The Foundations of Morality

CHAPTER 16 Duty for Duty’s Sake

1. Mistaking Means for Ends

We come now to the doctrine that we ought to perform our “duty” simply because it is our “duty”—the doctrine, in other words, that morality has no other end beyond itself. Before the formulation of utilitarianism, this was the most commonly accepted view, and it still has a tremendous hold on men’s minds. In its modern form, however, it was most explicitly formulated by Immanuel Kant, and it is in that form that it is most convenient to examine it.

Let us begin by trying to clear away a central ambiguity. “Duty for duty’s sake” may mean that when our duty is clear—i.e., when once we recognize or acknowledge that a certain course of action is right—that is the action we ought to take, whether at the moment we like it or not. This is merely another way of saying that a man should always do his duty, that he should always act morally, regardless of his immediate inclinations.

But “duty for duty’s sake” may also mean that a man should always act blindly in accordance with some rigid rule, not only without examining what the probable immediate consequences of his action will be in those particular circumstances, but without considering even the long-run consequences (for happiness or misery, good or evil) of acting in accordance with that rule. It would be hard to find a better description of irrational conduct.

Yet Kant himself appears to have been guilty of this as well as of a whole complex of other ambiguities and confusions. He held, among other things, that nothing was truly and unconditionally good except the good will. The only act that really deserved to be called moral, in his opinion, was an act done from a sense of duty, an act done because it was thought right, and for no other reason.

This view has brought down on his head the caustic satire of Bertrand Russell:

But if Russell is one of the most caustic critics of the Kantian view, he is not the first. He has been anticipated by scores of moral philosophers. Even Schiller, otherwise an admirer of Kant, travesties this view in lines in which he has a disciple of Kant complain:

Gladly, I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure.

Hence I am plagued with the doubt that I am not a virtuous person.

In reply to which he gets the advice:

Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely,

One reason for Kant’s error is that he looked with the deepest suspicion on all desire or natural inclination itself, because he assumed that all desire was desire for pleasure, and pleasure in the narrow or carnal sense. But he slid into this error also for a more subtle reason, which it will be instructive to explore. When Kant assumed that an action, no matter how beneficent in result, was not moral if done from natural inclination but only if done against natural inclination, “for duty’s sake,” his error was the result of a confusion easily explicable on psychological grounds. When we perform a beneficent act out of love or completely spontaneous benevolence we are not conscious of “doing our duty.” It is only when we have a disinclination toward an act and nevertheless “force” ourselves to do it, in the conviction that it is our duty, that we are conscious of “doing our duty.”

This, I think, explains the psychological genesis of Kant’s error. Moral action is action which is conducive to general well-being, regardless of whether it is done spontaneously or from conscious (or reluctant) adherence to duty.

The germ of truth in Kant’s position is that it is always our duty to do what is right, whether we want to do so or not. But this comes down to the tautology that it is always our duty to do our duty.

Perhaps a slight digression may be necessary at this point. So far in this chapter (and in this book) we have been using the word duty without raising the question of the validity of the concept and without specifically asking: “Why should I do my duty?” We have simply taken the concept of duty for granted. This is because it is, in fact, implicit in all ethics. In origin, duty means what is due, what is owing—to one’s family, friends, associates, employer, and other persons in general. One’s duty means: what one has an obligation to do.

To return after this digression to what we have found to be the germ of truth in Kant’s position: It is always our duty to do what is right, whether we like it or not. But that it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of our duty and force ourselves to do it against our inclination does not mean, as he went on to imply, that these occasions are the only ones in which we are acting morally. In fact, one of the paradoxical consequences to which Kant’s doctrine leads is this. A man who spontaneously radiates good will toward other men, or who has in early life formed the habit of always acting morally, will more and more tend to act that way habitually and spontaneously, rather than from a conscious sense of duty. Therefore he will, according to Kant, be less and less frequently acting “morally”—or he will at least be accorded less moral merit than he would doing the right thing reluctantly from a sense of duty.

But if actions or rules of action are not to be judged by their probable consequences, how are we to know what actions are right or wrong? Here Kant’s position is peculiar. He does not seem to hold that we know our duty in each case a priori or from direct intuition, but he does hold that we can determine our duty from certain a priori principles, and he proceeds to try to find and to formulate these principles.

2. The Test of Universalizability

There is a prima facie attractiveness about this maxim, but Kant’s effort to deduce a code of morals from it seems to me a complete failure. A code of morals can be deduced only by consideration of the actual or probable consequences of acts or of rules of actions, and the desirability or undesirability of those consequences. Kant tries to prove that non-observance of his maxim would involve a logical contradiction; but the examples he gives fail to do this. Thus his argument against lying is that if everybody lied nobody would be believed, so that lying would be futile and self-defeating. This does not prove, however, that there is anything logically contradictory about universal lying; it merely points out that one of the consequences would be bad. Kant’s argument here is, in fact, an appeal to practical consequences, and not to the worst ones, which are the harm that the lying would do the victims as long as they believed it, and the breakdown of almost all social cooperation once people knew that they could not trust each other’s words or promises.

On the other hand, there are courses of conduct which are certainly moral, even though they cannot be universalized, and even though the person who adopts them would not wish them to be universalized. A man may decide to become a minister or a lawyer; but everybody cannot decide to become a minister or a lawyer, because we would all starve. A man may decide to learn the violin without wishing that everybody should learn to play the violin. In fact, if he expected to make his living at it, he would wish, to increase his own scarcity value and income, that as few other people as possible would become competent violinists.

It may be replied that this is mere quibbling; that Kant obviously did not intend his maxim of universalizability to apply to the adoption of a specific trade or vocation; that the universal maxim to fit such a case might be: “In the interests of division of labor, everyone should adopt some trade or vocation,” or: “Everyone should adopt the trade or profession to which he is best suited (or in which he can be most useful).” But what, then, are the permissible rules for generality or specificity in framing a “universal” law? “Everybody else can lie, but only when caught in the particular kind of jam that I find myself in now?” Kant himself was a bachelor and a celibate. Could he have willed that everyone should be celibate? What was the wording of the universal law that permitted him to be so?

But none of this helps us in any substantive way to determine precisely what our moral rules should be. It might be universally possible, or nearly so, for everybody to smoke cigarettes or to drink whisky; but this is hardly sufficient ground to regard either as a duty.

There is no way, in fact, to adopt or frame moral rules except by considering the consequences of acting on those rules and the desirability or undesirability of those consequences. Kant’s categorical imperative does, in fact, rest on an unacknowledged consideration of consequences. What he is saying, in effect, is: “Lying is wrong, because if everybody lied the consequences would be so-and-so.” But he does not show that there is any logical contradiction in everybody’s lying. All that he shows (and it is enough) is that the consequences would be such that we would not like them.

But this kind of argument makes the moral case against lying seem weaker than it really is. Lying would not be wrong merely if it were adopted as a universal rule. Nearly every individual lie does some harm. Of course the more widespread lying became, the more harm it would do. But lying no more than murder is to be condemned merely because it cannot be universalized. In fact, either could be universalized; we simply would not like the consequences. Murder could be universalized until only one man was left on earth, and even he would then be perfectly free to commit self-murder. Universal celibacy would also extinguish mankind; but Kant did not therefore regard his own celibacy as a crime.

At the cost of repetition, let us state the preceding argument in another form. Suppose we take Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim which thou canst at the same time will to become a universal law,” and translate it into current colloquial English. We then get: “Act only on a rule that you wish to see generally followed by everyone.” This is merely saying that you have no right to treat yourself as an exception. It is saying that morality consists in a set of rules of conduct that ought to be followed by everyone; that it does harm and destroys morality for each or anyone to treat himself as an exception. But it tells us nothing of what the content of the rule or set of rules should be. It in fact implicitly takes utilitarian criteria for granted. For each of us would want to see universally followed the rules that would tend to maximize happiness and minimize pain and misery—his own and that of others. Kant did not see that his categorical imperative, as he stated it, rested on a basic desire of the individual. The rule that the individual wills to see universally followed is the rule he wishes to see universally followed, the rule he desires to see universally followed. Kant was a crypto-rule-utilitarian.

3. Kant’s Other Maxims

Ewing tells us that:

Kant himself tells us that his maxim rules out lying promises to others and attacks on the freedom or property of others.

But two questions obtrude themselves. The first is whether we need this maxim to establish the immorality of lying, stealing, or coercion. Are the rules against lying, stealing, coercion, violations of rights, etc., in other words, mere corollaries of Kant’s maxim? Or can they be established independently of this maxim?

Of course we do treat our close friends and the members of our immediate family as “ends” as well as means. We may even be said to treat trades people as ends when we inquire about their health or their children. We do owe it to others, even (and especially) when they are in the position of servants or subordinates, to treat them always with civility, politeness, and respect for their human dignity. And, of course, we should always acknowledge and respect each other’s rights. The world could have arrived, and did arrive, at these acknowledged duties and rules largely without the benefit of Kant’s maxim. But perhaps the maxim does help to clarify and unify them.

Kant’s third maxim, or third form of the categorical imperative, “Act as a member of a kingdom of ends,” seems to be little more than another form of the second maxim. We should treat ourselves and others as ends; we should regard every human being as having equal rights; we should regard the good of others as equal to our own. This seems to be merely another way of framing the requirements of justice and of equality before the law.

The truth is, to repeat, that the mere capability of a rule’s being consistently or universally followed is not in itself a test of the goodness or badness of the rule. That can be determined only by considering the consequences of following it and the desirability or undesirability of those consequences. Morality is primarily a means—a necessary means to human happiness. If we declare that duty should be done merely for duty’s sake, without regard to the ends that are served by doing our duty, we leave ourselves with no way of deciding what our duty, in any particular situation, really is or ought to be.

In addition to mistaking means for ends, Kant tremendously oversimplified the moral problem. That is why he held, for example, that a lie was never justified, even, say, to avert a murder. He refused to recognize that situations could arise in which two or more ordinarily sound rules or principles could conflict, or in which we might be forced to choose, not absolute good, but the least of two or more evils. But this is our human predicament.

If I may summarize the conclusions of this chapter, I cannot do so better than in the words of F. H. Bradley, taken from his own essay with the same title. Bradley’s essay takes off, by his own confession, from Hegel, and like most of what he wrote on ethical theory, it is by turns perverse, unintelligible, and stuffed with paradoxes and self-contradictions. But its final paragraphs emerge into a brilliant sunlight of common sense:

Is duty for duty’s sake a valid formula, in the sense that we are to act always on a law and nothing but a law, and that a law can have no exceptions, in the sense of particular cases where it is overruled? No, this takes for granted that life is so simple that we never have to consider more than one duty at a time; whereas we really have to do with conflicting duties, which as a rule escape conflict simply because it is understood which have to give way. It is a mistake to suppose that collision of duties is uncommon. . . .

To put the question plainly—It is clear that in a given case I may have several duties, and that I may be able to do only one. I must then break some “categorical” law, and the question the ordinary man puts to himself is, Which duty am I to do? He would say, “All duties have their limits and are subordinated one to another. You can not put them all in the form of your ‘categorical imperative’ (in the shape of a law absolute and dependent on nothing besides itself) without such exceptions and modifications that, in many cases, you might as well have left it alone altogether. . . . ”

All that [the categorical imperative] comes to is this (and it is, we must remember, a very important truth), that you must never break a law of duty to please yourself, never for the sake of an end not duty, but only for the sake of a superior and overruling duty. . . .