In Our Time - Kant's Categorical Imperative

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sought to define the difference between right and wrong by applying reason, looking at the intention behind actions rather than at consequences. He was inspired to find moral laws by natural philosophers such as Newton and Leibniz, who had used reason rather than emotion to analyse the world around them and had identified laws of nature. Kant argued that when someone was doing the right thing, that person was doing what was the universal law for everyone, a formulation that has been influential on moral philosophy ever since and is known as the Categorical Imperative. Arguably even more influential was one of his reformulations, echoed in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which he asserted that humanity has a value of an entirely different kind from that placed on commodities. Kant argued that simply existing as a human being was valuable in itself, so that every human owed moral responsibilities to other humans and was owed responsibilities in turn.With Alison Hills Professor of Philosophy at St John's College, OxfordDavid Oderberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of ReadingandJohn Callanan Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Immanuel Kant 1724 to 1804 was one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, an age in which reason was the dominant force in philosophy as it was in science. Rather than rely on emotions or faith, Kant argue that the best way to distinguish right from wrong

was to be rational. He argued that when someone was doing the right thing, that person was doing what was the universal law for everyone. This idea has been influential on moral philosophy ever since, and is known as a categorical imperative. Taking this further, Kant argued that simply existing as a human being was valuable in itself, so that every human owed moral responsibilities to other humans and was owed responsibilities in return, a fundamental aspect of modern human rights. We need to discuss Kant's categorical imperative are Alison Hill, Mills, Professor of Philosophy, St. John's College, Oxford. David Odlemurg, David Oderberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading,

and John Kallanan, Senior Lecture in Philosophy at King's College, London. David O'Derberg, can you give us something of Emmanuel Kant's background? So he lived what we would regard as a fairly conventional academic life, a typical kind of professional philosopher. He wasn't promoted until quite late in his career in his 50s before he became a full professor. He was born in fairly modest but reasonably comfortable means of a harness maker and a mother to whom he was greatly devoted. He had an education in a pieter school, the Collegium Friedrichianum, which emphasized kind of evangelicalism, fundamentalism, rigorous morality, personal Christianity and so on. He rebelled against that. He did not like it. He found it quite stifling to his independence of mind.

He went on to the University of Koenigsberg to study. Before that, he'd been a private tutor at various wealthy houses and so on, families. Went to the University of Konigsberg where he spent the rest of his life. He's in East Prussia, now part of Russia. And as I say, he was there the whole time, starting off as a lecturer, lecturing on science, mathematics, geography, geology, everything under the sun. But philosophy was his main interest. Let's just for one second go back to this religious.

It was in a sect called pietism, which was a branch of Lutheranism. Can you just say a little more about that? Because I think it is germane to the story. Very much so. So Lutheranism was the kind of the orthodox Christianity of Germany. Pietism was, had developed really during Kant's time and a little bit before that, under a number of notable kind of German theologians, evangelicals, who felt that the orthodoxy of Lutheranism was too rigorous, too stifling.

it was too dogmatic. It was all about the pastor giving a sermon in the church rather than about personal Christianity and personal morality. So it was a kind of an enthusiastic movement, enthusiastic in perhaps a good or for Kant, maybe not a good sense in certain respects. But it emphasized personal family morality, personal Christian living, rigorous morals.

And it was quite, you know, what we might call a fundamentalist or at least a strict reading of scripture and so on. Heavily influential on Kant, at least in his personal outlook, not necessarily in his philosophy overall. But maybe in his personal outlook, believing that he, or the pietists themselves, had a direct connection with Christ.

So that's a big thing to have, isn't it? It is. It's not something that he felt, though. So as we'll see, perhaps, his own attitude to religion is very different from the pietists. So although I think he inherited their kind of staunch attention to morality and personal rigor and abstemiousness and frugality and so on, which he lived to the max in his life, Nevertheless, his own attitude to religion was not exactly one to which the pietas were particularly

of which they were particularly fond. I just think the autonomy issue might derive from that in some way, but we'll come to that. He became a moral philosopher. What's a moral philosopher? A moral philosopher is a philosopher who studies that branch of philosophy called ethics or moral philosophy. There we're concerned with concepts of right and wrong in the moral sense, not just right as in, you know, what's the right wallpaper for my bedroom, but morally right, what are the right actions that we should carry out?

How should we act towards other people? Even how should we act towards ourselves? How should we develop our character? What is the concept of moral obligation? What are the grounds of right and wrong, morally good, morally bad? And all those moral concepts like praise and blame, admiration, condemnation and so on which we use in our ordinary life. Alison Hills, was it a body of work to which he could repair when he turned his full attention to moral philosophy? Yeah, so while he was studying at the University of Kernigsberg, as we've heard, the main philosophical tradition that he was sort of taught under was a sort of rationalist one.

So this is a big strand of the Enlightenment. You were saying the triumph of human reason. And rationalist philosophers were extremely optimistic about what human reason could tell us. They thought that we could think for ourselves and we could come up with knowledge of God, of, of our own souls, of our freedom, and of what's morally right and wrong. So Kant was taught in this, but there were some criticisms of it, some sort of technical criticisms of how that might work. But he was also very influenced by a couple of other philosophers who were also philosophers of the Enlightenment,

but much more sceptical about the powers of human reason. So one of them is Hume. So Hume had ideas both about theoretical reason, about these ideas about knowledge of God and thinking that human reason is just much more limited than the rationalist philosopher's thought. We just cannot prove the existence of God. And much of what we think of as our knowledge of the world

is actually instinct or habit, and we don't know what the future will be like. There's lots of things that we just don't know. In ethics, Hume thought that human reason was just not a powerful thing at all. It cannot be practical. It cannot tell us what the right thing to do. do is he calls it the slave of the passions, right? It's pushed about by our desires. It can tell us how to get what we want, but it can't tell us what we ought to do. So Camp talks about Hume,

waking him up from his dogmatic slumber where he was going along with these rationalists thinking, yes, I can prove all this stuff and Kume saying absolutely not. The other philosopher, again, skeptical about human reason, but in a very different way is Rousseau. Now, Kant says Rousseau's this huge influence on him in his moral philosophy. philosophy, ideas about equality of humans that Rousseau emphasises, ideas about reason being something that can be kind of destructive or problematic. So Rousseau talks about how I can be kind of happy with my life and then I compare myself to other people and think, well, it's fantastic that I'm on the radio. I'm so excited. But Melvin's on the radio every week. Actually, it's not

so great after all. So these sort of reason giving me these comparisons. I turn out to be less happy than if I hadn't had reason at all and Kant takes that argument directly into the groundwork and says, look, happiness cannot be the basis of morality. So there's another strand there. But was he also influenced by his admiration for Newton, seeing that Newton had unlocked hitherto mysteries, by things hitherto of interest by the use of reason,

by an internal use of reason? Did he think I can do that for morals, as he has done that for science? So yes, Eutonian philosophy was being taught and of course at this stage there wasn't a big distinction between philosophy, science, mathematics. A lot of the major rationalist philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz were making major contributions in maths

and Kant himself makes some contributions in science and maths. And now he thinks that, yes, I can try to prove things like this but one of the fascinating things about Kant is that he is part of both these traditions of the Enlightenment, both the rationalist ones thinking reason can do all this stuff and the one thinking actually it has limits and Kant can bring those together. Before we come to the categorical imperative,

is it possible to mention on Paso, I think this is a ludicrous question but put it in for the sake of putting in a founding story. To mention the critique of pure reason and a previous book which was important to the rest of his development. Yes, a summary of the critique of pure reason. Well, this was Kant's huge.

huge monumental work of theoretical philosophy and his really enormous, important, influential book. That's where he's really grappling with that first question I said Hume put to him. How can we have knowledge of the world? What can I know? He said was the question he was trying to address in the critique of pure reason. And there's a huge amount in that book. But I think perhaps I'll mention some things that are really important later for the moral philosophy. which is that Kant thinks that there are limits to what we can know about the existence of God. We cannot prove that God exists.

He attacks all these arguments the rationalist philosophers had put forward, people like Descartes trying to prove the existence of God. We can't know that. So we can't base ethics in knowledge of God, but that won't work. Another very important limit is on human freedom. We cannot know that we are free. We also can't know that we're not free. We also can't know that God doesn't exist.

These are just questions we can't answer with reason. And that's where he thinks the practical philosophy can come in and actually address some of these questions where theoretical reason gives out. Thank you very much. John Kamanin, in 75, he wrote the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, which is our focus really for this morning. What are the central questions he asks there? As Alison was saying,

Kant is trying to extend this Newtonian analysis into philosophy and in the groundwork he's trying to extend the use of reason to the questions of morality. The two central questions are what is moral value? Is there such a thing and what is it?

How would we define it? And once we've defined it, is it possible that we might even realise it in our day-to-day actions? As we've heard, he was very much influenced by Rousseau who thought that moral achievement isn't difficult. The ordinary, uneducated peasant knows right from wrong. but how then can we explain that?

And his core idea that it begins the groundwork is that you have to look to the subject and to the subject's will as the source of moral value. The subject being the argument. The subject being the individual. So we can look to every individual and see that every human being who has a minimum of rationality has the resources to discern right from wrong.

his question is what is moral goodness moral goodness he says has this character of being unconditional there are many things that are good an umbrella is good for keeping dry if you have that desire but we think there's a different category of goodness such as actions like refraining from torture which are not just good in this or that circumstance

but are good in every circumstance for every person always calls these unconditional goods So if there is morality, it's something unconditional. And he wants to know what is that. His answer is the only thing that can be a source of unconditional value is a good will. That is the individual subject's own capacity to form their intentions and plans to perform actions. And he's got a quick argument for why this has to be the case. He thinks there are lots of goods, as I've mentioned.

There might have strength of character, you might have intelligence, you might have wish and imagination. But you can use all these goods to evil purposes. You can use your strength to bully. You can use your wish to humiliate. If you don't have good intentions, if you don't have a good will, then all these goods become bads. So the only thing that remains constant is having good intentions. And so he locates the will as the pure focus of morality. So he has will and intentions.

being the same thing in a way. Sort of will is your capacity to form intentions to perform an action and commit to them. They're your plans. They're the reasoning that you've engaged upon

in forming those plans. So where does that take him? Where that takes them is the idea that there's an inward turn. We're not looking for moral value now out in the consequences of our actions. We're not looking for moral value in a divine lawgiver

or something like that. Or in conventional values. We're looking for moral value inwardly, which is a... akin to the Lutheran background. We're looking for that very personal, authentic, moral, sincere activity. The question is, if we're now turning towards the subject and their own reasoning processes as the source of moral value, how do we get to objectivity? How do we avoid the consequence that all our reasoning is merely subjective? And it's for that reason that he wants to appeal to the categorical imperative as a way in which a subject can nevertheless realize objective truths.

So how does the categorical imperative come out of that? How does it define the categorical imperative from the idea of goodwill? It's a good question. There's a transition he makes. The first thing he notes is it's not just enough to do the right thing. It's not just enough to have a plan to do the right thing. You've got to do the right thing for the right reasons. He uses an example of a shopkeeper who doesn't rip off his customers.

He keeps his prices the same for everybody. That's the right thing to do. But what has been the shopkeeper's motivations? his motivation is if it got out that I was ripping people off I'd be ruined. So it's very just prudential reasoning. However, another shopkeeper might keep his price as the same price simply because it's the right thing to do. It's the fair policy. He makes his decision on principle.

And that's the core idea that you have a goodwill if you choose to do the right thing and your reasoning process has been I've chosen to do it on the principle that it's the right thing to do. David, would you like to take up there, develop the categorical imperative a little more? So I think there's one way of looking at when one reads Kant, there's the kind of exoteric and the esoteric in Kant. So the exoteric is really what John was talking about, you know, doing things for the right reason, not ripping off your customers simply because it could lead to you being bankrupt or something like that.

But really the kind of, as it were, not say the esoteric, the deeper motivation in Kant is this idea that morality has to be pure has to be purified of anything contingent, anything empirical, anything to do with personal happiness, personal desire, and even things that we normally regard as moral, such as love, sympathy, benevolence, desire for the welfare of others, things which we normally take as moral philosophies to be central to morality, are absolutely contaminating for him of morality.

Morality has to be decontaminated of anything that is conditioned or empirical or contingent, or just in the world. How does he do that? How does he do that? So what he says is, as John was saying, the only thing that for him is absolutely unconditionally good is a good will. What is a good will?

It's not quite the same as intention. The goodwill is the subject as the internal, the subject as the personal legislator of morality. So if the person thinks, if I do this and everybody does this, we're okay, it's a big judgment to have to make, isn't it? You're shaking your head, I'm not surprised. It is a big judgment to have to make. But he tries to do it, right?

He tries to give examples, right? So the first formulation of the categorical imperative act only on those maxims or principles which can be willed to be universal laws of nature for all rational beings, not just humans, can't dabble in the idea that there might be rational beings on other planets, actually, in his early writings, right? I think comisticio, it's enough, really.

So that has got to happen. So that's up to the individual every time to decide that this will be the case and therefore acting in that way is moral. I have to ask myself as a moral legislator, can the principle that I'm considering, should I lie? Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I treat people this way or that way? Should I treat myself this way or that way? Can I will that to be a universal law? Alison, Arson-Hills, can we keep going with this categorical imperative? Can you give us some examples of things that he says, this is categorically imperatively true? Yes. I mean, David's thrown up you in, lying, cheating, Zetan, that sort of thing.

Exactly, yes. He gives four main examples, and they're chosen carefully because he thinks they're examples of every type of duty he comes out. So duty is his word for this reason to act morally, which has that force of being a categorical imperative. You must act. So there are duties to other people, and there are duties to yourself. So the duties to others, he talks about the duty to not make false promises. that means not make a promise you don't intend to keep. So just as David was saying, if I promise you, lend me some money, I'll pay you back. And if I don't intend to keep that promise,

Kant says, well, what think would it would be like if everybody acted on that? Everybody would be going about trying to borrow money and without the intention to pay back. And that sort of institution of promising where if I say I promise, you're expecting me to give it back, won't work anymore. You will think, she's just saying that.

Of course she doesn't intend to pay back. So you're not going to lend me any money. So it won't work. So that's an example where you try to will your principle as a universal law and there's a contradiction. You can't do it. So you must not will that maxim. So that was a duty not to make false promises.

There's also a duty to help others. Similarly, I can imagine, can't think. a world where nobody helps anyone else. I can imagine that's possible in a way that a world where everyone makes false promises is not possible. It's possible but I can't will it. Why not? Because another feature of us

he thinks is that we are not self-sufficient. We're dependent creatures. We depend on other people. So there are things that I will for myself that I can't achieve unless other people help me. So I can't at the same time will that no one ever helps anyone. So similarly I have a duty

not to Will the Maxim of never helping anyone. I have a duty equals an imperfect duty to help other people sometimes. So those are his two examples of duties to others. He also gives some examples of duties to yourself. A duty not so... I think we might come on to that. Do you mind a bit later duties to yourself? I think that we can separate that off.

Is that all right? Yes. Fine. Right. John. How radically different is this really from formulations in the Bible, such as doing to others as you would have them doing? to you. Right. So that rule, as it's known, the golden rule of doing to others as you would have them doing to you. There are some similarities here. In that case, you're considering whether to do an action

and you imagine yourself from the perspective of someone else and try and imagine, is my rule fair? Would I be happy if someone else did this action in the same way? But the differences between the golden rule and the categorical imperative. That's the golden rule. The differences between that and the categorical imperative are much more profound. Kant is quite emphatic that what he's proposing here is not the golden rule. With the golden rule, you're imagining what kind of desires can I act upon? I'll only act on the desires that I'll be happy that if someone else were to act on those desires towards me. But that's not really the type of moral psychology Kant thinks is appropriate.

For example, what if someone has, for example, masochistic desires, doesn't mind receiving pain every so often. Does the golden rule then sanction that they can inflict pain on others now and again? Or the example that Alison just used, perhaps someone would reason, it's okay for me never to help someone, so long as I never receive any help. That satisfies the golden rule, as we've just understood it. I'm doing unto others as I would have them do unto me. But Kant thinks it's just obvious that if someone is in need, drowning in front of you, it's no excuse to say, well, I wouldn't accept any help.

if I were drowning, so therefore I don't have to offer you anyhow. We have some basic moral responsibilities, obligations to others. Where does he say they come from? We have some basic moral responsibilities. Where does he find those? He thinks the basic moral responsibilities are issued by reason itself. This is what Alison was talking about earlier, the rationalist theme, that just by going through a rational procedure of thinking about what if everybody did this,

we can discover that certain policies, the action of making a false promise, of never helping anyone else, are actually rationally incoherent. That means that reason itself recommends that we must always make our promises sincerely. So just by thinking through it rationally, we're given a motivation to perform a certain kind of action.

What does he put in place that says, this is why therefore you should follow reason at all times? I think that Kant is starting from an assumption that we all have some rational capacities. We use reason, we trust reason as when we're reasoning whether to take an umbrella out with us, whether we're reasoning how to go through our day.

We use reason in many different ways and we think that it's a reliable capacity. So we do rely upon it in some contexts. The question is, are there moral contexts where we can use reason? And Kant wants to say, if you believe in reason at all, then you can see that you can use it for moral reasoning also. I'd like to come to David again now, but on the way,

I'm passing between you to, you could say the 20th century was, if he'd marked by wanting, it was marked by massive unreason, right, left and center. David. Where's God he in all this? Good question. If I can't.

Not sure. So just to give you a little bit of biography here. So some of his early biographers were convinced he was an atheist. So Hafner, for example, Paul, one of his earliest biography, says it's absolutely unquestioned Kant was an atheist, and that his protestations in favor of belief in God and so on, rational faith, as he calls it in God, were just protestations. Others say, well, he was an agnostic. Others historians such as Frederick Copelson are convinced he was a sincere atheist. That just goes to show how difficult it is to know

exactly what Kant did think about God. Here's what we do know from his official statements in the critique, practical reasons, in the groundwork and other writings. We must believe in God. Why must we believe in God, well, as Alison was suggesting earlier in terms of practical reason, critique of pure reasons, we can't prove the existence of God who theoretical means. Those proofs don't work. They're folly. But we don't want to give up on God, as it were. So where do we find a foundation for belief in God? We find it in morality, in duty, this wonderful, this duty that he rhapsodises about in the critique practical reason, particularly, you know, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me, there's this pure, unadorned, moral law given to us from somewhere.

Well, how is that possible? It's possible on a number of postures. One, that we're free, where we're able to legislate for ourselves, that we're immortal as well, he thinks, not that he can theoretically prove it, that we must somehow postulate it, we must hope for it. And also that we must postulate the existence of God. Is God the supreme lawgiver?

Well, he never says. I mean, he wants to extricate himself from, you know, The Enlightenment idea, part of the project. You know, morality is not imposed on us by a divine lawgiver. But somehow God is the backing. And I think maybe one of the most helpful ways of looking at it, and it may be incorrect. And Alison John made complete disagree with me on this.

It's just my take on it. I think he identifies God with the moral law. I think he thinks God is the moral law. It's a fight, isn't it? Because entitlement is sort of wrenching its place in intellectual space from the church and still holding on with its fingernails to what had there been. led to believe for centuries and so on. Alison, do you want to take that up?

Yeah, so I think I'd put an emphasis on a slightly different part of the moral philosophy brings in another interesting part of it, which is the place of happiness in Kant's moral philosophy. So we're very familiar with lots of moral theories that say happiness is the important thing. I'm utilitarianism is the key one there, saying the demoral thing to do is to make people happy. Now, Kant doesn't think happiness plays that important. role, partly for the reasons I was talking about before, that he thinks it's a very elusive

goal for us. We are never really sure exactly what will make us happy. So we can't base anything as important as duties on that. But he does think, and he also says that we must do our duty, even if it's not going to make us happy or even anybody else happy. We must not lie, we must not torture people, even if that would make ourselves or other people happy. But he does think that the highest good is virtue rewarded. So the goodwill and happiness combined. And he says, well, look around you. Do good people get rewarded in this life? No, they do not. So we must hope, we must hope that there is another life where we will be able to perfect our virtue because nobody's... Why do you think we must hope?

He thinks that, well, this is one of the hard questions. I think he thinks that it would just be too depressing if it wasn't true. and he would undermine our motivation. So his official line, his official line is that we are required to do our duty, even if it's against our happiness or against what we want. Why does it think that? Because he thinks that when we reflect on what's morally right and wrong, it does have that force.

Of course. He says, well, just think about it. Think about somebody who is very tempted to tell a lie. Maybe, when he gives one example, of somebody who is being asked to give witness against Amblin and they're being threatened with execution unless they lie. And he says, look, everybody knows the right thing to do here is not to tell a lie.

The difficult thing is to persuade yourself to do it, to motivate yourself to do it. You know it's the wrong thing to do. Even if that would be, you would make you much happier, you would live your life happily ever after, and that's what you'd want to do. We know it, reflecting, everybody, common people, reflecting on morality, know it has this force.

So we know we have to do it, but it would be so difficult for us to do if we just thought we will never end up happy with this, not even in another life. So we have to hope that's true and we have to hope that God will reward us, and we have to hope that we can perfect ourselves morally and be rewarded.

Do you say that as a weakness in this theory, John Collinan? I think it can seem that Kant's whole theory is an apology for a certain Christian worldview at some point, that we see that we have these duties, we owe them to some force, we want to strive against our desires to do what we want to do through some higher authority figure and that we then end up searching for some narrative

that can explain that. But it wasn't his idea that we did it, not because I'm higher authority figure, but because some inward authority figure that somehow had accreted to us and he doesn't say how this notion of reason. This was part of what we were, we were reasonable rational persons.

and when we use that, we got to the basis of what we could and should do. I think Kant seems to have religious and anti-religious moments. The anti-religious moment seems to be the one that you just described. We look to ourselves for the source of moral authority and moral decision-making. But there are other moments where thinking of ourselves as God's creatures, thinking of perhaps that there might be some reward for us in an afterlife, has to find a place in his system. So there's a deep ambivalence frequently in Kant's thing.

This is one example. But does it come back to, and this is really a crude question, I apologize, but you can make it much better. Does it come back to duty as the basic thing that he's advocating? Is that it? Fundamentally, duty is at the core of the... Who defines duty then? Pardon? Who defines duty?

The human being defines duty for themselves. But what if my duty is different, idea of beauty is different from yours? That is the challenge I mentioned earlier. If we're taking this subjective turn where we're now looking towards our own intention-forming capacity to decide what's the right thing to do, how can we know that we are actually getting to something like objective truth? How can we know that we're actually getting to real genuine duties? And the answer is we have, he has this confidence

that we have a universal form of rationality that we can appeal to, that every human being can appeal to, and that gives a constraint on the kinds of answers that we can give. David Oedberg, what do the implication and impact what's being called the humanity formulation? Right, so the humanity formulation is it's called the second formulation of the categorical imperative is perhaps more influential in its kind of long-term legacy than the first formulation. The second formulation always act on those maxims such that you

treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end, an end in itself. So the idea there is, of course, we use people as means to ends all the time. Every time I go to the post office, I'm using the post office person as a means to get my letter posted. And I go to the supermarket, I'm using a checkout person as a means to get my bottle of milk. That's okay. But what kind of can't object to is the idea of using other rational beings as pure means to our own ends. So the kind of, I guess, to put it in some contemporary jargon that he wouldn't have put it in, you know, the kind of exploitative behavior which treats people purely as objects for furtherance of one's own ends. You can see immediately without any further interpretation, the influence of that kind of idea,

the notion of dignity, which he goes on and on about. He's one of the premier kind of emphasises of the concept of human dignity. Just being a human being. Just being human makes you a rational being. Just being a rational being, and we are rational beings, makes you an end in itself to be respected absolutely. Yeah.

And that you can see human rights, human dignity, the dignity of the person, which everyone mouths on about all the time. I mean, I can trace a lot of that really back to card. When you mean, mouths on about it, me, talks about these days. Did he introduce it or did develop it Are people taking his views and developed those? Well, I guess it depends what area you're looking at.

So, for example, if you take political philosophy, I mean, Kant wrote some famous works on cosmopolitanism and world government and perpetual peace and the abolition of war and all that sort of thing and a kind of universal religion through reason alone, this kind of enlightenment, humanistic religion that didn't pay heed to any kind of actual authority or revelation or anything like that. he really prefigured a lot of those kind of ideas that people talk about even now.

I mean, he probably would have been quite happy with the United Nations as a concept, maybe not in practice, but perpetual peace, a league of Commonwealth, a league of republics resolved by reason alone to establish perpetual peace, yeah. Alison Hill's perhaps right of sequence in the groundwork of metaphysics of morals, but how free are we? How free are we?

to act morally? So this is probably the most difficult question that we've tackled so far, the place of freedom in Kant's moral philosophy. It's absolutely crucial to him. He thinks that if we have a duty to do something, it must be possible for us to do that thing. So he's very concerned that he might be just

a member of the causal order like anything else, where one thing happens after another, and there isn't actually options open to us that we can freely choose between. So that's one really important strand of thought. Another really important strand is that one of the grounds of the value of the will, the dignity of human beings is our capacity to act freely, to make choices for ourselves. So in various points, this is absolutely hugely important to his moral philosophy.

But as we mentioned before, in the critique of pure reason, he thought we couldn't prove that we're free. So morality is suddenly looking really under threat because we have to be free but we can't prove that we're free. Is he talking about internal freedom, as it were? Can you be free while still being held in societies as a slave?

I think that he is talking about freedom in the sense of making a choice. So that is a sense of internal freedom. So that would be possible. and so somebody who was held as a slave would still have this capacity to make choices for themselves, to act morally, and so have dignity in his sense. I think it's a different attack that he's worried about, the attack that maybe we're just on the laws of normal laws of nature,

causal laws of nature, rather than the will being able to give itself a law, the moral law, and act on that. That's what he's worried about. And so in part three of the groundwork, he tries to show that there is room to think of ourselves as free. He says there's a shift where you think of yourself as acting. And you see, when you act and making a decision, you must think of yourself as having an option. Which brings us John Gallenand to another formulation of the categorical. It's autonomy formulation. What's that?

It's a very influential formulation. As Alison mentioned, it relates to the notion of freedom. We can't know in Kant's system whether or not we're really free, but we have to presume that we are. And that puts a responsibility upon us when we're approaching moral questions. That responsibility is to decide for ourselves. This was the motto of his famous essay, What is Enlightenment? For Kant, Enlightenment is taking on the responsibility for yourself, for your own acts of thinking. It's growing up and not outsourcing moral responsibility to some parental figures, conventional morality,

religious figures, but rather deciding for yourself what you think is the morally correct thing to do. And Kant in the groundwork describes that as acting autonomously. It literally is setting the law for yourself. You can't accept moral values from some other external system. They have to come through your own reasoning process and you have to act as if you are setting up the law for yourself as in a political state does in a constitution. We will be bound. Here he's under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau again. We would be bound by no law but the law that you've set up for yourself. And he thinks this is the only way we can get moral sincerity, authenticity and a kind of bindingness of our own moral demands. Here, perhaps,

we find Kant's anti-religious thinking coming to the fore. It can't be that I perform moral actions because it's God's will, Kant says. That can't be my moral motivation. If it is, then the reason why I'm helping someone who's a drowning in front of me is because God would like it. There it seems like my motivation is just to win the approval of some divine parental figure. But that's distorting proper moral motivation. You should help someone in need because it's the right thing to do. Your moral reasoning should go no farther than that.

And it should be the right thing to do in terms of your own rational conscience. Just like Martin Luther, who famously said, I can't recant, I can do no other. It's just what I think must be the right thing to do. And Kant wants that return to the subject. Say you must set up the law for yourself. That's the only way you can be bound by your own choices. Would you like to take that on, David? Well, there are so many things that can be said about this.

Again, you know, Alison and John, again, may think that I'm kind of overregging the pudding here. But just, again, thinking about how you would place Kant in the history of philosophy and what this emphasis, this almost fetishization of duty. And, you know, we all recognize there's more philosophy. who believe in duties, but there are also other things in morality. There's what's permissible. There's what's admissible. There's what's praiseworthy in matters of degree and so on. There's the building of character.

All that, you know, it's duty, duty, duty above all else. Only holy duty. That is the holy thing. It's Prussianism. It's Prussianism. And I know I'm probably going to get people, my colleagues trying to kill me on this one. But that is Prussianism. And I know it's so easy to say, well, oh, you know, of course, duty. So therefore, you know, obedience to the moral law. that's kind of a caricature. I think whether Kant is the cause or effect of Prussianism

in morality, I don't know. A bit of both probably, but unreasoned obedience to the moral law is absolutely crucial for Kant. So John is right about these external influences of God and so on are completely irrelevant but unreasoned obedience to the moral law is absolutely crucial for Kant.

First do you ask, and I come back to you, John. Well, there's lots I disagree about there. I mean obedience to the moral law is something that reason gives to itself. It's So it's not, it cannot be unreasoned. And I would also say that the groundwork does put a lot of emphasis on duty, but other works that can write, particularly the ground, is a groundwork for the metaphysical morals.

He goes on to write the metaphysics of morals. And the bit about moral philosophy is called the doctrine of virtue. And it's all about these other aspects of character, including the importance of some kinds of love and some kinds of sentiment and respect is hugely important. So I think it's just a mistake to think that all Kant's interested in his duty. Can I just pick up on that? That's quite true what Alison is saying, and then the later works he does, but then I think

it could be argued that is the dilution of the official theory as found in the groundwork. John? I also think we have to realise that when Kant talks about duty, that's just his name for a very ordinary kind of moral psychology that he thinks everyone does, not just those who've grown up in authoritarian Prussian culture. It's the notion of reasoning and doing something simply because you think it's the right thing to do. That's it. That's all duty. It's not responding to some authority figure. It's responding to the demands of your own conscience.

How influential was canned at the time? And then briskly, how influential has it been since? So let's start it at the time. At the time. So everywhere. I mean, his influence is diverse and diffuse throughout the 19th century and beyond. So you find his influence on the romantics. Philosophers in both positive and negative ways, in a positive way, this idea of, and go back to the critical, pure reason, the mind's construction of reality through the imposition of these forms of thought on sensory perception is something that impressed many romantic writers and poets, the idea of the human beings' own contribution to the construction of an interpretation of reality. In a negative way, some of the romantic philosophers, like early ones such as Hamann, for example, feuded with Kant Bittily over his destruction of faith and destruction of religion, destruction of any kind of ground, firm ground for faith. he's influential on the scientific revolution, the ongoing scientific revolution, of course, the enlightenment, the autonomy of reason,

the ability of reason to get to the truth, at least of some things, right? So he's influential there. So he's influential on romanticism in positive and negative ways, on the scientific revolution and on other strands as well. Alison, anything to add?

Yes, I'd say straightforwardly in moral theory of how should we treat other people. Kant is still a really dominant thinker in terms of being against that other strong tradition of utilitarianism or consequentialist thinking, which says, it doesn't matter what means you take,

what matters is the end result, the happiness or the good that you produce. Kant is very strongly opposed to that. How you treat individuals absolutely matters, and so he's still very important as an alternative way of thinking about morality to those sorts of theories. John, do you think that his ideal of this society of moral people,

he ever thought it was achievable? I think he thought it was achievable. I think he thought it was achievable. It was an ideal that we should be aspiring towards all the time. He's interested, he says, in the critique of pure reason of establishing a culture of reason. By that, he really means that we value reason as the way in which we engage in dialogue with each other. We don't think that our moral transactions are just about who has the stronger passion, who is the stronger desire, but rather, can we give reasons and arguments for why we're doing what we're doing?

and he sees that his project is trying to promote that culture. And I think to a large degree he's been successful. Well, thank you very much, John Callanan, Alison Hills and David Odeburg. Next week we'll be discussing Wuthering Heights, Semmerey Bronte's novel of love, cruelty, violence, revenge in Yorkshire. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

So what did we miss out? I think one thing when we're talking about Kant's influence, at the end there. One thing that we can talk about is the role of autonomy again. The idea of deciding for yourself, I think, is, and the importance of that and the morally authentic life

is extremely important in ways that Kant didn't predict and perhaps wouldn't have approved of. Existentialism, you might say, is a philosophical movement from Nietzsche to Kirkegaard right up to Jean-Paul Sartz, thinking that the choice of simply making a choice

for yourself is the ultimate valuable thing, and taking on responsibility for your choices. For those thinkers, they have far less confidence in reason as an ability to constrain those choices to get at objectivity. So you could describe existentialism as canty and autonomy without the reason, and it's been massively influential in all different ways. When I said, what are we about? A look of despair came across your first day, but we missed that so much. But what most importantly did we miss out? We most importantly missed out. So Bertrand Russell said of Kant that he awoke from his dogmatic slumber

and invented for himself a soporific which soon put him back to sleep again. Nietzsche called him a catastrophic spider. Heinrich Heiner said he was a greater destroyer than Robespier. And Moses Mendelsohn called him a destroyer. And legend has it that the people of Konigsberg named their dogs the destroyer after Kant. Why? Because I think many people did feel that Kant had destroyed, had had wielded a significant attack upon religion,

whether it's Orthodox Lutheranism, whether it's on Catholicism, other versions of Christianity, or any form of dogmatic religion, people were worried. Judaism. Can't sort the euthanasia of Judaism. That's his terminology.

So in the conflict between the theological and philosophical faculties, there's great defense of the autonomy of philosophy over theology. it was in that one. Correct me if I'm wrong. He argued for the euthanasia of Judaism because Judaism was a superstitious desert religion which relied on dogma and should be superseded by autonomous reason. Well, so I guess I come as somebody interested in moral philosophy and what's right and wrong and so I guess I'm very, I'd like to talk more about the kind of theory you get out of the categorical imperative, this idea that you have relatively simple principles

like not lying like not killing people and whether an ethics like that is viable so I mean I mentioned that it comes under a tag or sort of against a kind of view where lying is fine

if it makes people happier or produces more good so can you think of humans as having dignity and in a way that makes sense of, well, there are lots of us, so how can we, you know, how can we treat everybody fairly? Don't we have to sacrifice some for the sake of others? How do you, how do you make it work if you're thinking everybody has this very special value, so you shouldn't sacrifice them for other people, basically? So can you make a viable theory like that? And one of the other,

so he gives all these formulations of the categorical imperative and one that we haven't mentioned, but I think is a very interesting one, is the formulation. of the Kingdom of Ends. So he has this vision of this... The vision of this ideal society. An ideal moral community where everyone treats everyone in the right way. So we're talking about kind of a community of responsible adults basically. And thinks, well, what would be...

How would they treat each other? What would it be like? Would it be one where you were just trying to make people happy but you were quite happy to lie? And he thinks absolutely not. You know, you wouldn't be lying to each other. you would be treating each other as having dignity. So he has, you know, it's an inspiring vision and ideal.

And then there's a very big question for Kant and for other people who like moral theories that do this sort of thing. How do you go from that ideal to the real world where there are people who are doing awful things to each other? How do you respond to evil in other people? And this was one of the big early criticisms of Kant. He's saying, you know, don't lie. but what if there's a murderer coming to your door,

asking where your friend is, and making you say something, and Kant says no, absolutely shouldn't lie. You should tell the truth. Well, actually what he says is you shouldn't say anything, but you certainly shouldn't lie. And people thought, how can that be right? How can it be right that you're telling the murderer

where to go and find his victim? But Kant has this idea that, well, you should not be dragged down by what other people do. You should be playing your part in making this ideal community. and so you should just do what's right. Can I pick up on that? Please do.

So actually, when you read his paper on, I suppose, right to lie, which was quite controversial at the time and still is, actually you find that if you cut through all the verbiage of CART and Kant is full of verbiage and technical jargon and just obscurantism, he's responsible for all continental philosophy as we have it today, if you cut through all the verbiage, actually the reason he gives for why you shouldn't lie in the case of the quintessential Nazi at the door,

wanting to find the Jus to take to the concentration camp, those sorts of cases is simply where do you draw the line? Where do you draw? Okay, if you're prepared to lie to save a life, are you prepared to lie to stop someone from being hurt? Are you prepared to lie if it means that you'll get a promotion and find a cure for cancer? Are you prepared to lie in something?

I mean, basically, you know, where do you draw the line is ultimately what he's saying. And I actually admire him for that, that he holds the line on lying, unlike pretty much every other philosopher. I'm actually with him on that. I know it's not, it's a minority view. I think there are aspects in Kant which are incredibly uplifting and quite noble in a really good way.

Kant is a, whatever you think about, he's a philosopher of uplift. You don't read Kant coming away. You might come away feeling quite pessimistic about the chances of reason to actually know anything. But you do come away as far as morality is concerned with a sense. He really cares. He really cares about morality. I think as a historian of philosophy, one of the things I'm more interested in as well is how this theme we started with, that Kant is attempting a scientific analysis of morality.

He thinks he knows what it is to be scientifically rational. It's to find universal laws that dictate what must happen. And he thinks he can apply that to the realm of human behavior and what ought to happen. That very project is one that is controversial in itself. Perhaps the type, perhaps reason is a more diverse phenomenon than we think. It's not simply this scientific model that might work for physics. but does it necessarily work in the same way for human beings?

Kant sometimes seems constrained by his appeal to universality, finding universal laws all the time, and tries to bend all the moral phenomena into an analysis in those terms. And perhaps if it points at the end of the day, if that project isn't possible, that perhaps the very idea of giving a scientific analysis of moral phenomenon is itself misguided. Well, thank you.

I think you're going to, about to be offered, The producer is here. I think I'll have tea, actually. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC. Follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.