Categorical Imperative

The Categorical Imperative is a an Eighteenth-Century idea that derives from Immanuel Kant's book Groundwork for he Metaphysics of Morals. The simplified essence of what Kant is saying is "do that which you would deem universal law." There are many deep subtleties to this statement that covers a wide spectrum of issues. Think of the imperative as a conceptual laboratory in which a person striving to be ethical takes their ideas to test them for their relevance and ethical selflessness. Would you want to universalize the belief that taking candy from a baby is right? If you believe it is right then the foundations of an entire galaxy of moral and ethical rules that define civilized behavior is placed at risk. Your motives for adopting such an approach would immediately come into question because if "might makes right" becomes a foundational idea in the early twentieth-century then all of civilization would begin to de-evolve in the direction of a time and place where "might is right" was a relevant moral position as civilization-building was in its formative moments. Such a self-serving view overlooks the cooperative nature of civilization in which hoarding scarce resources is an implicit "defection" from the cooperative effort of most people have towards building a better world. If one takes the evolutionary position that human being are as a whole competing with other life-forms for the Earth's resources to survive, the hoarding of wealth by less than moral means puts the entire species at risk at some mathematically defined point.

Kant's moral and ethical view stresses the fact that ethical behaviors must contain a principled element to be legitimate ethical concerns. A well-founded principle is an abstraction of mathematical efficiency that furthers the survival of the human species. Deviation from a principle is like putting a big rock in the middle of a flowing stream. Many turbulence and eddy currents will arise if there are too many rocks impeding the stream, turning a placid stream into an unpredictable river from the viewpoint of a person using the river as a means of transportation. Commerce can also be thought of as a river in which minimizing pain, suffering and tragic accident is a goal while at the same time maximizing peace, prosperity and productivity.

Human being by the time they are an adult already have a good idea of fundamental principles of the particular society that they live in. The human brain has an immense capacity to grasp the complex behaviors abstraction implicit in laws, customs, manners and ethics. For example, the California motor vehicle code is more than two hundred pages in length. It can be reasonably said that few people out of tens of millions of adult citizens have ever read the code or even see the book. Nevertheless, many people drive safely on the streets for thirty or forty years with out much conflict with the written laws. There are, quite simple principles of action that can be abstracted from the mere process of driving on the roads. Likewise early childhood training and the training received in school imbues students with a good understanding of the law and its expectations of the citizens of a country. In this light Kant appears to say we should act according to principle in the sense we already know right from wrong. After about ten years of driving a person has at least a foggy idea that they have run a stop sign even if they do not admit it to themselves. The police who cite people for unending lights and stop signs already have sensed impropriety but over the years they have conditioned their minds not to see their impropriety.