Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [59]
QUESTION 1: Kant’s categorical imperative tells us to treat everyone with respect, as an end in itself. Isn’t this pretty much the same as the Golden Rule? (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”)
ANSWER: No. The Golden Rule depends on contingent facts about how people would like to be treated. The categorical imperative requires that we abstract from such contingencies and respect persons as rational beings, regardless of what they might want in a particular situation.
Suppose you learn that your brother has died in a car accident. Your elderly mother, in frail condition in a nursing home, asks for news of him. You are torn between telling her the truth and sparing her the shock and agony of it. What is the right thing to do? The Golden Rule would ask, “How would you like to be treated in a similar circumstance?” The answer, of course, is highly contingent. Some people would rather be spared harsh truths at vulnerable moments, while others want the truth, however painful. You might well conclude that, if you found yourself in your mother’s condition, you would rather not be told.
For Kant, however, this is the wrong question to ask. What matters is not how you (or your mother) would feel under these circumstances, but what it means to treat persons as rational beings, worthy of respect. Here is a case where compassion might point one way and Kantian respect another. From the standpoint of the categorical imperative, lying to your mother out of concern for her feelings would arguably use her as a means to her own contentment rather than respect her as a rational being.
QUESTION 2: Kant seems to suggest that answering to duty and acting autonomously are one and the same. But how can this be? Acting according to duty means having to obey a law. How can subservience to a law be compatible with freedom?
ANSWER: Duty and autonomy go together only in a special case—when I am the author of the law I have a duty to obey. My dignity as a free person does not consist in being subject to the moral law, but in being the author of “this very same law… and subordinated to it only on this ground.” When we abide by the categorical imperative, we abide by a law we have chosen. “The dignity of man consists precisely in his capacity to make universal law, although only on condition of being himself also subject to the law he makes.”26
QUESTION 3: If autonomy means acting according to a law I give myself what guarantees that everyone will choose the same moral law? If the categorical imperative is the product of my will, isn’t it likely that different people will come up with different categorical imperatives? Kant seems to think that we will all agree on the same moral law. But how can he be sure that different people won’t reason differently, and arrive at various moral laws?
ANSWER: When we will the moral law, we don’t choose as you and me, particular persons that we are, but as rational beings, as participants in what Kant calls “pure practical reason.” So it’s a mistake to think that the moral law is up to us as individuals. Of course, if we reason from our particular interests, desires, and ends, we may be led to any number of principles. But these are not moral principles, only prudential ones. Insofar as we exercise pure practical reason, we abstract from our particular interests. This means that everyone who exercises pure practical reason will reach the same conclusion—will arrive at a single (universal) categorical imperative. “Thus a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same.”27
QUESTION 4: Kant argues that if morality is more than a matter of prudential calculation, it must take the form of a categorical imperative. But how can we know that morality exists apart from the play of power and interests? Can we ever be sure that we are capable of acting autonomously, with a free will? What if scientists discover (through brain-imaging, for example, or cognitive