Unit 3: Morality, Markets, and Immanuel Kant
John Locke and the libertarian philosophers he inspired held that justice and morality are a matter of respecting the fundamental rights that all individuals hold in common – life, liberty, and property (including the property of one's self). Libertarians such as Milton Friedman argue these principles are incompatible with the government placing restrictions on the free market. But what happens when the market itself brings our rights into conflict with one another? In this unit, we examine several case studies in which individual rights are disputed, and we consider whether these cases provide sufficient reason to doubt the libertarian position.
Are individual rights enough to determine how to answer moral questions and how to propose a just society? Perhaps we need a more substantive philosophical approach to answer some of our moral and political questions. This is the position of Immanuel Kant, who suggests that we have certain moral obligations because we are human beings with moral reasoning capabilities. These capabilities lead to certain duties which we need to consider. We call Kant’s philosophy deontological, which means it is rooted in duty.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 10 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- explain the connection between moral behavior and economic pressures of the market, as in situations connected to parental rights and the sale of human organs;
- discuss the implication of Kantian ethics for decisions involving lying and buying and selling of goods and property;
- define the categorical imperative;
- apply the categorical imperative to specific decisions and situations; and
- compare and contrast Kant's ethical theory with libertarian political theory and utilitarian theory.
3.1: The Morality of the Market
Watch this lecture until 27:06. Consider the following question: is it an abuse of the government's power for it to order citizens to risk their lives in the military? In this lecture, Sandel calls the libertarian conception of self-ownership, along with the Lockean conception of consent, into question by confronting it with the controversial case of military conscription. The problem is further complicated by the fact that military conflicts take place within a market economy. This aspect of the problem is brought out in the Civil War practice in which the wealthy hired less affluent citizens to fight in their place.
This article is a reaction to Michael Sandel's ideas on the moral limits of markets. What things do you think money should not buy? What principle should legislators use to write laws about these matters?
3.2: The Morality of Surrogate Motherhood: The Case of Baby M
Watch the rest of this lecture, from 27:07 to the end. While you watch, consider this question: Whose rights take precedence, those of the mother, or those of the child? Motherhood immediately presents a complication to the general theory of natural rights. Everyone who is familiar with the debate over abortion knows this. The matter becomes yet more complicated when motherhood, and in a sense, children, are exchanged on the free market. In this lecture, Sandel introduces the case of Baby M, in which a surrogate mother's claim to the baby she has carried came into conflict with the claim of the baby's biological father.
Read this description of the Baby M case from the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Additional description of the case of Baby M.
3.3: Humans Organs as Commodities
Read this article describing the ethical questions surrounding kidney transplants. List the ethical dilemmas which arise surrounding the donation and scarcity of kidneys. Write a one paragraph position paper about one of those issues, arguing for your position with concrete arguments.
3.4: Grounding Moral Action in Rational Principles: Immanuel Kant
Watch this lecture until 28:25. Michael Sandel introduces a third major approach to morality: Immanuel Kant's deontological, or duty-based, ethics. In contrast to the utilitarian philosophers, Kant holds that an action's consequences are not what make it right or wrong. We need to focus on the principle on which the action was based. Kant's view is similar to Locke's in that he ascribes fundamental rights to persons, but what really sets Kant apart is his insistence that even if we do the right thing, we have not acted morally unless we have also acted for the right reason.
3.4.1: Overview of Kant's Moral Theory
Watch this lecture from 21:17. The lecture introduces Kant's moral theory and his conception of duty, maxims of action, and categorical imperatives. Kant believes that actions should be guided by principles.
3.4.2: Kant's Motive of Duty
Read the Preface and First Section of Kant's 1785 text about morality. Try to answer the following questions in your own words:
- What does Kant say is the only thing good without qualification?
- What types of actions does Kant reject as examples of pure duty?
- What are the three propositions of morality?
What Kant argues here is that the only absolutely good thing in the world is good will, or the human desire to act morally, and that this desire is only possible for us because we are rational beings. According to Kant, we have an absolute duty to act on the basis of the moral principles that stem from our rationality. This is, in fact, what separates us from animals, and is why Kant so opposes the utilitarian view, which seems to make human beings slaves of their desire for pleasure and aversion to pain.
3.4.3: How a Kantian Decides on the Right Thing to
Watch this lecture from 28:26 to the end. Pay attention to the distinction Sandel draws between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, since this is what sets Kant apart from the utilitarian philosophers. Sandel breaks down some of the complexity of Kant's moral philosophy by illustrating the major contrasts Kant uses to develop it. While he gives three different versions of his categorical imperative, Kant considers it to be a singular rational principle for deciding how to act. As long as we follow the categorical imperative, we are acting out of duty, and we are respecting ourselves and others as rational beings.
3.5: Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
Read the second section of Immanuel Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (which many call his "Groundwork").
Kant states that five things are clear:
- The origin of moral concepts is entirely a priori based in reason.
- Moral concepts cannot be abstracted from empirical knowledge.
- The non-empirical, pure, nature of moral concepts dignify them as being supreme practical principles.
- This value of moral concepts as pure and thus good practical principles is reduced if any empirical knowledge is added in.
- One must derive for oneself and apply these moral concepts also from pure reason – unmixed with empirical knowledge.
Do these claims seem to be as clear and correct to you as they do to Kant? What is Kant referring to in his concept of the categorical imperative?
Kant gives a second version of the categorical imperative which he the practical imperative. Interpreters sometimes call it the imperative of dignity or imperative of human dignity. Can you describe this version of the categorical imperative?
Kant says these two versions of the categorical imperative ultimately say the same thing. Why do you think he believes this?
Unlike our study of hypothetical examples in this course, Kant believes that morality is not something we can derive from examples. He wants to find universal principles of morality that spring wholly from reason and not from experience. This is why he calls his system the metaphysics of morals. In the second section, Kant decries utilitarian moral theories and puts forward his own, absolutely binding moral principle: the categorical imperative.
In Kant's ethical theory, a categorical imperative is a universal command, a principle everyone should follow in any situation. If we choose command such as "always tell the truth" to represent a moral rule we all should follow, it has the status of a categorical imperative, and is therefore a duty. Kant's examples in this section are meant to show that we can only consider actions to be truly moral when they are motivated by the duty to follow this imperative.
What does Kant mean by autonomy and heteronomy? Kant gives a third version of the categorical imperative in this section. Here, Kant is concerned that our principles of morality must come from ourselves and from our own rationality. However, he thinks about our rationality in universal terms, not as our own individual persuasion or opinion. Rationality and rational morality is always an objective science for Kant.
In the third section of his Groundwork, Kant presents his view of what human freedom consists of, namely, following our rational principles rather than being guided by our appetite for pleasure and our desire to avoid pain. Because Kant bases freedom and morality on rationality, this means that to be free is to be moral. In other words, to be free is to be bound by our duty to ourselves.
- The origin of moral concepts is entirely a priori based in reason.
3.5.1: A Kantian Analysis of Lying
Watch this lecture until 22:29. As you watch, consider whether you you agree with Kant's belief that it is never morally permissible to lie. Kant's idea that duty and autonomy are compatible seems to be counter-intuitive. In this lecture, Sandel helps us make sense of this view, and applies it to the example of lying. Ordinarily, many of us believe that lying is never morally permissible, unless doing so will help avert a greater harm. Kant famously denies this view. He asserts that even if we believe a great harm will result from our failure to lie, the lie is immoral because it means we will have failed to respect a moral law that springs from our rationality.
3.5.2: The Ethics of Lying
Read this section, which shows some of the difficulties of an objective, "categorical" approach. Do the circumstances affect the morality of lying, or is it always wrong to lie? Is it really lying if Weinstein chooses not to write the book? Is there conflict between telling the truth and the imperative of dignity in Weinstein's dilemma?
Unit 3 Discussion
Post and respond to the following topics on the course discussion board, and respond to other students' posts.
- Kant's critics complain that his theory often leaves us with two conflicting duties. Imagine a student who is finishing their college degree, who learns their mother has been diagnosed with cancer. The student's first instinct is to go home to take care of their mother. However, what if their mother asks them to stay in college to complete their degree program? How would Kant advise us to choose between these two conflicting duties (to their mother and to finish school)?
- In the past, doctors would often fail to tell a patient the truth about a diagnosis. For example, a doctor might decide to wait to tell a patient that they have a terminal illness until after the patient returns from a highly-anticipated vacation. Many communities would consider this decision to withhold medical information from a patient to be unethical and a violation of the patient's right to participate in their own treatment. Do doctors have a duty to tell their patients the truth, no matter what, even if the information might cause them great pain and suffering (or ruin a vacation)? Why, or why not?
- A famous Kantian example concerns two shopkeepers. One shopkeeper always gives correct change because they feel they should do so, even when they are tempted to do otherwise. Another shopkeeper always gives correct change because they want their customers to like them so they can receive their vote during an upcoming city council election. For Kant, the first shopkeeper, who lacks an external motivation to do the right thing, is more morally praiseworthy. Does this same distinction apply to companies? Should companies always act from the right intention even if doing so may decrease their profits or market share? Why, or why not?
- Kant's critics complain that his theory often leaves us with two conflicting duties. Imagine a student who is finishing their college degree, who learns their mother has been diagnosed with cancer. The student's first instinct is to go home to take care of their mother. However, what if their mother asks them to stay in college to complete their degree program? How would Kant advise us to choose between these two conflicting duties (to their mother and to finish school)?