Equality before the (Moral) Law

Few issues have caused greater difficulty to expositors and students of Immanuel Kant's ethical teachings than that centerpiece of his moral philosophy, the Categorical Imperative. Together with the conception of moral universality on which it pivots, it raises a host of issues that both demand closer scrutiny and amply deserve it.

Kant's criterion for determining the moral appropriateness of human actions pivots the feasibility of having the motivating principle of the act serve as a universally operative principle. “Honoring a promise” is thus the morally requisite thing to do because promise honoring can and should serve as a general standard for behavior. “Lying when convenient” is the wrong thing to do since doing so as a general practice would prove a communal catastrophe. And this is universally so: A mode of behavior whose generality would be disastrous is ipso facto wrong.

And so, for Kant an act's moral appropriateness requires that the universalization of its modus operandi (its implicit rule of proceeding) could unproblematically form part of the operating code of a viable social order. “The idea is that one should act in a way that everyone would in a wellfunctioning community.”) Its generalizability in this way is a necessary condition for an act's qualifying as morally appropriate.

In maintaining this idea of the viability of procedural generalization as a sine quo nonstandard of moral appropriateness Kant rejects as morally inappropriate those acts whose generalization as a maxim of standard procedure would be catastrophic. But what sort of catastrophe does he envision here?

This is a question Kant (understandably) addresses via examples rather than general principles because of the variability of unacceptable consequences. For those impediments to generalizability can take different forms as the accompanying tabulation indicates.

While the failure maxim generalizability in the case of immoral action will always impose an unacceptable (and avoidable) price on the community as a whole, Kant envisions a diversity of grounds of non-universalizability here in that this could prove to be:

• 1. impossible through logical incoherence and self-contradiction (“Act randomly”)

• 2. impracticable through procedural incoherence and potential self-defeat. (“Do whatever your inclinations at the moment favor.”