CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) introduced the term "categorical imperative" to characterize the fundamental principle of morality as it presents itself to beings. The principle is categorical, or unconditional, because it is valid for all humans, indeed, for all rational beings, independently of any particular desires or aims they may have. It presents itself as an imperative precisely because human beings have desires and aims that can be incompatible with the unconditional demands of the principle of morality and thus those demands often present themselves as obligations and constraints. Hence the propositional content of the fundamental principle of morality is identical for all rational beings, but its coloration as an imperative is distinctively human. For Kant, since there is a single fundamental principle of morality, there is, properly speaking, only a single categorical imperative, although more specific moral duties and obligations derivable from it are themselves unconditionally valid for any agent in the situation in which they arise. Kant contrasts the categorical imperative with "hypothetical imperatives," which express only the necessity of adopting certain means to achieve certain ends that are themselves merely conditional. Hypothetical imperatives can also present themselves to us as constraints, because we are not always sufficiently rational even to accept willingly the means to ends that we have willingly adopted, but in the case of hypothetical imperatives, we are not under any moral constraint to adopt the ends concerned.

Kant anticipated his mature distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives in his Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality of 1764. There he wrote, "Every ought expresses a necessity of the action and is capable of two meanings. … Either I ought to do something (as a means ) if I want something else (as an end ), or I ought immediately to do something else (as an end ) and make it actual." He argued that the former do not really express obligations at all; rather, they express only "recommendations to adopt a suitable procedure, if one wish[es] to attain a given end." Genuine obligations, by contrast, are "subordinated to an end which is necessary in itself." Kant's examples of ends that might be necessary in themselves were advancing the greatest total perfection and acting in accord with the will of God (Kant 1764; in Kant 1900, 2: 298; in Kant 1992, p. 272). The first of these is the ultimate end of morality according to Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), and the latter the ultimate end of morality according to their Pietist opponent Christian August Crusius (1715–1775). In his Anweisung, vernünftig zu leben (Guide to living rationally; 1744/1964), Crusius himself anticipated the distinction that Kant made in the Inquiry by contrasting duties of prudence, which are grounded "only in certain ends already desired by us," with true obligations, which are grounded in "moral necessity" lying "in a law and in our owing fulfillment of it," and ultimately, in the case of "the obligation of virtue, or true obligation in a narrower sense," in divine law (§161). A widespread account of Kant's development of his mature conception of the categorical imperative is that he moved from the idea of an unconditional obligation grounded in a necessary end to the idea of an unconditional obligation that does not depend on any end whatever. Below, that will turn out to be misleading.

Kant first published his mature account of the categorical imperative in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). There Kant distinguished the categorical imperative from two kinds of hypothetical imperatives, namely, hypothetical imperatives of skill, which simply prescribe practically necessary means to realize entirely optional ends, and the hypothetical imperative of prudence, which prescribes means to an end that all human beings have as a matter of fact, namely happiness. Kant described the imperatives of skill as "problematic" (debatable, since the ends are optional) and the imperative of prudence as "assertoric" (impelled by the goal of happiness). Because the end of happiness is universal but not obligatory and because it is also indeterminate what will actually make anyone happy, the imperative of prudence can give rise only to "counsels of prudence." Finally, Kant stated, "There is one imperative that, without being based upon and having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by certain conduct, commands this conduct immediately. … It has to do not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form and principle from which the action itself follows" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:415–416; in Kant 1996, pp. 68–69). This is the categorical imperative, which is apodictic (certain).

In the Groundwork, Kant gave his first official formulation of the categorical imperative and the one to which he most frequently refers in subsequent works. This is that one "must act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1990, 4:421; in Kant 1996, p. 73). He reached this formulation by different routes in the first and second sections of the book. In the first section, he began with the claim that only a good will is of unconditional value, and then argued that a good will is demonstrated in acting from the motive of duty, where "duty is the necessity of an action from respect for law" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:400; in Kant 1996, p. 55), rather than in acting from any inclination toward a particular end or object. The good will having thereby been deprived of any inclination to realize it with action, nothing is left as its principle "but the conformity of actions as such with universal law" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:402; in Kant 1996, p. 56).

In the second section, Kant argued that the formula of universal law follows from the very concept of the categorical imperative, since once it is stipulated that such an imperative "contains no condition to which it would be limited, nothing is left with which the maxim of action is to conform but the universality of a law as such" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:420–421; in Kant 1996, p. 73). In his Critique of Practical Reason of 1788 (1996), Kant derives a similar formulation of the categorical imperative from the initial premises that any practical law must be necessary, but that any objective for action is empirical and contingent—a circumstance that leaves only the form of a law to furnish content for the categorical imperative (theorem III, Kant 1788, in Kant 1900, 5:27; in Kant 1996, p. 160).

In the Groundwork, Kant offers four further formulations of the categorical imperative. The first of these is "Act as if your maxim were to become by your will a universal law of nature " (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:421; in Kant 1996, p. 73), where a maxim is a proposal to perform a certain type of action for a certain end. H. J. Paton (1947) held that this introduces a teleological conception of nature into Kant's argument, and this is true in Kant's first illustration of how the imperative yields a prohibition of suicide. But since all that Kant explicitly meant by a law of nature is a law that is uniformly followed, this formulation, like the initial one, requires only that you consider whether you could act on your proposed maxim if in fact everyone else were also to act on it. In the second formulation, Kant said that "a possible categorical imperative" needs a ground in "something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws," and stated that this ground is "the human being and in general every rational being" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:428; in Kant 1997, p. 78). This leads Kant to reformulate the imperative as follows: "So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always as an end and never merely as a means " (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:429; in Kant 1996, p. 80). By "humanity" Kant meant just the capacity to set and pursue ends (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:437; in Kant 1996, p. 86; Kant 1797; in Kant 1900, 6:387, 392; in Kant 1996, pp. 518, 522), so this requirement means that the human capacity to set and pursue ends should itself always be an end and never merely a means. Kant interpreted this requirement in turn to mean that the categorical imperative requires that you act only for ends that others can accept or even adopt for themselves. Third, Kant reformulated the imperative as "the principle of a human will as a will giving universal laws through all its maxims " (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:432; in Kant 1996, p. 82), which requires that any maxim be part of a universally acceptable system of maxims. Finally, he formulated the imperative as the requirement that "all maxims from one's own lawgiving are to harmonize into a possible kingdom of ends" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:436; in Kant 1996, p. 86), which is "a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the ends of his own that each may set himself" (Kant 1785; in Kant 1900, 4:433; in Kant 1996, p. 83).

This formulation makes explicit that to treat everyone as an end involves not only acting only on universally acceptable maxims but also allowing and promoting the individual ends of each insofar as doing so is consistent with treating all as ends in themselves. This sequence of formulations thus shows that the normative force of the categorical imperative is grounded on recognition of a necessary end, thus that the distance between Kant's mature formulation and his initial formulation of twenty years earlier is not as great as it initially seems, and that far from proscribing actions in behalf of particular, contingent ends, the categorical imperative prescribes such actions to the extent that such ends are freely chosen and are consistent with universal law. This is the foundation for Kant's doctrine of duties.

G. W. F. Hegel famously charged that Kant's categorical imperative is an "empty formalism," that is, that it either presupposes some already accepted particular end or else licenses any action that anyone is willing to universalize. This is clearly false, since the imperative requires consistency between any maxim on which you are proposing to act and the universalization of that maxim. Moreover, as the analysis above shows, universalization includes the requirement that your maxim be universally acceptable. This means that it is not enough that you be willing for your maxim to be universalized; everyone must be willing. More recent authors, including Marcus G. Singer (1971), Onora O'Neill (1975, 1989), and Allen Wood (1999), have considered cases in which clearly permissible maxims seem to fail the test of universalizability while clearly impermissible maxims seem to pass it. This shows that considerable care is needed in properly formulating maxims to be tested by the categorical imperative. John Rawls (2000) has interpreted the categorical imperative as yielding a "CI-procedure," which can be directly applied to individual maxims or proposals of action, while Barbara Herman (1993) has argued that it rather yields "rules of moral salience," that is, general factors of moral relevance that need to be considered in undertaking any particular action. The latter seems closer to Kant's own use of "categorical imperative" in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) to yield general categories of duty, although Kant himself sometimes interpreted the requirement of being universalizable to apply to very specific types of action, as in his notorious argument of 1798 that lying is always wrong, no matter what the circumstances.

In addition to these questions about the interpretation and application of the categorical imperative, it has been criticized from a number of other points of view. Philippa Foot (1972/1978) has argued that categorical form is not sufficient to show that a requirement is moral, since rules of etiquette are also stated in categorical form. She concluded that both etiquette and morality, in spite of their categorical form, are really systems of hypo-thetical imperatives, to be adopted only if one wants to be regarded as polite or moral respectively. Bernard Williams (1985) accepted the categorical imperative as formulating the demands of morality, but raised questions about whether these demands are "overriding," that is, whether one's own personal projects and goals must always be sacrificed to the demands of morality in cases of conflict between them. R. M. Hare (1971) likewise accepted that moral principles have the form of categorical imperatives, or universal prescriptions, while raising the question of whether such prescriptions must always be accepted. These latter objections suggest that Kant was correct to use the concept of the categorical imperative to characterize the demands of morality, but that there is room to debate both whether he correctly identified the ground of any possible categorical imperative and whether morality itself is overriding.

See also Deontological Ethics; Duty; Kant, Immanuel; Kantian Ethics; Moral Rules and Principles.

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Paul Guyer (2005)