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1.2.4: Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives

  • Page ID
    89073
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    If we agree with Kant and want to act for the sake of duty what should we do? His answer is that we have to act out of respect for the moral law. He has two examples of how this works in practice: lying and suicide. However, before doing this we need to get a sense of what Kant has in mind when he talks about acting out of respect for the moral law.

    The moral law is what he calls the “Categorical Imperative”. He thinks there are three formulations of this.

    CI-1: …act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

    CI-2: So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.

    CI-3: …every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a lawmaking member in the universal kingdom of ends.

    We will consider these in turn, showing how they are linked. Consider then, CI-1.

    Kant’s idea is that we use this “test” to see what maxims are morally permissible. If we act in accordance with those then we are acting from duty and our actions have moral worth. Let us look at what this means.

    Initially it is worth considering what “categorical” and “imperative” mean. An imperative is just a command. “Clean your room!” is an imperative I give my daughter every Saturday. “Do not park in front of these gates!” is a command on my neighbour’s gate. “Love your God with all your heart, mind and soul” is a command from the Bible.

    What about the “categorical” part? If a command is categorical then people ought to follow it irrespective of how they feel about following it, irrespective of what consequences might follow, or who may or may not have told them to follow it. For example, the command “do not peel the skin of babies” is categorical. You ought not to do this and the fact that this might be your life’s ambition, or that you really want to do it, or that your teacher has told you to do it, is completely irrelevant.

    Contrast this with Hypothetical Imperatives. If I tell my daughter to clean her room, this is hypothetical. This is because whether she ought to clean her room is dependent on conditions about her and me. If she does not care about a clean room and about what her dad thinks, then it is not true that she ought to clean her room. Most commands are hypothetical. For example, “study!” You ought to study only if certain things are true about you; for example, that you care about doing well, that you want to succeed in the test etc.

    Kant thinks that moral “oughts” — for example, “you ought not lie” — are categorical. They apply to people irrespective of how they feel about them.

    The next thing we need is the idea of a “maxim”. This is relatively simple and is best seen through the following examples. Imagine I’m considering whether to make a false promise. Perhaps I think that by falsely promising you that l will pay you back I will be more likely to get a loan from you. In that case my maxim is something like “whenever I can benefit from making a false promise I should do so”.

    Imagine I decide to exercise because I feel depressed, then I may be said to be acting on the maxim “Whenever I feel depressed I will exercise”. A maxim is a general principle or rule upon which we act. We do not decide on a set of maxims, perhaps writing them down, and then try to live by them but rather a maxim is the principle or rule that can make sense of an action whether or not we have thought about it in these terms.


    1.2.4: Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.