Summary
In the first part of Chapter 2, Kant worked to prove that real, lawgiving consequence for human actions can only come from the categorical imperative. Now, he needs to prove that this imperative exists, and that it is our duty to follow this law.
We can’t, Kant says, simply derive the existence of the categorical imperative from human nature, because the categorical imperative is rationally universal, and therefore must hold for all rational beings—even hypothetical non-human ones, though a maxim based on human nature would nonetheless have a certain dignity to it because of its relative universality.
Philosophy must be the pure sustainer of its own laws. It can’t rely on anything else—feelings, religion. Its laws have to expect nothing from human beings, except their respect for the law; failing that, they have to condemn the human being to self-loathing for not following it. Therefore, the question Kant comes to is, is it a necessary law for all rational beings to always appraise their actions as though they were necessary laws?
If such a law—the law to act in accordance with the law—does exist, then, like the law itself, it has to be connected to our rational capacities as human beings. If reason is to determine our conduct, it has to do so a priori, not because there is some benefit, or because it is useful. So long as we don’t have a universal principle that can be the basis of the practical law, we need an end in itself. Relative ends can only be the basis of hypothetical imperatives.
But what if there were something whose existence has an absolute worth? An end in itself, that could be the basis of practical laws? This would be the basis of the legitimacy of the categorical imperative. The human being, and all rational beings, are ends in themselves. Human beings are not simply means to something else. All objects of inclination (pleasure, wealth, comfort) are only conditional, since situations might arise when they are bad. Rational beings are called persons, not things, precisely because nature has designated them as ends in themselves.
Rational nature, embodied in humanity, is an end in itself; it is intrinsically good. Thus, the law to use the categorical imperative itself derives from another law: act such that you always use humanity as an end and not a means.
Kant now returns to his previous four examples, and regards them from this perspective, trying to prove not just that the categorical imperative will yield the only moral outcome, but that one must apply the categorical imperative. In the case of the suicidal man, he sees his own life as simply a means for escaping displeasure. In the case of the borrower, he treats the money of others, as well as their trust, as means for escaping his situation. The layabout who refuses to cultivate his talents is ignoring the imperative to treat humanity with dignity by fulfilling its potential. Humanity must always be an end, never a means to some other end external to it. This brings us to the idea of every rational being as a will that gives us a law. Acting in accordance with the categorical imperative reminds us that all rational beings are both the givers and the receivers of the law. Thus, only by acting according to the categorical imperative do we act with an understanding of the will as a giver of the universal law.
Human beings are bound by duty. But the only real duty is the one that human beings legislate to themselves. Any other situation would be one of compulsion: we would be forced to conform to a "duty" that someone or something else gave to us. If we are motivated to do something by force, then we have not really chosen it; we have not given ourselves the duty, have not "legislated" it, in Kant's terms, to ourselves. In that case, it would not be a true moral duty, in Kant's strong sense of the term: it would not have that ultimate moral worth associated with the self-actualization of man's autonomy. Only in man’s autonomy, his ability to give laws to himself, does morality lie. Everything else is heteronomy, or letting an outside authority make judgments for us.
From the notion of the individual as one who must regard himself as giving universal laws through his will, we get to the concept of a kingdom of ends. This would be a union of individuals through common laws. In the "kingdom of ends," each person would pass only laws that treated others as ends in themselves, including themselves. Each person's freedom makes him think of himself as a lawgiver. But because he necessarily co-exists with other people, he is also the subject of laws, including is own. Kant acknowledges that this is an ideal arrangement, but it is one that we enter into whenever we act in accordance with the categorical imperative. Morality consists in acting as one might in such a community.
Previous moral philosophies have failed precisely because they’ve tried to find man’s capacity for morality in something else than his own autonomy. Man’s autonomy is the only possible basis for moral judgment, because moral choices, to be truly moral, have to be freely made. All other systems have attributed man’s moral choices to mere feeling or inclination, or to another authority, and have, for this reason, proven shaky, precisely because they have in fact avoided the question of how legitimate moral judgment is possible.
Analysis
In the second part of the second section, Kant’s argument pivots to the question of means and ends. This might seem unexpected after the argumentation in the Groundwork so far, but the question of ends, of ultimate purposes, runs throughout Kant’s critical work. He will turn to it in greater detail in his last work, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Kant also introduces the notion of autonomy, which is decisive for his moral philosophy.
Kant’s argument is that practical reason, which we use to do things in the visible world, or the will, which is the same thing, is really a way of matching means and ends. Practical reason means deciding, say, that if I want to get to work on time, it would be faster to take the train than to drive, because of all of the traffic. Kant calls these judgments hypotheticals, because they take the form of “If X, then Y.” There is nothing final or universal about hypotheticals, and therefore nothing moral about them; indeed, our entire life is simply an endless chain of hypotheticals. Once I get to work, I work there in order to make money so that I can pay my rent. I pay my rent in order to keep my house. I keep my house in order to sleep. I sleep so that I can rest to go to work. And so on, and so on.
If a moral action was simply a means to something else, it would cease to be moral, because it would no longer be universal. It would be determined by an incentive. But if morality is to function as a higher form of practical reason, we need to find something that is an end in itself. Kant proposes that that end is man himself. The categorical imperative consists of treating human beings as ends, instead of means. The surest way of formulating a categorical imperative is to treat another person as a goal in himself, instead of a means. Thus, in the above example of the baker, I can’t steal from him in order to feed my family, because in doing so I would treat him merely as means to solving a specific problem. Rather, I must treat him and his work as an end in itself.
From here, Kant images a hypothetical community of people, all of whom recognize one another as ends in themselves. To do so, they would have to regard one another from the perspective of the categorical imperative, which also means embracing an understanding of oneself as one who legislates laws to which one is then, in turn, subject. Much has been made of this thought experiment of Kant’s. Though Kant never worked out a rigorous political philosophy, many have read this passage as a defense of representative democracy as the only basis for a legitimate government. The idea also had an influence on the utopians and anarchists of the 19th century.
Though its anti-monarchical thrust is hard to miss, it is important to note that Kant’s political sympathies were rather mixed. He sympathized with the French revolution, though he never spoke out in favor of it. Many of his major works are dedicated to the King of Prussia, the leader of an autocratic monarchy. We should note, in any case, that for Kant freedom is indistinguishable from the law. Freedom is not the absence of laws. That would be chaos. Freedom is the capacity to legislate laws to which one is then subject. Freedom is the capacity to use one’s own reason, without the influence of outside authority.
If later philosophers tend to reject the categorical imperative as too cold, the notion of man as an end in himself, at least, was enthusiastically picked up by Kant’s readers. Hegel critiqued the modern world on the basis that it was a world in which every person treated another person as a means, but in which no one had any sense of a legitimate end. Following Karl Marx, twentieth-century philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have argued that capitalism is a system that completely “instrumentalizes” individuals and thought, treating only those things and people as valuable that “useful.”
