In Section III of his 1785 work entitled Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant shifts from his search for the supreme principle of morality from both a moral common sensical standpoint (Section I) and a standpoint of practical reason—the ability to have justified reasons for action (Section II), to a validation of his findings in the preceding sections. It is in this last section that we find the following quote: “And so categorical imperatives are possible by this: that the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world and consequently, if I were only this, all my actions would always be in conformity with the autonomy of the will; but since at the same time I intuit myself as a member of the world of sense, they ought to be in conformity with it”(4:454). This present work will be focused on the explication of this quote as a whole via explications of the concepts contained therein.
The immediate context of the quote supplied above is not only Kant’s justification of his findings in the preceding two sections of the groundwork, but more precisely, the question of just how a categorical imperative is possible. By categorical imperatives, Kant means moral commandments. He means the “ought” that acts as a prescription for action, or what is perceived as morally required in any given set of circumstances. These imperatives are such as “you ought not to kill,” or “you ought not to steal.” They are those requirements that demand lawfulness, or action in accordance with the law as is expressed in Kant’s formulation of universal law, which is as follows: “There is, therefore, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”(4:421).
This formulation of universal law is to be utilized to test a maxim for its moral worth. Is the action in question able to be universalized such that it can be a law for all people in all places? That is to say, if the action in question were to be made a law, would that law be able to command categorically some moral requirement that all are rationally bound to abide by? If so, then the action is deemed worthy of the label “moral.” But this alone does not satisfy the rigorous demands of Kant’s endeavor, which is to seek out and justify the supreme principle of morality. What he truly wants to know is how categorical imperatives are possible. By “possible,” he means to ask what it is that gives categorical imperatives normative precedence. That is to say, he is asking what the source of the reason-giving force of the categorical imperative is. That this is the question leading to the answer contained in the quote of the opening paragraph is seen in another quote from Section II of the Groundwork. Kant writes:
“On the other hand, the question of how the imperative of morality is possible is undoubtedly the only one needing a solution, since it is in no way hypothetical and the objectively represented necessity can therefore not be based on any presupposition, as in the case of hypothetical imperatives” (4:419).
If hypothetical imperatives analytically contain their reason-giving force via the Principal of Instrumental Reason, that is to say, the idea that one does what is required to obtain the optional end that they set out to gain, what is it that binds all rational beings to a categorical imperative that has a non-negotiable (i.e. non-optional) end?
Kant answers this question with the notion of freedom. He links the idea of freedom with membership in an intelligible world where actions are necessarily in accordance with the autonomy of the will. Kant writes, “Will is a kind of causality of living beings insofar as they are rational, and freedom would be that property of such causality that it can be efficient independently of alien causes determining it” (4:446). This, according to Kant, is the negative definition of freedom in the sense of saying what it is not. For Kant, freedom is not acting under influences external to oneself, such as natural laws, because the actions of such conformity are heteronomous. That is to say, when one acts in accordance to external laws, one is acting in accordance with the natural laws of desire, inclinations, etc., which are not actions that fall into moral categories, because they are outside of the autonomy of the will. This is the realm of non-rational and thus non-moral action, akin to lions hunting and eating gazelle. There is no moral worth in actions that stem from natural instinct.
But Kant does not leave off with a solely negative definition. He proceeds to define freedom in the positive sense as a matter of being a law to oneself. He writes,
“But the proposition, the will is in all its actions a law to itself, indicates only the principle, to act on no other maxim than that which can also have as object itself as a universal law. This, however, is precisely the formula of the categorical imperative and is the principle of morality; hence a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same”(4:447).
So for Kant, if the categorical imperative is the foundation for willing an action (practical reason), then the will is free, and if the will is truly free, then the categorical imperative is the foundation for all of its actions. On this conception of freedom, as Robert Johnson states:
Freedom does not consist in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one's own making. The idea of freedom as autonomy thus goes beyond the merely ‘negative’ sense of being free from influences on our conduct originating outside of ourselves. It contains first and foremost the idea of laws made and laid down by oneself, and, in virtue of this, laws that have decisive authority over oneself.
It is this freedom that is possessed by rational beings that make them members of an “intelligible world.” Kant states:
As a rational being, and thus as a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for, independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (which reason must always ascribe to itself) is freedom. With the idea of freedom the concept of autonomy is now inseparably combined, and with the concept of autonomy the universal principle of morality, which in idea is the ground of all actions of rational beings, just as the law of nature is the ground of all appearances (4:452).
What Kant is saying is that the hallmark of moral action is rational action, and to be rational is to be autonomous, that is, to be a law to oneself. But rationality is a component of the intelligible world, and membership in the intelligible world, or the world of understanding (i.e. the world as things are in and of themselves) is predicated on the grounding of appearances in things as they are in themselves (i.e. the noumenal world). According to Kant, “we can achieve only cognition of appearances, never of things in themselves”(4:451).
On this view, according to Kant, a rational being, “as regards mere perception and receptivity to sensations…must count himself as belonging to the world of sense, but with regard to what there may be of pure activity in him (what reaches consciousness immediately and not through affection of the senses) he must count himself as belonging to the intellectual world, of which however he has no further cognizance”(4:451). This is why the moral law takes precedence over natural inclinations and desires; it is grounded in the world of things as they are in and of themselves, and our access to that world comes via rationality, which presupposes and assumes that there is “behind appearances something else that is not appearance, namely things in themselves”(4:451). So while we are ontologically bound to the phenomenal world, we can, in Kant’s estimation, go beyond empirically based reasons for action and ground our behavior in the pure, a priori noumenal world of rationality. This whole conception is akin to the early Christian adage of being in the world without being of the world, in that while we have no choice but to live in the world of senses, our actions should conform to something that is inherently transcendent.
But how exactly does this all work? How is it that, “the subjective principles of actions, that is, maxims, must always be so adopted that they can also hold as objective, that is, hold universally as principles”(4:449)? The key to the answer for Kant is rational agency. Because the will of a rational agent is autonomous (i.e. free), the moral law is a law of rational agency. The will as action (practical reason) thus presumes freedom, and to be free, according to Kant, is to be a law to oneself (autonomy). Kant’s positive definition of freedom amounts to the individual rational agent being the author of universal laws, which the individual is subsequently bound to. On this view, moral “oughts” have reason-giving force, namely because rational agency is predicated on this positive sense of freedom.
So on this view, rational agents act from a sense of duty, which are those actions that are morally called for, and they do so out of reverence for the law. This law is that which has the authority to bind a person in his/her obligation to perform the morally required actions necessitated by a given set of circumstances regardless of inclination or desire. But according to Kant’s positive formulation of the notion of freedom, individuals as rational agents who are the sole authors of universal laws are the only things that have this binding authority. Because they are autonomous, that is, laws unto themselves, any action from duty (actions that are morally called for) out of reverence for the law are really done out of reverence for oneself as a lawgiver.
So just what does all this have to do with the Groundwork project of searching for and establishing the supreme principle of morality? It brings finality to the project by showing that categorical imperatives are possible because they call for actions in accordance with the law, the concept of which applies directly to all rational agents because of their inherent capacity to set ends as humans, and because those rational agents are also endowed with the autonomy to set universal laws, and are thus intrinsically bound by them.
So then, having unpacked the concepts contained in the quote cited in the opening paragraph, we are now in a position to look at that passage as a whole. The intelligent and rational world, the one to which Kant was steered in his project’s search for a pure and a priori supreme principle of morality, provides the foundation for moral action. But in this world, actions would necessarily be in accordance with the autonomy of the will because it is a world devoid of the natural laws that are inherent to the world of sense. This means that there would be no possibility of heteronomous actions from desires and inclinations, because heteronomy is not a category in the world of things in themselves. As such, there can be no “ought” in regards to actions in conformity with the autonomous will, because acting in conformity with the autonomous will is an analytic a priori conception in a world devoid of heteronomy. However, being that the world in which we live is indeed fraught with opportunities to act in conformity with the heteronomous desires that are inherent to the world of senses, the “ought” that accompanies categorical imperatives is given its due weight. Because we are free rational beings, our moral intentions ought to be in accordance with our freedom. This “ought” comes about by the very fact that we dwell in the world of sense, a world in which, according to Kant, the supreme principle of morality could not be brought forth. So in laying the Groundwork for future endeavors into metaphysical speculations pertaining to morality, Kant did indeed provide a non-empirically based, synthetic, a priori foundation for the “ought” of moral action, and at the very least, made a valiant effort in showing the “possibility” of the categorical imperative.
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