KANT S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE: AN ASSESSMENT OF CAPITALISM (ROUGH DRAFT) Ben Ricciardi IB Extended Essay May 2000 3,944 words ABSTRACT The first question which seems applicable to apply to any action is its morality. Yet, when it comes to their economic system, humans pass through the motions on the basis of a set of principles and maxims seen only in terms of that system. Rarely are these maxims, or the composite set of them in the system, judged in terms of morality. Perhaps this is because few people have yet even attempted to create a paradigm capable of judging it. However, a perfectly adequate paradigm has been around for quite some time now: Kantian ethics. Kantian ethics, based on the Categorical Imperative, provides a fluid and adaptable model through which to judge the morality of any practise. When applied to the practises of capitalism, such judgments raise significant doubts as to the morality of the system, despite Kant s personal feelings. The application of core elements of Kantian ethics, such as various formulations of the categorical imperative, social duty, and the good will itself; are applied to core elements of capitalism, such as the basic motives underlying all capitalist maxims of action, the invisible hand theory, and distribution of wealth. Primary and secondary sources are used to help understand Kant s often seeminglyobtuse theory, and heavy analysis is used to link and evaluate it in terms of capitalism. Conclusions display an intentional definitiveness and position. The essay attempts to find definitively the moral status of capitalism in the Kantian system, and contrasts with feudalism and communism. Kantian Morality and Capitalism
Philosophers have sought only to understand the world. The point, however, is to change it. Karl Marx Of the many great, difficult, and perennial questions with which philosophers have struggled, the most relevant to the lives of human beings is that of right and wrong. Throughout most of history, people have relied on instincts, tradition, or the religious establishment to answer it. A man named Immaneul Kant attempted to take from the potpourri of the popular system of morality and derive from it a common, universal moral principle. After much analysis, he arrived at that principle: I should never act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law... The ordinary reason of mankind in its practical judgments agrees completely with this, and always has in view the aforementioned principle (Grounding 14). This is the famous categorical imperative, the principle of law from which all of Kant s other aspects of ethical philosophy follow. The imperative is categorical as opposed to hypothetical because it proscribes the correct course of action regardless of the desirability of the outcome (Ellington viii). (The categorical imperative itself follows as a way of defining actions in accordance with a good will, which Kant defines as the only thing that is good without limit or qualification (Grounding 7). The nature of the good will will be explained further later.) This categorical imperative, for all its simplicity, is capable of being formulated in a number of different ways. Noted Kantian scholar J. Paton lists five in his The Categorical Imperative. The Formula of Universal Law -- Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. The Formula of the Law of Nature -- Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature. The Formula of the End in Itself So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means. The Formula of Autonomy So act that your will can regard itself at the same time as making universal law through its maxim. The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends So act as if you were always through your maxims a law-making member in a universal kingdom of ends.
Although Kantian ethics is essentially deontological (concerned with means rather than ends), Kant did recognise that there were two ends that are also duties: They are one s own [moral] perfection and the happiness of others (Metaphysics 150). (Hereafter the second shall be referred to as social duty. ) These are the ends to which one s actions should look toward assuming, of course, that the maxims behind them meet the moral test of the categorical imperative. This ethical system, remarkable for its simple and universal nature, forms an excellent moral paradigm through which to view the economic system of capitalism. No aspect of modern life in the United States or Western Europe is left untouched by the market. It exists wherever money changes hands, whenever anyone goes to work, whenever anything is bought and sold. People engage in actions every day evaluated on no level as personal acts, but rather as part of a broader system. When so much of the behaviour of men is determined on the sole basis of the accepted conventions of a system, it is high time for that system itself to become the subject of ethical analysis. When the tool of that analysis is Kantian morality, such analysis raises significant doubts as to the morality of the system, despite Kant s personal feelings. Kant himself was a supporter of the property relations whose inevitable result is capitalism that is, the private and freely exchangeable ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange most notably, land on the basis of economic self-interest. This was distinguished from the feudalism from which Kant saw Europe emerging since the latter had land tenured in a more-or-less permanent fashion under a hereditary aristocracy, with serfs often being tied to the land and in any case not in a position to own productive property. This was a system further characterised by the absence of any real distinction between ownership and government; the lord possessed both over his fief. Kant (rightly) saw this system as inherently unjust, and greeted gladly this new world where, as the expression has it, people are free as far as capital is free. Given this opinion, the question of the Kantian morality of capitalism would seem to have been readily answered. Kant has spoken on the subject. However, it does not necessarily follow that the broad and powerful moral principles espoused by Kant must be applied in the way that he himself applied them. To draw an analogy, many philosophers would accept Descartes s claim that the proof of existence is thought, but not all of them would draw the same conclusions as he did from that initial axiom. There
is, indeed, even significant precedent for arguing that Kantian morality implies a world very different from one governed by market principles. There have been Neo-Kantian socialists and Kantian socialist analyses published previously, including one of the sources of the current analysis, Kantian Ethics and Socialism. Nevertheless, despite the existence of precedent, it is necessary to justify why Kant may have been mistaken in applying his own principles. Firstly, there is the question the historical context in which he embraced the emergence of what Marx called the bourgeois conception of property.... [T]he appropriation and control of landed property symbolized emancipation from serfdom and the guarantee of personal freedom and dignity. It was against this historical background that Kant held there is a integral relationship between the possession of landed property and the exercise of that free choice which is necessary if morality is to flourish (Introduction xiii). Kant had no idea that capitalism would in fact turn out to be a system in which free choice was also greatly restricted, though to a much lesser degree than feudalism. Secondly is the limitation of Kant s economic background. Though he had access to the work Adam Smith, he did not have access to that of Karl Marx. Thus, his view of the workings of the market is necessarily one-sided. Thirdly, Kant s theory of property does not take into account the final, collective ends of mass capitalist economic activity and the maxims of economic action that grow out of private ownership of capital. Indeed, what Kant perceived as morally right, both in terms of the categorical imperative and in terms of social duty, is often incompatible with capitalist property relations. Since Kant recognised that all landed property is characterised by an innate possession in common, reciprocal recognition of property rights is only mandated under the categorical imperative under the assumption that such recognition creates an environment necessary for moral behaviour (Metaphysics 38). As will be shown, this environment, capitalism, is in may respects just the opposite. Therefore, there is no properly Kantian basis for this recognition of property rights. This is not, however, to say, that there is no basis for the reciprocal recognition of anything possession of non-productive property is a concept that transcends economic systems. Even Marx and Engels in their famous call for the abolition of private property as such, commented of... the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form... [that] [t]here is no need abolish that; the development of industry has to a large extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily (Manifesto 34). Indeed, if Marx and Engels
are correct, capitalism tends to destroy the personal property rights which certainly are indispensable to freedom in a world of limited supply. The next question that concerns the analysis is that of which formulation to use when judging capitalism. The answer depends on which particular aspect or situation is under investigation at a given point. The Formula of the Universal Law is the one most generally applicable. That of the Law of Nature makes the most sense when looking at humanity s place in nature and capitalism s effect thereon. The Formula of the End in itself is indispensable for judging the effects on individuals of various economic relationships. The Formula of Autonomy, while distinct of that of Universal Law in some important senses, is in this analysis largely superfluous. Lastly, the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends is most important in determining the overall effect of the market economy on human society. Once it has been determined which formula with which to analyse maxims, the problem becomes one of determining what the maxims of action in a capitalist economy are. To understand that, it is necessary to understand what a maxim is. [ Maxim ] may be defined as a subjective principle of action.... A principle is in general a universal proposition which has under it other propositions of which it is the ground... (Paton 51). Kant looked at actions and their maxims from a personal, rather than an economic, level. For example, he held that the repayment of loans was a general principle to be followed under the categorical imperative, as was mutual reciprocation of ownership. In an attempt to establish a moral economic theory, however, one must analyse maxims with respect to the economic means and ends, as well as with respect to the effects of their universalisation (as mandated by the categorical imperative). The first analysis will be discussed below. The second means that in order for a maxim behind an economic action to be moral, one must be willing to accept as positive (or at least not harmful) the ends achieved by simultaneous, substantively identical action on the part of the entire economic community. Thus, the relevant laws of economic tendency that result from such action on common (and thus at least partially universalised) principles are applicable. When one looks at maxims of action from an economic sense in capitalism, the good will that is the fundamental characteristic of all moral maxims seems conspicuously absent. A good will conforms to the moral law the categorical
imperative, and, so far as consistent with that, active and passive duties. A good person, therefore, acts on maxims not only universalisable (analysed below), but also towards ends consistent with duty. The applicable duty here is the social duty to seek the happiness of others. Economic actions in capitalism operate on the basis of self-interest without regard to the welfare of others, something admitted even in Smith s aphorism in support of capitalism that private ambition furthers public welfare. Regardless of consequence, the motives of actors in capitalism are undeniably based on self-interest, and are therefore contrary to social duty. There are several arguments that may be levelled against this reasoning. The first is the aphorism stated above itself, as well as the theory behind it the invisible hand theory. It may be argued that the actual maxim of action in capitalism is one of private ambition and the furtherance of public welfare on the basis that the former leads to the latter. This argument is, however, circular. If one acts to further public welfare through an act (on whatever basis), then it is an act made on that maxim and to that end, not one of private ambition. If, on the other hand, it is made of private ambition, it cannot be made simultaneously for the purpose of public welfare without losing its character. The two qualities are simply mutually exclusive. It makes no difference if public welfare is furthered (and the end of social welfare achieved) if the maxim behind the action is itself immoral. Further, there are elements of capitalism which are themselves quite contrary to the maximisation of the general happiness of others that is, private ambition does not necessarily equal public welfare. Most notable of these elements is the massively unequal distribution of wealth. Rather, it is one s duty to pursue an equal distribution of wealth as that distribution best suited to increasing the general happiness of others. The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility states that [a]s a consumer increases the consumption of a good or service, the Marginal utility... obtained from each additional unit of the good or service decreases (Brue G-16). This is the principle that holds that eating multiple bars of chocolate within the course of an hour will yield a person successively less and less enjoyment for each one, until he actually becomes ill and gains negative enjoyment. This enjoyment is called utility. On a broader economic scale, it is the principle that states the obvious: a person s tenth car will grant him less utility than his first. A person with no means of transportation benefits greatly from acquiring an automobile; for a person with nine already, it makes much less of a difference. Without any great difficulty, this same principle may be applied to wealth
in general. While excess money is unlikely to make on ill and wealth is certainly not a more or less polarised issue as transportation is (either one has it or he does not), there is still the issue of finite time and space. A person can only drive one car at once, live in one house, be in one room, wear one pair of clothes, et cetera. It is plain to see that it is a fundamental property of wealth that, the less one has of it, the greater utility it has on average. Thus, if one of the great duties of man is the happiness of others, perpetuating a system that consistently works against that aim hardly seems moral and capitalism does consistently work against it. The maldistribution of wealth is maintained by at least two basic laws of market tendency. The first of these is the Iron, or Brazen, Law of Wages. Labour is a commodity like any other and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of large-scale industry or of free competition... the price of a commodity is on the average always equal to the costs of production. Hence the price of labour is also equal to the costs of production of labour. But the costs of production consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to keep the worker fit for work and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labour than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labour or the wage will therefore be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life. However, since business is sometimes worse and some times better, the worker receives sometimes more and some times less, just as the factory owner sometimes gets more and sometimes less for his commodities. But just as the factory owner, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than their costs of production, so the worker will, on the average, get no more and no less than this minimum (Principles). As the compensation for labourers is determined on the basis of market-value and only is sufficient to keep the proletariat as a whole sufficient to its labour, there is no basis for equitable distribution of wealth. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation states that this is essentially a permanent relationship, and that thereby those who have control of forms of production, distribution and exchange (bourgeois) will continuously become more and more wealthy in comparison to those whose labour they purchase (proletarians). [It]... states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of the exploitation of the labourer, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging
scale, of the capitalistic relation (Capital). So it has finally been proven that in at least one prominent aspect of capitalism, the world it creates is incompatible with Kantian social duty. Smith s theory Invisible Hand is not only irrelevant but incorrect. This is not, however, the only argument against the contention of the immorality of capitalist motives that begs refutation. Another is that one need not, even in capitalism, totally ignore the effects of actions on the happiness of others. One need not be totally selfish; one can be a caring capitalist after the manner of Ben and Jerry s. What proponents of this idea fail to realise is that any such actions are either extraeconomic (id est, charitable or friendly), or else they are actually contrary to the nature of capitalism itself. In either case, they are not properly capitalist actions and motives at all, and are thus of no relevance in an analysis of the morality of the maxims of capitalism. Lastly, there is the point that Kant himself did see promoting one s own happiness as an imperfect or indirect duty. Since one has a perfect duty to seek one s own moral perfection, it is desirable to keep oneself in a mind-set in which one is most likely to be able to remain doing so unhappy people are more tempted to be immoral (Paton 86). However, seeking the happiness of others is a perfect duty and thus easily overrides the imperfect duty towards the happiness of oneself. Also, there is the circular nature of an argument that contends (as this one does) that it is a moral to commit an act which would itself otherwise be a moral towards the end of one s own moral perfection! After hashing out the question of whether the will that powers actions in a market economy can be considered good, it becomes apparent that, far from being moral, the motivating will behind capitalistic acts is in many respects the antithesis of moral, and that the world it tends to create is the antithesis of that humans are directed to work towards by their social duty. Now that it has been shown that the capitalist will is evil and that capitalist maxims result in increasingly negative ends the closer they are made towards universal law, attention may be turned to the other formulations of the categorical imperative, beginning the with the Formula of the End in Itself. Capitalism, with the nature of its relations between people, tends to allow people to be in many cases treated exclusively as means. Every time we post a letter, we use post-office officials as a means, but we do not use them simply as a means. What we expect of them we believe to be in accordance with their own will, and indeed to be in accordance with their duty (Paton 165). The
shareholder in a company is concerned exclusively with the effects of employees on the price of his stock, for whatever reason. An employer is concerned only with his bottom line, and would use his employees for their labour regardless of their own wills or duties, unlike the example of the postman above. This can be said without equivocation on the basis of the most basic principle of capitalism stated earlier: private ambition furthers public gain. Motives which are not purely self-interested are not capitalistic. It will always be in the interests of those who are exploiting others to use them as means, but certainly not always as ends as well. Next, there is the question of the market economy s compatibility with the Formula of the Kingdom of Nature. It should be obvious to anyone who has perceived the devastating impact corporate America, Canada, and Europe have made on the natural world that the maxims of the actions that created them could not themselves become laws of nature without destroying them. Business decisions regarding given actions are made on the basis of marginal costs and benefits if the latter outweigh the former, the action is taken. That is the maxim of their action. Since environmental damage is a cost shared by all in most cases, while the benefits are immediately and privately attainable by the capitalist, nature is frequently the victim. Because of this, capitalism as a whole is inherently pollutant, without regard to natural balance or harmony. (Government regulations, while perhaps desirable even to capitalist economists, are again elements outside of the economic system properly they are interferences in the market economy, not parts of it.) Were the maxims of capitalist economic action universal laws of nature, the earth would have destroyed itself long ago. Finally, does capitalism facilitate or permit the Kingdom of Ends? The Kingdom of Ends is... a world where, as a result of moral action, the ends of all free agents are realised (so far as they are compatible with freedom under universal law), and where in consequence happiness is proportionate to virtue (Paton 186). The only answer can be one firmly negative. As has been repeatedly demonstrated above, the maxims of capitalism are far from those which are moral a system based on immoral maxims can hardly simultaneously be one that is a result of moral action. Capitalism is a system based on constant competition and scramble among mutually exclusive goals; the Kingdom of Ends requires all those of free agents to be realised. The Kingdom of Ends has happiness in proportion to virtue; in a market economy, a person virtuous under
Kantian law is banned from even the most basic of capitalist principles not something likely to lead to happiness. People are indeed free as far as capital is free, and only that far. Private ownership of productive forces results in the stratification of social classes on the basis of material wealth, and thus their ability to act as free agents. Interestingly, however, Marx and Engels s conception of a new economic system based on the abolition of private property (a concept Kant personally thought essential to a moral world) seems eerily similar: an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the development of all (Manifesto 43). So, in Kantian terms, what is capitalism? Capitalism is a monumental mistake a mistake of history, of economics, and of morality. When Kant saw the liberation of productive of property from the iron yolk of the aristocracy, he believed that he was seeing the final liberation of people in their struggle to attain a moral freedom, subject to no law but their own universal ones. In reality, however, he was witnessing only one step in the long march towards a moral society, one that can only be attained in the absence, not simply the redefinition, of the ownership of productive property. The new relations which he saw coming up around him formed not only a new avenue through which to examine the ethics of personal behaviour, but also the foundation of an economic system whose moral implications also were in need of analysis. This is a task to which Immanuel Kant himself was not capable. It is, however, on this basis that future generations will be able to strive for a society in which the principles that allow people to live physically among each other may be as pure and good as those personal ones that Kant saw in the Kingdom of Ends. It is on this basis that they will be able to pick up from where Kant left off. He has given them a means through which to understand the world; now it is their turn to change it.
Annotated Bibliography of Works Cited Primary Sources: Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. A lengthy work on the process of judgment and reason in general. Some material applicable to morality, but worked within a mass of difficult metaphysics.. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. The work that first lays out the categorical imperative and establishes how a universal moral code may be extracted from reason.. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. and Ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Expands on the groundwork laid by the above work and lays out sifferent elements of morality with the metaphysics behind them. Engels, Friedrich. Principles of Communism. 1847. 20 Apr. 2002 <http://www.newyouth.com/archives/theory/faq/principles_of_communism.asp> A pamphlet explaining many basics of Marxist social and economic theory. Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx. Capital. 3 vols. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Frederick Engels. 1867-1894. 10 Mar. 2002 <. The Communist Manifesto. Ed. Friedrich Engels. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. Where Capital lays bare the economic flaws of capitalism, the Manifesto summarises the ideas of the most coherent ideology against the market economy yet conceived. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. 10 Mar. 2002. < The groundbreaking book defining capitalism and explaining its operation.
Secondary Sources: Baron, Marcia. Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. A defence of Kantian ethics from criticism regarding their emphasis on duty. (It should be noted that the apology in the title is in the sense of seeking forgiveness, not defence.) Brue, Stanley and Campbell McConnell. Economics. 13th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1996. An introduction to the basic functions and study of market economics. Ellington, James. Introduction. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. By Immanuel Kant. Trans. James Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. v - xiii. An analysis and summary of the work it introduces. Van der Linden, Harry. Kantian Ethics and Socialism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988. An attempt to apply Kantian ethics to socialism and Marxist theories of history and society. Explores somewhat the apparent dichotomy between Kant s personal views of capitalism and his ethics. Paton, H. J. The Categorical Imperative. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967. A lengthy analysis of the categorical imperative and Kantian morality in general: its foundation, formulation, and justification. Sullivan, Roger. Immanuel Kant s Moral Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989....[A] synoptic and detailed exposition of Kant s entire practical theory.. Introduction. The Metaphysics of Morals. By Immanuel Kant. Trans. and Ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Summarises and explains the work it precedes.