This deontological approach links in with Kant’s ideas of ‘good will’ and ‘good intention’. According to Kant, to act with a good will is to act with a good intention. He says that, in deciding whether an action is moral or not, the outcome is irrelevant – it is the intention that matters. Kant believes that good will is intrinsically good and can be nothing other than good. He says that a good will will act out of duty for the moral law as the moral law is binding it and only those who are irrational or immoral would go against it. He states that the moral law has to be universally binding as all moral agents are bound by the same laws of reason. Also, Kant suggests that we are in full control of our will – that it is us that make the decisions about what actions we perform.
Kant takes a normative approach to ethics. This is the approach where we react to somebody’s beliefs or personal policy statements and make moral judgments of them. Kant wants to try and give people advice on whether an action is moral or immoral before they actually perform it.
Kant says that the supreme principle of morality is found in the categorical imperative. To help moral agents decide whether or not their personal policy statements are rational or not, Kant came up with the Categorical Imperative test. An imperative is something that helps us to decide something else – it is usually in the form of a command. A categorical imperative is a single command with no given condition (as opposed to a hypothetical imperative that always has a condition attached). Kant favours the categorical imperative because of his deontological approach that is not necessarily concerned with conditions or consequences.
The categorical imperative test is used to test the rationality of a moral agents personal maxim. The aim of the categorical imperative test is to help moral agents to decide whether or not their personal policy statements are rational and if they can be put into the form of a command. If you can wish that your personal policy statement could become universalized in every situation then it passes the test and in Kant’s perspective, it could be classified as moral law. However, if it does not pass the test and the moral agent cannot wish for their maxim to become universal then it cannot be in Kantian terms as rational or morally correct. It seems that the most important feature of the categorical imperative test is it’s total emphasis on universalizability (the willing that any personal policy should become a universal law).
According to Kant, for a rule to become part of the universal law then we must be able to consistently act upon it. If we can’t then it is because the rule presents a contradiction either in the law of nature or a contradiction in the will. A contradiction in the law of nature means that by sticking to one rule, we would be breaking another and that the two rules cannot co-exist as universal laws – that they cannot both form rational arguments. For example, if it is always wrong to break a promise and always wrong to tell a lie, what happens when I have to tell a lie to keep a promise? If I tell the truth I break the promise and if I keep the promise I must tell a lie. This is a major weakness in Kant’s theory and he does not provide us with a way of resolving the problem.
Another criticism of the categorical imperative test is that Kant assumes we are all rational, moral agents, which of course, not everybody is. For example, there could be a sadist that wishes to universalize pain, as he sees nothing wrong with pain. To the ordinary person this maxim would seem completely irrational but to the individual, it passes the categorical imperative test. Kant does not allow for the fact that different people have different ideas and can argue that different maxims should be universal – not everything can be rationalized. As the test is purely in the mind of the agent, they can manipulate the test and it’s answers.
Others would argue against Kant’s theory does not work, as it does not allow other motives for action such as emotions. However, Kant would say that emotions ARE allowed but only when acting ‘in line with duty’ rather than purely ‘out of duty’. He says that we cannot perform actions based on other motivations such as emotion due to the pure nature of them; emotions are naturally deceptive and extremely biased. Also, he would not give moral praise to an action that was motivated by an emotion as it was not done out of duty towards the moral law.
The aim of the categorical test was to provide assistance to a moral agent in a moral dilemma. The test appears to have failed this in everyday situations and this is what undermines Kant’s approach to ethics.
Overall it seems that although Kant’s theory is successful in itself, the way in which the test was formulated can be improved, as it is the test that is criticized the most and it is the test that has it’s flaws. If Kant could come up with another test, better than both the first and second formulation of the categorical imperative then he would have a brilliant theory for which to test any personal maxim against.
