What The Categorical Imperative Means For Your Life

Kant's works are among the most difficult philosophical works to read at all. During my studies, Kant's texts often drove me to despair. Philosophy was my minor subject, and I was certainly never a competent and perceptive philosopher.

But the categorical imperative has remained in my memory as one of the very few philosophical concepts because it is about how we should act if we want to understand ourselves as moral beings.

In this article, I will talk about the core concept of the categorical imperative and ask about its practical meaning in our daily lives.

I am not the right person to pursue theoretical philosophy or even philosophical science. I need to draw practical conclusions from the thoughts of our greatest thinkers.

What does the Categorical Imperative say?

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." (Kant, Immanuel (1993) [1785]. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Ellington, James W. (3rd ed.). Hackett. p. 30).

What does that mean? What is a maxim?

Let's take a simple example: If we stand in the supermarket on the shelf with the expensive gin bottles and nobody is watching us, we could decide according to our free will to put one of these bottles in our waistband and leave the store without paying.

We could justify our decision by saying that we think the price is unreasonable.

The underlying maxim is: I am allowed to steal things if the price charged for them seems unreasonably high to me.

To decide, according to the categorical imperative, whether our actions are morally impeccable, we can now test this maxim.

Can we want our maxim to become a universal law that should apply to every human being?

In this case, the answer is straightforward. Of course, we cannot want this, because in the worst case, this maxim would sooner or later turn against ourselves.

By the time you advertise your used car for sale, you will be glad that no law allows others to take your car because they find it too expensive.

By the time you advertise your used car for sale, you will be glad that no law allows others to simply take your car because they find it too expensive.

In cases in which you would be directly affected, your actions are, therefore, effortless to judge using the categorical imperative.

Many believe that the categorical imperative only applies to this type of action and therefore say that the categorical imperative is just a complicated version of a famous saying: Treat others as you would like others to treat you.

But this wisdom, also known as the golden rule, falls short of the categorical imperative.

What the categorical imperative means in practice

The categorical imperative demands that one thinks beyond one's own horizon. It demands that one considers not only what is, but also what could be.

A maxim is often dependent on other maxims, and in the course of a decision, one must consider all maxims that build on each other.

For example, if I say that I can produce as much CO2 as I want, I can undoubtedly want to do so according to the golden rule. I could say that I allow others to produce as much CO2 as they wish. I let them because I want to be allowed to do so.

But the categorical imperative demands that we not only see ourselves personally but also ask about the big picture. To judge whether my maxim should become a universal law, we must consider all the consequences of acting according to this maxim.

According to the categorical imperative, we should not simply ignore the results of scientific research on the greenhouse effect and the ecological and economic consequences associated with it.

While we may question the statements of science and believe that the consequences of the greenhouse effect need not be as adverse as research has predicted, we cannot merely want this opinion as a universal law.

After all, the maxim behind it would be: everyone is allowed to act as they see fit. Now, at the latest, it is clear that even a denier of climate change can no longer insist that everyone is allowed to produce as much CO2 as they want.

To defend this maxim, the climate denier would, in a second step, have to want to make a further maxim a general law, namely that scientific findings may be ignored on principle.

If humanity were to agree to be allowed to ignore scientific findings, this could suddenly revert to the denier of climate change.

His doctor could then, for example, withhold a tried and tested therapy from him and instead try summoning. Nobody should then be able to stop this doctor from doing so, because it would be allowed to ignore scientific findings.

So whenever we want to decide whether an action meets the categorical imperative, we have to think in several layers.

We examine the maxim on which our actions are based, and we also examine which maxim, in turn, underlies the first maxim.

In this way, the search for the right course of action is much more complicated than when applying the golden rule, but the results also become more apparent.

Those who consistently apply the categorical imperative to their actions will seldom be wrong. With the golden rule, however, we often cannot say with absolute certainty whether we are morally correct.

Of course, in everyday life, it is impossible to make each of our decisions only after an in-depth analysis with the categorical imperative.

But if we leave the level of spontaneous decisions and instead look at the values by which we live and act, things look different.

After some reflection, each of us can undoubtedly name the values we live by.

Each of us would only have to check these values once using the categorical imperative to have a stable moral framework.

According to such an evaluated value system, we would then be able to make reasonably reliable decisions in everyday life that meet the requirements of the categorical imperative, because we would make this decision based on verified fundamental values.