Interestingly, Kant acknowledged that he had despised the ignorant masses until he read Rousseau and came to appreciate the worth that exists in every human being. For other reasons too, Kant is part of the tradition deriving from both Spinoza and Rousseau. Like his predecessors, Kant insisted that actions resulting from desires cannot be free. Freedom is to be found only in rational action. Moreover, whatever is demanded by reason must be demanded of all rational beings; hence, rational action cannot be based on an individual’s personal desires but must be action in accordance with something that he can will to be a universal law. This view roughly parallels Rousseau’s idea of the general will as that which, as opposed to the individual will, a person shares with the whole community. Kant extended this community to all rational beings.

Kant’s most distinctive contribution to ethics was his insistence that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does his duty for its own sake. Kant first introduced this idea as something accepted by the common moral consciousness of human beings and only later tried to show that it is an essential element of any rational morality. Kant’s claim that this idea is central to the common moral consciousness expressed, albeit in an explicit and extreme form, a tendency of Judeo-Christian ethics; it also revealed how much Western ethical consciousness had changed since the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Does common moral consciousness really insist that there is no moral worth in any action done for any motive other than duty? Certainly one would be less inclined to praise the person who plunges into the surf to rescue a drowning child if one learned that he did it because he expected a handsome reward from the child’s wealthy parents. This feeling lies behind Kant’s disagreement with all those moral philosophers who argued that one should do what is right because that is the path to happiness, either on earth or in heaven. But Kant went further than this. He was equally opposed to those who regard benevolent or sympathetic feelings as the basis of morality. Here he may be reflecting the moral consciousness of 18th-century Protestant Germany, but it appears that even then the moral consciousness of Britain, as reflected in the writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume, was very different. The moral consciousness of Western civilization in the early 21st century also appears to be different from the one Kant was describing.

Kant’s ethics is based on his distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. He called any action based on desires a hypothetical imperative, meaning by this that it is a command of reason that applies only if one desires the goal in question. For example, “Be honest, so that people will think well of you!” is an imperative that applies only if one wishes to be thought well of. A similarly hypothetical analysis can be given of the imperatives suggested by, say, Shaftesbury’s ethics: “Help those in distress, if you sympathize with their sufferings!” In contrast to such approaches, Kant said that the commands of morality must be categorical imperatives: they must apply to all rational beings, regardless of their wants and feelings. To most philosophers this poses an insuperable problem: a moral law that applied to all rational beings, irrespective of their personal wants and desires, could have no specific goals or aims, because all such aims would have to be based on someone’s wants or desires. It took Kant’s peculiar genius to seize upon precisely this implication, which to others would have refuted his claims, and to use it to derive the nature of the moral law. Because nothing else but reason is left to determine the content of the moral law, the only form this law can take is the universal principle of reason. Thus, the supreme formal principle of Kant’s ethics is: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Kant still faced two major problems. First, he had to explain how one can be moved by reason alone to act in accordance with this supreme moral law; and, second, he had to show that this principle is able to provide practical guidance in one’s choices. If one combines Hume’s theory that reason is always the slave of the passions with Kant’s denial of moral worth to all actions motivated by desires, the outcome would be that no actions can have moral worth. To avoid such moral skepticism, Kant maintained that reason alone can lead to action without the support of desire. Unfortunately, he was unable to explain how this is possible, beyond arguing that it is necessary if the common conception of morality is to make sense. Of course, the fact that the alternative leads to so unpalatable a conclusion may be in itself a powerful incentive to believe that somehow a categorical imperative is possible, but this consideration would not be convincing to anyone not already committed to Kant’s view of moral worth. At one point Kant appeared to take a different line. He wrote that the moral law inevitably produces a feeling of reverence or awe. If he meant to say that this feeling then becomes the motivation for obedience, however, he was conceding Hume’s point that reason alone is powerless to bring about action. It would also be difficult to accept that anything, even the moral law, can necessarily produce a certain kind of feeling in all rational beings regardless of their psychological constitution. Thus, this approach does not succeed in clarifying Kant’s position or rendering it plausible.

Kant gave closer attention to the problem of how his supreme formal principle of morality can provide guidance in concrete situations. One of his examples is as follows. Suppose that a person plans to get some money by promising to pay it back, though he has no intention of keeping his promise. The maxim of such an action might be: “Make false promises when it suits you to do so.” Could such a maxim be a universal law? Of course not. The maxim is self-defeating, because if promises were so easily broken, no one would rely on them, and the practice of making promises would cease. For this reason, the moral law would not allow one to carry out such a plan.

Not all situations are so easily decided, however. Another of Kant’s examples deals with aiding those in distress. Suppose a person sees someone in distress, whom he could easily help, but refuses to do so. Could such a person will as a universal law the maxim that one should refuse assistance to those in distress? Unlike the case of promising, there is no strict inconsistency in this maxim’s being a universal law. Kant, however, says that one cannot will it to be such, because one may someday be in distress oneself, and in that case one would want assistance from others. This type of example is less convincing than the previous one. If the person in question values self-sufficiency so highly that he would rather remain in distress than escape from it through the intervention of another, then Kant’s principle would not require him to assist those in distress. In effect, Kant’s supreme principle of practical reason can tell one what to do only in those special cases in which willing the maxim of one’s action to be a universal law yields a contradiction. Outside this limited range, the moral law that was to apply to all rational beings regardless of their wants and desires cannot provide guidance except by appealing to wants and desires.

Kant does offer alternative formulations of the categorical imperative, one of which appears to provide more substantial guidance than the formulation considered thus far. This formulation is: “So act that you treat humanity in your own person and in the person of everyone else always at the same time as an end and never merely as means.” The connection between this formulation and the first one is not entirely clear, but the idea seems to be that, in choosing for oneself, one treats oneself as an end; if, therefore, in accordance with the principle of universal law, one must choose so that all could choose similarly, one must treat everyone else as an end as well. Even if this is valid, however, the application of the principle raises further questions. What is it to treat someone merely as a means? Using a person as a slave is an obvious example; Kant, like Bentham, was making a stand against this kind of inequality while it still flourished as an institution in some parts of the world. But to condemn slavery one needs only to give equal weight to the interests of slaves, as utilitarians such as Bentham explicitly did. One may wonder, then, whether Kant’s principle offers any advantage over utilitarianism. Modern Kantians hold that it does, because they interpret it as denying the legitimacy of sacrificing the rights of one human being in order to benefit others.

One thing that can be said confidently is that Kant was firmly opposed to the utilitarian principle of judging every action by its consequences. His ethics is a deontology (see deontological ethics). In other words, the rightness of an action, according to Kant, depends not on its consequences but on whether it accords with a moral rule, one that can be willed to be a universal law. In one essay Kant went so far as to say that it would be wrong for a person to tell a lie even to a would-be murderer who came to his house seeking to kill an innocent person hidden inside. This kind of situation illustrates how difficult it is to remain a strict deontologist when principles may clash. Apparently Kant believed that his principle of universal law required that one never tell lies, but it could also be argued that his principle of treating everyone as an end would necessitate doing everything possible to save the life of an innocent person. Another possibility would be to formulate the maxim of the action with sufficient precision to define the circumstances under which it would be permissible to tell lies—e.g., perhaps there could be a universal law that permitted lying to people who intend to commit murder. Kant did not explore such solutions, however.

Hegel

Although Kant’s philosophy was profoundly influential, there were several aspects of it that troubled later thinkers. One of these problematic aspects was his conception of human nature as irreconcilably split between reason and emotion. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), the dramatist and literary theorist Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) suggested that, whereas this division might apply to modern human beings, it was not the case in ancient Greece, where reason and feeling seem to have been in harmony. (There is, as suggested earlier, some basis for this claim, insofar as the Greek moral consciousness did not make the modern distinction between morality and self-interest.) Schiller’s suggestion may have been the spark that led Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) to develop the first philosophical system based on the notion of historical change.

As Hegel presents it, all of history is the progress of mind, or spirit, along a logically necessary path that leads to freedom. Human beings are manifestations of this universal mind, though at first they do not realize it. Freedom cannot be achieved until human beings do realize it and so feel at home in the universe. There are echoes of Spinoza in Hegel’s idea of mind as something universal and also in his conception of freedom as based on knowledge. What is original, however, is the way in which all of history is presented as leading to the goal of freedom. Thus, Hegel accepts Schiller’s view that for the ancient Greeks, reason and feeling were in harmony, but he sees this as a naive harmony that could exist only as long as the Greeks did not see themselves as free individuals with a conscience independent of the views of the community. For freedom to develop, it was necessary for this harmony to break down. This occurred as a result of the Reformation, with its insistence on the right of individual conscience. But the rise of individual conscience left human beings divided between conscience and self-interest, between reason and feeling. As noted above, many philosophers tried unsuccessfully to bridge this gulf until Kant’s insistence on duty for duty’s sake made the division an apparently inevitable part of moral life. For Hegel, however, the division can be overcome by a synthesis of the harmonious communal nature of Greek life with the modern freedom of individual conscience.

In The Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel described how this synthesis could be achieved in an organic community. The key to his solution is the recognition that human nature is not fixed but is shaped by the society in which one lives. The organic community would foster those desires by which it would be most benefited. It would imbue its members with the sense that their own identity consists in being a part of the community, so that they would no more think of going off in pursuit of their own private interests than one’s left arm would think of going off without the rest of the body. Nor should it be forgotten that such organic relationships are reciprocal: the organic community would no more disregard the interests of its members than an individual would disregard an injury to his or her arm. Harmony would thus prevail, but not the naive harmony of ancient Greece. The citizens of Hegel’s organic community do not obey its laws and customs simply because they are there. With the independence of mind characteristic of modern times, they can give their allegiance only to institutions that they recognize as conforming to rational principles. The modern organic state, unlike the ancient Greek city-state, is self-consciously based on principles that are rationally justified.

Hegel provided a new approach to the ancient problem of reconciling morality and self-interest. Whereas others had accepted the problem as part of the inevitable nature of things and looked for ways around it, Hegel looked at it historically, seeing it as a problem only in a certain type of society. Instead of attempting to solve the problem as it had existed up to his time, he contemplated the emergence of a new form of society in which it would disappear. In this way, Hegel claimed to have overcome one great problem that was insoluble for Kant.

Hegel also believed that he had rectified another key weakness in Kant’s ethics—namely, the difficulty of giving content to the supreme formal moral principle. In Hegel’s organic community, the content of one’s moral duty would be determined by one’s position in society. One would know that his duty was to be a good parent, a good citizen, a good teacher, merchant, or soldier, as the case might be. This ethics has been characterized as “my station and its duties,” after the title of a well-known essay by the British Hegelian F.H. Bradley (1846–1924). It might be thought that this is a limited, conservative conception of what one ought to do, especially when compared with Kant’s principle of universal law. Hegel would have replied that because the organic community is based on universally valid principles of reason, it complies with Kant’s principle of universal law. Moreover, without the specific content provided by the concrete institutions and practices of a society, Kant’s principle would remain an empty formula.

Hegel’s philosophy has both a conservative and a radical side. The conservative aspect is reflected in the ethics of “my station and its duties” and even more strongly in the significant resemblance between Hegel’s detailed description of the organic society and the actual institutions of the Prussian state in which he lived and taught for the last decade of his life. This resemblance, however, was in no way a necessary implication of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. After Hegel’s death, a group of his more radical followers known as the Young Hegelians hailed the manner in which he had demonstrated the need for a new form of society to overcome the separation between self and community, but they scorned the implication that the state in which they were living could be this society. Among them was a young student named Karl Marx (1818–83).