Rick: Welcome to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. This is our last episode of Season 11. I’m Rick Lee, and as usual, I’m joined by the co-hosts Leigh Johnson and David Gunkel. And as is our custom for our last episode, we’re going to take a deep dive into a text or an issue in philosophy. This time, we’re talking about Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Before we do that, we have a duty to order some drinks, and I’d like to know whether you’re ranting or raving. So, Leigh, let me start with you.

Leigh: I think I’m just going to have a hot toddy today, and I am raving this week about Grawlix. Let me be honest, I’m not so much raving about it as I’m just showing off the fact that I just learned this new word, but Grawlix is the term for that string of symbols often used in comics to indicate someone is swearing—you know, like an exclamation point, a hashtag, a percentage sign, etc. That’s called a Grawlix.

Rick: I did not know that.

Leigh: Yeah. That’s it. That’s all I have to say about it.

David: But it is cool to know. I like it.

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Well, someday you’ll be able to complete a crossword puzzle. David, what about you? What are you drinking and are you ranting or raving?

David: So, in terms of drinking, I think I’ll have the Unibroue La Fin du Monde. At 11%, it’s a beer you can drink early in the morning, and it lasts all day. And I’ll be ranting about social media platforms.

Social media platforms are kind of like ships that stay afloat for a while, then they start sinking and everybody jumps. And I think we’re at that point on Twitter right now. We’ve been through this before with MySpace, we’ve seen it with Facebook, and now it’s the Twigxit. We’re seeing a lot of people jumping ship to BlueSky or Mastodon. How long these new social media platforms will remain viable is anyone’s guess. Let’s find out.

But there is a huge exodus taking place, and this is probably just the ecosystem of social media. It lasts for a short period of time, then turns into dilapidated shopping malls, and it’s time to leave.

Leigh: What about you, Rick?

Rick: I’m going to have a Boulevardier, and today I am raving about Amtrak.

I’m visiting my sister in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I just love the fact that I can get on a train in Chicago—or actually now I’ll get on one in Ann Arbor—and in five or five and a half hours, I can be home. Yeah, it’s longer than driving, but guess what? I’m not driving. And also, my car does not legally have a bar in it.

Leigh: That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a bar. It just means it doesn’t legally have a bar.

Rick: So, I want to encourage you all to take Amtrak because I think the more of us who do it, the better it’s going to be for all of us.

So, Leigh, today we’re talking about the Categorical Imperative. Why? And what are we going to talk about?

Leigh: Well, you and I have joked several times this season about coming out as Kantians. I think this was a recent realization for you—it’s been around for a while for me—but there are many ways to approach ethical questions, of course.

Since the Enlightenment, two forms of moral reasoning have really come to dominate: consequentialism and non-consequentialism. Consequentialist moral reasoning, as the name suggests, posits that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on its consequences. Most people know this form of reasoning as utilitarianism, which argues that actions tend to be good inasmuch as they produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, and bad inasmuch as they produce the inverse.

Non-consequentialist moral reasoning obviously posits the opposite—namely, that actions are good or bad independent of their consequences. Perhaps the most famous proponent of non-consequentialism, who we’ll be discussing at length today, is Immanuel Kant, who famously stated in his Critique of Practical Reason: Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Now, in that book, and in a shorter version of it called The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant demonstrated that we come to understand a moral law that is universal and does not permit exceptions. And what’s more, we come to understand this moral law using reason alone.

Kant’s form of non-consequentialism, called deontology, figures the moral law alongside the laws of logic and the laws of physics, thus removing morality from the realm of opinion, personal interest, local circumstances, or variances altogether. It’s a bold claim—rare today but consistent with the sweeping systematic thinking of his time.

So, what is this moral law? Kant names it the Categorical Imperative. It’s categorical inasmuch as it is unconditional and universal, applying to all rational beings for all actions under the general umbrella of morality. And as an imperative, it’s not a suggestion.

So, buckle up, because today we’re not just asking What would Kant do? We’re asking What should you do? when morality calls—because declining the call is not an option.

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Leigh: Kant basically gives three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. Some people argue there’s a fourth, but we’re going to stick with three. It’s important to point out right here at the outset that these are not three different moral laws. There’s only one moral law: the Categorical Imperative. These are just three different ways of expressing it.

So, we thought we’d divide this episode today in that exact way. In the first section, we’re going to talk about the universality formulation. In the second section, we’re going to talk about the humanity formulation. And in the third section, the kingdom of ends formulation.

But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I just want us to talk for a minute about how Kant is characterizing this moral law. So, as I mentioned in the intro, Kant thinks of the moral law as similar to the laws of logic and the laws of physics. It applies to all people, at all times, in all circumstances, without variation and without exception.

What do you guys think about just that claim?

Rick: For me, what’s most interesting about that claim is that Kant recognizes that when we talk about morality, we’re talking about a certain sphere of action—and that sphere is what he calls, and we can call, and I think it’s generally understandable, the realm of freedom.

What is interesting about the realm of freedom is that it doesn’t seem to operate like gravity. For instance, if I drop something, it will fall toward the earth, and that will always happen. But when we talk about freedom, things could be willy-nilly. Or we say, “Oh, I’m free if I can do anything,” and Kant, I think, is trying to say that may be true, but if we’re talking about morality, if an action is moral, then we need a law.

And we need a law that would exist in the realm of freedom, just like gravity would exist in the natural realm—it would be the ground of the action and what determines the action. I find this really compelling, and I will say that I’m going to be a broken record this episode, but I want to keep hitting over and over again the fact that for Kant, what’s really at stake here is freedom. Not to ring Leigh’s bell before she does, but I really do think it’s important for us to know that, whatever the downfalls might be, Kant thinks this moral law is the only way to safeguard freedom.

David: So, for myself, there are just two things that stand out with Kant’s moral philosophy that I think are worth mentioning. One is that the Kantian approach to morality, in line with Enlightenment Inc., is an agent-oriented ethics. It comes from the side of the actor—the agent.

A lot of post-Enlightenment thinking shifts the emphasis from the actor to the receiver. So, it’d be a patient-oriented ethics as opposed to an act- or agent-oriented ethics. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on act and will and freedom and other things having to do with the side of agency and responsibility.

The other thing I’d point out, which is important, is that Kant’s moral philosophy is really dependent on a very laden metaphysical substructure. You need to have behind this a massive metaphysical edifice having to do with freedom, will, and other things that are developed in the First Critique and into the Second Critique.

In order for this agent-oriented reasoning that he deploys in the Second Critique and in the Groundwork to actually operate, you need to accept or assume that metaphysical scaffolding. If you don’t, there are ways in which Kant’s moral philosophy doesn’t hold up. One of the ways people have critiqued Kant is by going after the metaphysics behind the scenes—but, you know, that’s stuff we can get into later.

Leigh: Yeah. I suppose, just right here at the outset, I want to remind us all that this is fundamentally a rational account of morality. It’s an account that should be able to be shared by all rational human beings.

Now, again, we can critique the notion of rationality that’s being used here, but I do think that’s how Kant is going to put the moral law on the same shelf as the laws of logic and the laws of physics.

One of the challenges when we’re talking about morality is that when I judge something to be right or wrong, or good or bad, it’s often assumed to be right or wrong only for me or only in this situation—that it’s just my opinion. But we want to be able to say that when I say something is right, it’s right for everyone. That is to say, it’s something you ought to do. Or when I say something is wrong, it’s something that you also ought not do.

And Kant gives us a way to get there. The Categorical Imperative is that way.

So, maybe we should just jump in. Are you guys ready?

Rick: Yeah, I’m ready.

David: I’ve never been more ready.

Leigh: So, as I mentioned at the top, Kant gives us three different formulations of the categorical imperative. Again, these are not three different moral laws, but three different formulations of the same moral law.

The first one is often referred to as the universality formulation, and it states that we should act only in such a way that we could will the maxim of our actions as a universal law. Now, just to get a little bit of technical vocabulary out of the way, for Kant, a maxim is going to be a principle upon which you act.

And as I tell my students all the time, we don’t, in general, think of ourselves as always acting on principles, but whenever you act, you are implicitly acting on some kind of principle. For example, when you sit down for lunch, you’re acting on the principle, “When I’m hungry, I ought to eat.” When you go to bed at night, you’re acting on the principle, “When I’m tired, I ought to go to bed.”

So there is, implicitly, a principle—a maxim—that you’re acting on whenever you act. In the universality formulation, Kant is saying that we should only act in such a way that we could will the principle of our action, the maxim of our action, as a universal law.

Rick: And to be even more specific—because I think it’s often easy to misunderstand this—Kant isn’t saying that you should only act in such a way that you’re okay with everyone acting in the same way. Rather, it’s this principle—the basis of your action—that you will as a principle for everyone.

I want to say this because it would be very easy to slip into a kind of consequentialism if we don’t insist on the fact that it’s the principle.

David: And the way the principle is seen as being universally applicable is that if it doesn’t come into self-contradiction in terms of its universality, if it doesn’t contradict itself, then it is universalizable.

Leigh: I also just want to point out a very common mistake with this universality formulation of the categorical imperative, which is that many people will say, “Well, that just sounds like the Golden Rule, right? ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

But there are some really significant differences between the categorical imperative and the Golden Rule. The first, and probably most important, is that the Golden Rule states, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which means that if I’m going to act that way, the very first thing I have to figure out is how I want other people to treat me.

And Kant is going to already eliminate self-interest as a ground for moral action. He’s going to say that if I’m acting self-interestedly, then I’m acting consequentially—right? Like, on the basis of consequences: “This is good because it’s how I would like to be treated, because the consequences are things that I would find pleasurable or desirable,” or whatever.

So there absolutely isn’t a parallel between the Golden Rule and the universality formulation.

Rick: Can I follow up, Leigh, because you raise a point that I think is also important to say—and this comes close to my emphasizing freedom once again.

You might ask, “Okay, so why does Kant think this is the moral law?” His answer is—and I’ll just say the conclusion, and we can tease it out—his answer is that if you’re not acting on the basis of willing something because it follows from the moral law, then you’re acting like a rock falling toward the center of the earth or like a planet orbiting the sun.

That is, you’re not acting freely. So the only way to ensure that you’re acting freely is to determine your own will on the basis of a moral law—not by what you want, what you desire, or what you think you want.

And so, it might sound weird that he has this universal moral law, but he seems insistent that this is the only way to make sure that the action you’re performing is based in freedom.

David: And this is really crucial. When I’ve talked with students about this, I find that if you’re going to defeat determinism, Kant’s way of defeating determinism is to say that you’re bound by the moral law.

Oftentimes, people are a little misdirected by thinking that “the will” means “I can just will whatever I want.” But Kant is saying, no—if you want to avoid determinism, your will has to be in accord with the categorical imperative and the universal law.

Leigh: That’s absolutely true. And if I could just introduce a little more technical language here: when Kant talks about a maxim, he’s talking about a principle upon which we act.

Earlier in his discussion of duty, he notes that within any maxim—any principle upon which we’re acting—there’s the objective principle of that maxim and the subjective principle of that maxim. So, the objective principle of the maxim would be the principle upon which any rational agent, acting rationally, necessarily would act.

The subjective principle, on the other hand, is the principle upon which you actually do act. This is important because Kant is going to make certain claims, like “lying is always wrong,” for example. And obviously, we’ve gotten into this before, and we’re going to get into it again, but people will often say, “Oh, but I can think of situations in which lying would be the morally right thing to do.”

I think this distinction between the subjective principle and the objective principle of a maxim is very helpful in that case.

For example, let’s not use lying because we’ve talked about that so much already—let’s use something like being on time. Let’s say we’re starting this podcast, and all of us arrive on time to record it. If I asked, “What was the objective principle upon which we were acting?” it would be something like, “When a podcast recording starts at 10 a.m., we ought to be there at 10 a.m.”

If I asked, “What was the subjective principle upon which we were all acting?” we’d say, “Well, I had a podcast that started at 10 a.m., so I was there at 10 a.m.”

Now, if one of us were late—let’s say Rick shows up at 10:10—we would describe the subjective principle upon which he was acting as something like, “If I have a podcast that starts at 10, it’s acceptable to arrive within 15 minutes of the starting time,” or something along those lines. That’s the subjective principle upon which Rick actually acted.

But if we asked, “What is the objective principle of his maxim—what should any rational person, acting rationally, do in that situation?” we would still say, “One ought to show up at 10 o’clock for a recording that starts at 10 o’clock,” right?

So, here we see a conflict between the subjective principle upon which Rick was acting and the objective principle upon which he ought to have been acting. Essentially, he’s acting in such a way that he believes there’s a principle that applies to him subjectively, which is different from the principle that applies objectively to any other rational person acting rationally.

I think that’s really helpful for understanding why the subjective principle and the objective principle have to be the same. Because if we were playing a game and I said, “Alright, here are the rules of the game, objectively, that apply for everyone, and here’s a separate set of rules that subjectively only apply to me,” I think everyone playing the game with me would say, “You’re cheating.” You’re doing something wrong.

Rick: This is how Leigh’s poker games run at her house. Nothing wild except for me.

Leigh: Right.

David: I agree with all of this, and it’s a good example. The only issue I’d have with it is that we need to distinguish this categorical imperative—this universal law—from a contractual obligation. Being on time could be seen as a social contract, not necessarily coming from the dictates of pure practical reason. And in Kant, this has to come from rationality itself—it can’t come from an agreement among actors in the world.

Rick: Then to save that, I would say, what if we think of being on time as a more specific instance of “You must keep your promises”?

David: I would say that in Kant’s terminology, that would probably be a more rigorous grounding of this.

Rick: Right, exactly.

Leigh: I’m not so willing to quickly give up on the claim that being on time is a moral action—or that being punctual is a moral action—for this reason: ultimately, what Kant is going to motivate us to ask ourselves is, could I live in a world in which basically time had no meaning?

Could I rationally live in a world in which time had no meaning? And if I willed the maxim of my action when I was late as a universal law, which would basically be to say, “Whether for good reasons or not, if people are late, it’s fine; it’s the same as being punctual,” that would effectively mean that time has no meaning.

And I don’t think that, as a rational agent, I can will that—any more than I could will it to be the case that if I have reasons, good or not, to tell a lie, I ought to tell a lie, or that it’s morally permissible for me to tell a lie. Again, going back to the rationality point: I think Kant is really making a compelling argument that you can’t, as a rational agent, will that time means something subjectively to you that is different from what, objectively, it ought to mean to everyone else.

Now, that’s not to say I can never be late, or that I can’t give good reasons for being late, and that there aren’t, obviously, socially contracted arrangements about what counts as being late and what doesn’t. But it is to say that I can’t live in a world in which time has no meaning.

David: Clearly, you’ve never spent a lot of time in southern Italy or Brazil. In other words, there is a way in which this is a very Prussian way of thinking about time. There are culturally construed understandings of temporality that are different. In Brazil, nothing ever starts on time, but that’s perfectly okay. And I want to know how we account for these differences from the global North to the global South and how time is negotiated in different places.

Leigh: I think that’s a really good point. And this is something that I bring up to my students a lot.

There are situations in which to say, “X starts at this time,” means be there at time X—you know, weddings, funerals, podcast recordings, interviews, things like that, right? But if I were to say, “Hey, I’m having a party tonight, and it starts at 8,” I doubt anyone would be there at 8. We all understand that to say it starts at 8 doesn’t mean be there at 8 o’clock on the dot.

Nevertheless, if I asked you, “What time would be acceptable to be there?”—like, what time would you say is not too late?—a lot of people would say, “Oh, I’d be there by 8:30, or I’d be there by 9. Maybe I’d be there by 10.” But there will be a point at which you would say, “Hey, if it got to, I don’t know, midnight, I would either not go, or when I went, I would apologize on my way in the door for being late.”

So that’s not to say that, as you rightly point out, David, all conceptions of time are exactly the same. But it is to say that there still is a conception of time, and that it does kind of have a moral understanding beneath it that we all respect. We wouldn’t say, universally, that people can just show up to whatever, whenever they want.

Rick: You know, it happens once in a while that a student will walk into your class with 15 minutes left to go.

Leigh: Right! Yeah, right!

David: And I’m always like, “Why bother? Like, you think this counts for something?”

But also, one difference here between the party, Leigh, and something like, let’s say, the train—or, I don’t know, even a television show—is that there’s not a lot that relies on the party starting at a certain time and so on. But, for example, if the train is supposed to leave at 10:20, and time was very flexible and so sometimes it leaves at 9:30—well, then people are missing the train. Or sometimes it leaves at 11:30—well, then that’s going to affect other trains and intersections and switches.

So even in these situations in which there’s a socially flexible account of time, that is all predicated on the fact that there is an inflexible account of time that we all know about and are aware of.

Leigh: Just for the record, I do want to point out, though, that that reasoning—like “I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I might miss the train because when Amtrak says a train is leaving at 10, who knows when it’s leaving”—that’s consequentialist reasoning. That’s not going to be how Kant gets from point A to point B. Kant’s claim is going to be that, as a rational being, I could not rationally will a world in which time had no meaning without contradicting myself.

Rick: Right. And I think it’s fairly simple to get from what I was listing as my subjective maxim to the objective maxim.

Leigh: A hundred percent. Yeah.

David: This is sort of a tangential question, but I wonder why Kant did not use the universality of time as one of his examples. I think there’s something that Heidegger could get at for us here. There’s a way in which time doesn’t play this role in Kant because, in the First Critique, time is one of the categories of our experience and not a thing that’s out there. The Kantian notion of time is a very different notion of time than a lot of us mobilize. And especially after Heidegger, we can see how this Kantian notion of time actually affects his entire metaphysics.

Leigh: Yeah, that’s totally fair. The only reason I chose that example is because we’ve several times before discussed his example of telling a lie. But I’m going to assume that not everyone who’s listening to this episode has listened to all of our other episodes.

Let’s just go ahead and quickly recount Kant’s argument against lying, which is effectively the same. I cannot will the maxim “One ought to lie” as a universal law, because I would be, in effect, willing a world that no rational person could will without contradiction.

David: Right.

Rick: Right. Because truth would not matter, and no one would ever be telling you the truth. And left is right and up is down and dogs are sleeping with cats.

Leigh: Yeah, like quite literally, the willing of that maxim wouldn’t make sense.

Rick: Right.

David: Correct.

Leigh: And the very famous example challenging Kant is: What if you’re harboring a friend, and a murderer comes to your door and asks if your friend is in there? Presuming here, of course, that the murderer wants to murder your friend—what do you say?

Many people say, well, Kant would insist that you must tell the truth. I want to again say that Kant would insist that lying is always wrong. That’s a different thing. There are many reasons why you might lie to the murderer—prudential reasons, good reasons—but you wouldn’t then turn around and begin conducting your life under the maxim “One ought to lie.”

Rick: From that, it’s important to point out before we move on—Kant is not saying that we look at Leigh, she told the truth, and we’re like, “Okay, so therefore Leigh did the moral thing.” The only way we could tell—and we couldn’t, we couldn’t, and maybe even Leigh couldn’t tell—whether the moral thing was done is if we look at whether you willed the maxim of your action to be a universal moral law for all.

That is, we have to look at what the ground of your action was, not what the action was. And so I could be honest accidentally. You know, I could be generous in order to win an election, or all sorts of things. And so it’s not the action itself that, for Kant, is moral—it’s rather what is the determining ground of your choosing that action.

David: One way to explain this, I think really clearly, is to say that what matters for Kant is the motivation for the act and not the act itself.

Leigh: Yeah. I mean, he articulates this in what is sometimes called his formal principle of duty, which basically says that we should always act in such a way that the maxim of our action is: “Do your duty, whatever your duty may be.”

And another way to say that is: Act always in such a way that the subjective principle of your action and the objective principle of your action are the same—that what you actually are doing is what one should do.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Now, if I tell the murderer that my friend went that way down the street, and unbeknownst to me, my friend heard the murderer at the door, ran out the back, and went exactly that way, I’ve sent the murderer directly to my friend, and my friend gets murdered. Am I responsible for that murder?

I think a lot of people would say, no, you’re not. You had no idea that your friend was going to run out the back door and go that way.

But how is it the case that in the first scenario, where I say I’m doing a morally good thing by lying to the murderer and saving my friend’s life—assuming that my friend didn’t run out the back door—I get moral credit for that? But if I lie to the murderer, and my friend runs out the back door and gets murdered, I don’t have any moral blame for that?

This, I think, is the foundation of Kant’s argument against basing the rightness or wrongness of an action on its consequences. Because, at the end of the day, none of us can see the future. None of us knows what the consequences of our actions are going to be.

And so the only way that we can ground the rightness or wrongness of an action is, again, in a formal principle—a maxim where the subjective principle and the objective principle of the maxim are the same, or a maxim that you could universalize.

That is, I think, the best argument for Kantianism—for deontology.

All right, so we got through the first formulation of the categorical imperative—the universality formulation—but there are two other formulations.

So now I want us to talk about what is often called the humanity formulation. It more or less states the following: That we should act only in such a way that we always treat humanity, whether in our own person or in the person of someone else, never simply as a means, but always as an end in itself.

And I think that there are a lot of technical terms kind of embedded in this formulation. One that I want to point out right here at the top is what Kant means when he says humanity is rationality, autonomy, and freedom—full stop.

So if I’m disrespecting someone’s humanity, then I am treating them as if they are not rational, not autonomous, or not free. And here, the humanity formulation is going to say we always have to treat people as if humanity is intact, basically—our own and other people’s.

And that means never treating them merely as a means to an end, but always as an end in itself. Never merely instrumentally, but always non-instrumentally.

David: I think that’s crucial to mention because otherwise you would assume that “humanity” would be speciesist—that it would refer to somebody who is a member of the species Homo sapiens.

Especially if you look at what Kant says in the Anthropology, rationality could be possessed by aliens and other rational beings that are not members of our species. So “humanity” needs to be construed very broadly as involving any rational being that is like us, whether it be a human or otherwise.

Rick: As long as that other rational being isn’t a God.

David: Correct.

Rick: Yeah. Because Kant wrote—I think it was his dissertation—on the orbit of the planets. And he was convinced early on, and maybe throughout his whole life, that Jupiter was inhabited. He seemed to be pretty convinced that those were rational beings on Jupiter.

David: Yeah, correct.

Rick: He also has this really interesting moment where he gets gravity wrong, and he thinks gravity is stronger the closer a body is to the sun rather than based on the mass of the planet. And so he reasons that Jupiter has very little gravity, and therefore the people on Jupiter can work all the time without getting tired, and they’re the happiest.

Leigh: Well, leaving the Jupiterians aside for the moment, I’d like to get back to this claim that is embedded in the humanity formulation—namely, that we should never treat other people simply as a means, but always as an end in themselves.

This is an objection that I hear a lot from students, and it’s entirely justified, I think, which is that we treat people as means all the time. I mean, we couldn’t go about our normal days without treating people as means. When I go to a restaurant, I treat the waiter as a means of getting food from the kitchen to my table. When I go to the mechanic, I treat the mechanic as a means of getting my car fixed. When I go to the doctor, I treat the doctor as a means of hopefully getting well.

But I don’t treat them—or I shouldn’t treat them; I ought not treat them, Kant would note—as merely a means.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: As simply a tool. And so the real challenge, I think, is to push people to ask: What actually would it mean to treat someone merely as a means? That is to say, what would it mean to treat someone as if they are not free, not autonomous, not rational? Just like a tool.

And I think here, the obvious answer is slavery.

Rick: Right? And he does bring up that example in The Metaphysics of Morals. You know, he brings up slavery, but also other forms of servitude—voluntary servitude. I think he has in mind there indentured servitude, as ways of treating myself as a means, merely as a means, and not treating myself as an end at all.

I also think what’s interesting about your two examples,Leigh– the server in the restaurant and the mechanic—is, to bridge this with the first formulation, it’s okay to go into a restaurant and have someone bring food to your table. But it wouldn’t be okay to also lie to them. Or to steal money from them by not paying.

So you can see that there is a difference in relying on someone to perform a service for you while at the same time recognizing that they are a moral subject. And that, were I to act in a certain way, I would only act in that way if I were considering them not to be a moral subject—as if they were animals or, even worse, as you said, a tool.

Leigh: That’s exactly right. And as a veteran of the restaurant industry, I can attest that there are a lot of people who treat service workers as if they are merely tools, as if they are mere means to an end.

And you know, that’s why I think decent people—ourselves included—really morally judge other people who treat service employees badly, who treat service employees as if they’re not rational, free, autonomous agents.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Like, we think they’re doing something morally wrong there.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I have a member of my family who, as an adult—this was just a few years ago—said to me as we were paying the bill, “Oh, you don’t have to tip on taxes.”

And this is someone who had worked in the service industry. And I thought, you know, you are broaching treating this person as a mere means and not as an end in themselves. Give them an extra buck, for God’s sake.

And that was a moment where—and this is a word that comes up often in other parts of Kant’s moral philosophy—they’re not recognizing the dignity of the humanity in another person.

Leigh: That’s exactly right.

David: Correct. And this is where I think Kant himself then gets into some troubling territory when it comes to animals. Animal rights advocates have critiqued him on this point. Animals, according to Kant, can be treated as mere means and not ends in themselves. This allows for them to be considered raw materials for clothing, food, and other kinds of activities.

The best Kant can offer us here is the indirect duties argument regarding animals. But because animals are not rational creatures in his framework, they are unlike human beings—they are able to be treated as mere means and not as ends in themselves.

Leigh: Yeah. And it’s not just that animals are not rational. They’re also not free, according to Kant. The implicit principle of this humanity formulation of the categorical imperative is that to treat another human being as a mere means to an end is to deny the possibility of freedom in general. Right? That connects back to the first formulation, of being able to will the maxim of your action as a universal law.

David: And you can see the way in which we have been able to enslave various human populations is by reducing them to animality, right? All you have to do to create a slave is to deny the humanity of the other, to make them into an animal. And as a result, they then become a mere means as opposed to an end.

Leigh: Right. And this is where I’m always reminded of this fantastic quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, who said, To treat a man like a dog, you first have to recognize that he’s a man.

I think one of the interesting things about slavery—and oh God, I wish I hadn’t formulated it that way—but that’s actually what I mean. One of the interesting things about the moral wrong of slavery is not simply that it’s treating another human being as a mere means to an end, disrespecting their freedom, rationality, and autonomy. It’s also fundamentally self-contradictory.

In order to enslave another human being, I have to recognize that they are free, autonomous, and rational.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Like, I don’t say that I’m enslaving my car every time I drive it or enslaving my knife every time I cut something. So, there’s a fundamentally irrational operation at work when we try to justify slavery.

David: And that’s because there’s a paradox in the concept of slavery as a moral and legal category. Slavery—especially as formulated both in Roman law and in the laws of the Confederacy and other institutionalized forms—didn’t just use the slave as a tool. It recognized that the slave occupies this kind of liminal position between person and thing.

At times, you recognize the slave as a person—for instance, when the slave conducts business transactions on your behalf. Other times, you treat the slave as a mere means, not a person in their own right.

There’s this sort of ambivalence about slavery, which I think, Leigh, you’re exactly spot on about. It isn’t just that you’re treating the slave as a tool. It’s that it vacillates. It occupies this in-between position that allows for us to be rather capricious in the ways we assign humanity and then reserve humanity for ourselves.

Rick: And this goes back to both what you pointed out earlier, Leigh, and David’s point from the beginning of the conversation—the universality claim in the first formulation is about contradiction.

Because if, as a slaveholder and slave owner, I were to will the principle of my action as a universal moral law, then I’m saying at the same time that there is nothing morally wrong with anyone enslaving me.

Leigh: Exactly right.

Rick: And that universal enslavement—there’s no problem with that. And yet, obviously, there can’t be universal enslavement because there has to be at least one owner. Part of the contradiction here is that to enslave anyone is to say that there’s moral ground for you to enslave me.

David: So this is why the dehumanization component is absolutely crucial.

Rick: Right.

David: You have to remove the humanity from the other in order to create something that could be enslaved and not get yourself involved in that contradiction.

Leigh: Right. And that contradiction is not a consequentialist contradiction. The contradiction is not, if I enslave someone else, there could be some world in which I am enslaved. It’s that I cannot, as a rational, free, autonomous person, will a world in which rationality, freedom, and autonomy don’t exist or are impossible.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Yeah, exactly right.

So I want to bring up another example that often comes up in my classes, and it’s complicated. I kind of want to see where you guys fall on this, but often my students will bring up prostitution and ask whether or not prostitution is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative.

Obviously, one argument—the simplest argument—is that Johns treat prostitutes merely as a means to an end, merely as tools for sexual pleasure or whatever. But some students will object that that’s not always the case, right?

If I am a prostitute—and let me stipulate this first—an entrepreneurial prostitute, I don’t have a pimp, I’m not coerced into my situation, etc. If I am an entrepreneurial prostitute, I’m engaging in basically contractual relations with every John. This means that every John is recognizing me, to some extent, as a rational, free, and autonomous agent.

They’re saying, Look, I’m going to give you this amount of money to do these things with your body for this amount of time, and I’m saying, I agree or I disagree, and both of us could walk away if we don’t like the contract.

So in that scenario, it’s harder to demonstrate that there’s an obvious violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative going on. Now, again, the stipulation that I began with is very important because, of course, in general, that is not the situation many prostitutes find themselves in.

But I’m wondering, in that scenario, do you think there’s a moral violation?

Rick: Can I point out first that Kant would have a problem with prostitution on slightly different grounds? In another text, The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant talks about why lust is immoral. And so, to think about the John through the category of lust would be one way to get at this without addressing the transactional nature of it.

Because I think, Leigh, what’s interesting about the way you formulated it is that, except for the fact that one act involves genitalia, I can’t really see a difference between an employer hiring someone to screw a bolt in on a part all day long and a person contracting another person to have sex with them.

Leigh: That’s exactly right. I mean, my students quickly make the same conclusion. They’re like, Wait, are we all prostitutes? The answer is yes.

David: Yeah, and there’s a certain symmetry here too because it’s not just the John that is using the prostitute. The prostitute’s also using the John in these kinds of relationships because it’s a means to acquire money. And so, I think it’s, you know, complicated who’s using who in some of these circumstances.

Leigh: And it’s complicated because in the scenario that I’m posing right now, neither is using the other as merely a means to an end. Both are still, in Kant’s formulation, respecting the humanity of one another.

David: Yeah.

Leigh: I think the difficulty comes when we look at the real on-the-ground circumstances of women. I mean, I understand that prostitutes come in all genders—I’m just using women here. When women are coerced or in some other way forced to prostitute themselves, there’s something morally objectionable under this humanity formulation.

But the objection is not that the prostitute is prostituting herself. The objection is really that the prostitute is a slave.

Rick: It is incredibly difficult within Kant’s moral philosophy to bring an example of an action and then say, Is this moral or not? Does this treat humanity merely as a means and not ever as an end in itself?

Because, as Kant says in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, I myself might not even know what the actual determining ground of my action is.

And so, it’s very difficult to take an action—prostitution, moral or immoral—and analyze it. Because, as we pointed out before, we would have to ask the question: What’s the maxim of the action of either the John or the sex worker? Can that maxim be universalized without contradiction? Would that take away the autonomy, freedom, and rationality of anyone?

That’s where it becomes very difficult to start using examples and to see how concretely this applies in what students usually refer to as “the real world.”

Kant seems not to be worried about the application. He’s worried about our willing being determined by the moral law in any of its formulations. In that sense, it’s not about application; it’s about how you determine your will.

David: Let’s go back to something you said earlier. It’s more about the motivation for the act than it is about the act itself. That, I think, is one thing that students find frustrating in Kant—this idea of going back to the maxim and what it is that motivated the decision about the action.

Leigh: I agree with you both that, ultimately for Kant, what is at issue is the form of the will, and whether or not the form of the will is compatible with the categorical imperative.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: But will and motivation are different. Yes. Will and intentions are different. Will always discharges itself in an action. So I don’t think that we can say that Kant is not worried about the actions, that Kant is not worried about the applications. He absolutely is.

He’s just saying that we can’t focus on the particular actions and applications because those are always going to bring in all of these other criteria, like self-interest and consideration of consequences, et cetera, et cetera. And that it ought to be the case that we focus on the form of the will, because if the form of the will is in accordance with the categorical imperative, whatever the action that comes out or the application or the consequences of that action are going to be morally right or wrong, depending on the accordance of the will with the categorical imperative.

Rick: Correct. And that’s why I use the phrase determining ground rather than motivation.

Leigh: But I just wanted to be really careful to say that this is not not concerned with actual actions and actual applications.

David: Yeah.

Rick: I take your point. And maybe I overemphasized my point. But another way I could put this is that I think, from Kant’s perspective, it’s that it’s impossible for us to reverse engineer the determining ground of the will just from the action itself.

Leigh: Correct. Yeah.

David: And a way to say this in Kantian language is it’s more about the a priori condition than it is about the a posteriori re-engineering of that from the act in the world.

Leigh: Yeah. And that’s why Kant is not going to give us a list of 10 commandments, right? Like he’s never going to say, “Do not lie, do not cheat, do not steal, always be on time,” whatever, because all of those things are either going to conform to the categorical imperative or they’re not. I don’t need to give you a list of particular actions to do or not do.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah.

Leigh: Before we leave this humanity formulation, I just want to point out that everything that satisfies this second formulation of the categorical imperative also satisfies the first formulation of the categorical imperative.

Slavery is morally wrong because it involves disrespecting another person’s humanity, treating another person as merely a means to an end. Slavery is also wrong because you could not rationally will the maxim of that action as a universal law.

So, again, in support of Kant, he’s giving us a moral law here that is universal, unconditional, applies in all instances, and these different formulations are just clarifying what the moral law actually is.

Rick: And I would add to that: it clarifies the moral law, and each formulation puts the focus on a slightly different element of one and the same moral law. Right?

Leigh: All right. We finally got into the third formulation of the categorical imperative, which briefly commands that we should always act in accordance with the maxim of a member giving universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends.

So, again, we’re going to have to get some technical language out of the way. What does Kant mean by kingdom of ends? Well, this is pretty easy to explain given what we just talked about in the second formulation.

So Kant says we should never treat people as means, but rather as ends in themselves. This pair of terms—means and ends—has a long history, a long philosophical history. It goes all the way back to the ancients, to the distinction between intrinsic goods and instrumental goods.

And so when Kant is talking about a kingdom of ends, he’s talking about more or less a world in which everyone is an end in themselves and treats everyone else as an end in themselves. Now that is not an actually existent world, but it is a world that we can imagine.

And so when he says a merely possible kingdom of ends, that’s what he’s imagining: a world in which every person is an end in him or herself and treats others as ends in themselves.

And we ought to only act in such a way that we’re acting in accordance with a member of that world, giving universal laws to people in that world.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the most, like, stupidly obvious formulation of a moral law, because it basically just asks us to imagine a perfect world and act as somebody in that world.

David: I will say, in defense of it, it proceeds from a subjectivity of belonging to a communal organization—this kingdom of ends—and acting from that. So, in a way, it kind of interrupts the individualism of a lot of Enlightenment thinking in that it proceeds from a subjectivity that is communal and not individual.

Leigh: That’s a really good point.

Rick: And also, I think it comes back to one of the things you said, Leigh, when you quoted the formulation: treat humanity never merely as a means but always as an end. And you correctly stated “the humanity in yourself or in others.” I think what this final formulation does is to say that the first formulation of the categorical imperative says, basically, we all need to act like we are giving laws to everyone who is like us.

David: Correct.

Rick: We all need to act in such a way that we’re giving laws to all rational beings. It emphasizes both: I belong to this community of rational beings, and I need to keep that in mind. But I also now see my own dignity as a legislator in this kingdom of ends—that I’m a member of the House of Representatives of the kingdom of ends.

Leigh: Well, I’m a king, right? I mean, in a kingdom of ends, in a world in which everyone is an end in themselves and everyone treats everyone else as an end in themselves, you wouldn’t need laws because everybody would be giving the law to themselves that everyone else would also be giving to themselves and everyone else. Everyone is a king. Everyone is a sovereign in that sort of a world.

I also just want to point out that this goes back, again, to our earlier note that, ultimately, what Kant is describing here is a principle of doing one’s duty—whatever one’s duty may be. That we should always act on maxims in which the subjective principle of the maxim and the objective principle of the maxim are the same. That is what a duty is. To do my duty is to say, “What I am going to actually do (the subjective principle) is what one ought to do, what any rational person acting rationally ought to do.”

Rick: Right. And that’s why he also says that the first or the basic duty I have is to the moral law itself.

Leigh: Right.

Rick: So I have a duty to act with the moral law being the determining ground of my will. That’s the primary duty I have, and all other duties I have have to derive from that one.

David: So, let me just complicate the picture a little bit because I agree with all of this. But it does mean that membership in this community is exclusive. Not every being is in this kingdom of ends. There is a kind of membership criterion, and that membership criterion means some people are insiders and others are outsiders. And how that is distributed, I think, is a matter of politics and power.

Leigh: I completely agree with that. And I think I want to say I have no problem with that because I don’t think, for example, my utensils have a moral world. And Kant’s going to say, because they’re not free, they’re not rational, not autonomous. And that gets a little bit more complicated when we’re talking about animals or AI agents or other things, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that I do want to say do not have moral responsibilities, do not have moral obligations, do not have duties.

David: Unfortunately, this has historically not played out very well. Think of the Europeans who came to the New World and decided that indigenous people, whom they wrongly called Indians, were not rational creatures because they couldn’t speak in a way that we understood. What they had to say meant that they were animals and could be exploited and turned into slaves. So, there is a way in which this membership criterion can be manipulated in ways that do have—I’m sorry to say—consequences that can be very devastating for various populations and individuals.

Leigh: Completely agree. But also just want to point out that the only way to correct those misunderstandings is also by this very same theory.

Rick: I mean, what David, I think, you’re pointing out is that it is clear that for Kant, who or what counts as a rational being cannot be empirically determined. I can’t look out and say, “Oh yeah, that’s a rational being, that’s not a rational being.” Now, the positive side of that might be that there could be rational beings—let’s say, like AI—that look nothing like me, look nothing like us.

Leigh: Like people from Jupiter.

Rick: Right, yeah, the Jupiterians, as Leigh put it earlier.

David: Correct.

Rick: Kant thought they were really tall too because the gravity wasn’t so strong there. Because the only reason we’re not 12 feet tall is because gravity’s pulling us down. So, the positive side of this is, because it’s not empirically determined, we could recognize that something like AI or the Jupiterians are legislators also of the kingdom of ends. Kings in the kingdom of ends.

But because it’s not empirical, the other side of this is what David was pointing out: that I could, in the face of what is obviously empirically a human, say, “Ah, but that’s not a human.” I also want to point out that among, especially the Spanish, there were other grounds for treating the indigenous people really badly while recognizing their humanity.

David: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Colonialism is a wily activity that can get around a whole lot of obstacles.

Leigh: Ditto capitalism.

Rick: Well, yeah, exactly.

Leigh: My fellow prostitutes.

David: They’re all just C words. All right.

Leigh: So, earlier I described this as the most stupidly obvious formulation of a moral law, and maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole. But I do think that one of the things that is very important about this kingdom of ends formulation, in addition to what David rightly pointed out—which is that it does give us a more communal sense of morality—a lot of people accuse Kant and Enlightenment thinking in general of being overly focused on the individual subject.

But another good thing about this kingdom of ends formulation is that it kind of puts a nice ribbon and bow on top of the interconnectedness of the different formulations of the categorical imperative. So, again, it’s always going to be the case that if you violate one formulation of the categorical imperative, you’re also violating the other formulations of the categorical imperative. There is, again, only one moral law. And this last formulation, the kingdom of ends formulation, is maybe just the quickest way to determine if something is right or wrong.

David: That sounds right. Yeah.

Rick: I think that’s right. Cause you just say, “Oh, hey, my reason for doing this—could I make that a law for every rational being?”

Leigh: Or, if I was living in a perfect moral world, would I do this? Yeah. If I was a perfect moral agent living in a perfect moral world with only other perfect moral agents, would anybody do this?

Rick: And that, Leigh, I think, is a case where your point about lying is seen most clearly. Yeah. Obviously, in such a world, there would be no need for lying, because there would be no murderers. And that’s one way to see your point that you made earlier in the context of the other formulation, that lying is wrong.

Leigh: I think it also gives us another reason to point out the difference between the categorical imperative and the so-called golden rule.

Rick: Ah, yeah. Nice.

David: Correct. Yep.

Rick: Well, one thing I know for sure is that you should always act in such a way that you leave the bar when the bartender calls last call. But before we leave, I thought I’d go around and get your final thoughts on Kant’s categorical imperative.

David: So I would just end by saying we’ve been talking about agent-oriented moral thinking, which is very much in line with modern philosophy and the ancient traditions. But it’s after Kant that people begin to switch their perspective and look at ethics from a patient-oriented perspective. Jeremy Bentham already does that with his thinking about animals and the endurance of pain or the experiencing of pain. But also, this is a big innovation from Levinas, where he says that ethics is situated not on the agent but on the patient.

So I think in the wake of Kant’s innovations in the categorical imperative, one of the ways that people have responded to it isn’t just to talk about consequentialism and act utilitarianism, but also to look at moral patiency as another way of organizing the whole way we think about ethics and moral conduct of individuals.

Rick: Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: I think I’ve come to realize that as I grow older, I am less and less embarrassed by just admitting that I am a Kantian. Hi, Leigh. Not even—not even a closeted Kantian.

One of the things people often forget about deontology is that it doesn’t mean that you don’t still do wrong things.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: And one of the reasons that I find that a lot of people resist the arguments that Kant makes is because they want to justify things that they do. Things that they do that they probably know are wrong—morally wrong. And I’m more and more comfortable as I get older embracing Kantianism because I’m more and more comfortable saying, you know what? Yeah, I did that. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t the moral thing to do. I can’t justify it.

I mean, I think that that is something that we all just have to reckon with. The reality is that we’re not going to be able to find a moral theory that makes us the king of the kingdom of ends. We don’t live in a morally perfect world.

Yeah. So I would like to see more people not be so quick to make snap judgments about deontology. I think it is a robust and really important moral theory. I think that it doesn’t exclude the possibility that in particular situations you might use other forms of moral reasoning or other forms of reasoning, whether that’s, you know, virtue approaches or consequentialist approaches or whatever.

But I still find it mostly impossible to disagree with Kant’s formulation of the moral law. I also, by the way, find myself filled with awe and wonder when I contemplate it, just like the starry heavens above.

What about you, Rick?

Rick: Well, following directly from that, I mentioned that, as it happens, recently I’ve been teaching Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, and students constantly are saying, you know, “I don’t think Kant applies with the complexity of today’s world.” And I say, “Tell me about those complexities,” and they’ll be like, “Oh, well, today politicians lie all the time,” or “With social media, things become difficult.” And I say, “I think Kant applies to that, and he thinks that’s wrong.”

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: And I don’t know why you have a problem with Kant saying that’s wrong. Some of them admit they are uncomfortable when people say something is morally wrong. And part of the appeal to me for Kant is that I think we’re seeing in politics in the United States that all sorts of norms have been violated— even laws have been violated. And yet no one’s willing to stand up and say, you know what, that’s morally wrong. The problem with it is that it’s morally wrong.

And so that’s when my inner Kantian becomes an exoskeleton Kantianism.

Leigh: Yeah, it’s morally wrong, and that’s not my opinion.

Rick: The last thing I want to say is that it’s also worth pointing out that for Kant there’s an awful lot of things that we do that are neither moral nor immoral.

Leigh: Right.

Rick: There’s a lot of actions that don’t belong to the sphere of morality. It’s not like every breath I take I have to see whether the maxim of my action could be a universal moral law for all.

David: Right.

Rick: Or every move I make.

Leigh: But punctuality is definitely in that world.

Rick: Thank god I’m never late.

You may have been aware that just before we started this current season, David became chair of his department, and it appears as if that is a lot of shitty work. Takes a lot of time. I know a couple of times this season David has been in exciting seminars about management and other HR kind of policies.

Leigh: Assessment protocols.

Rick: Right. And so David has decided that while he’s chair, he’s going to step back from the microphone and deal with his circus full of monkeys. So we’re going to have to say goodbye to him for a while after this episode.

And let me just start by saying, David, it’s been a real pleasure talking with you every week and sometimes more about philosophical issues. I’ve always enjoyed your perspective, and you have ways of approaching things that are not mine, and I always find that really great. And I’m going to miss having these weekly chats.

David: Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. And the thing for me that I really enjoyed about this is that it has gotten me talking and thinking about things that normally I wouldn’t bump into in my everyday activities and in my own research.

So it sort of stretches my imagination and my intellectual muscle. And that, for me, is really valuable. Yeah. Talking with both of you has been really a pleasure.

Leigh: Yeah. David, I want to echo Rick and just say how much I’ve appreciated having you on for these last two seasons. And I’m sorry that you have to step back. I’m even more sorry that you have to step back for the reasons that you’re stepping back, but I know that you’re not going far, and we will see you again in the future.

A couple of other announcements I want to make about changes to this podcast are that we have finally made the decision to start moving off of Twitter/X and onto BlueSky. So if you currently follow us on Twitter, check our page there. We’re going to put our BlueSky handle on there and slowly start moving all of our content over to BlueSky.

Elon’s is a very dark cave, and we are in search of bluer skies—that is going to be happening soon.

And then, maybe most importantly, I want to announce that the person taking over David’s seat next season will be Devyn Havis. Earlier this season, we did a great interview with her about the ethics of refusal, and we’re looking forward to talking with Devyn next season.

I personally am very excited about having Devyn as the new co-host because this will be the first time in 10 seasons that it’s not just me and two guys, which, I was still excited about. But I was starting to think I might just rename this podcast Leigh and Two Dudes.

So yeah, definitely tune in next season for Devyn.

Rick: Yeah, we’re really excited. But now the bright lights of the bar are on, and we can see each other in the full light of day and our full humanity, and I’m getting out of here.

Leigh: Okay. Bye, guys.

David: Bye.

Rick: Bye.