A couple of days ago, in that post about whether or not it would be moral to walk out of a housing loan, I referred to a “Kantian” argument. In case you had no idea what I was talking about, I was alluding to a moral rule of thumb devised by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant known as the categorical imperative. It goes something like this: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, you can think through moral issues by considering, “What if everyone did it?”
The way I used it was to argue that if everyone who is underwater in his mortgage walked away, then our financial system would collapse. Therefore, what all should not do, one should not do. To use another example, abortion is wrong because if everyone who could got an abortion, the human race would cease to exist.
Now I don’t think the categorical imperative is the key to all moral issues. It does NOT eliminate the need for moral absolutes. (In the above examples, you need to assume that it is morally wrong to cause an economic collapse or end the human race, which is predicated on the moral absolute that we should not bring down a society’s economy or eliminate the human race. Rather, we should love our neighbors as ourselves. Also, the category can be differently construed. If we apply it in trying to decide the ethics of euthanasia, would the category be all sick people, so that euthanasia is wrong because if it were applied universally it would mean killing all sick people? Or is the category all people who are dying, in which case to kill all people who are dying anyway might not seem so consequential, so that euthanasia might be OK. (For that issue we simply need the moral absolute of God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”)
But still, the categorical imperative can help us see the moral significance of certain actions by connecting individual actions to universal consequences. Play with this: Why is stealing wrong? Why is extramarital sex wrong? Why is lying wrong? How else might you apply Kant’s categorical imperative to bring moral clarity?
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