate in its constitution.

4

Utilitarianism may need some form of the revered principle that “ought implies can”. Without it, our obligations would ostensibly inflate to the point of demanding that we create the best of possible worlds. With Kantian ethics, however, presumably the source of such axiom, it isn’t entirely clear what role it would have to play. Our meta-maxims of action, regarding our proper status as rational agents, do forbid that we take frivolous policies when they are hopeless. Nonetheless, in some cases, where all hope seems to be lost, it may be our duty to strive for the highest of goals, not thinking that we can make it, but in order to regain orientation when Earth is hell instead of a kingdom of ends.