PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) accepted the basic proposition that a theory of duties – a set of rules telling us what we're obligated to do in any particular situation – was the right approach to ethical problems. What he set out to add, though, was a stricter mechanism for the use of duties in our everyday experience. He wanted a way to get all these duties we've been talking about to work together, to produce a unified recommendation, instead of leaving us confused between loyalty to one principle and another. At least on some basic issues, Kant set out to produce ethical certainty.

Lying is about as primary as issues get in ethics, and the Madoff case is shot through with it:

• Bernie Madoff always claimed that the Ponzi scheme wasn't the original idea. He sought money from investors planning to score big with complicated financial maneuvers. He took a few losses early on, though, and faced the possibility of everyone just taking their cash and going home. That's when he started channeling money from new investors to older ones, claiming the funds were the fruit of his excellent stock dealing. He always intended, Madoff says, to get the money back, score some huge successes, and they'd let him get on the straight and narrow again. It never happened. But that doesn't change the fact that Madoff thought it would. He was lying temporarily, and for the good of everyone in the long run.
• Sheryl Weinstein had a twenty-year affair with Madoff. She also invested her family's life savings with him. When the Ponzi scheme came undone, she lost everything. To get some money back, she considered writing a tell-all, and that led to a heart-wrenching decision between money and her personal life. Her twenty-year dalliance was not widely known, and things could have remained that way: her husband and son could've gone on without the whole world knowing that the husband was a cuckold and the son the product of a poisoned family. But they needed money because they'd lost everything, including their home, in Madoff's scam. So does she keep up the false story or does she turn the truth into a profit opportunity?

What does Kant say about all this? The answer is his categorical imperative. An imperative is something you need to do. A hypothetical imperative is something you need to do, but only in certain circumstances; for example, I have to eat, but only in those circumstances where I'm hungry. A categorical imperative, by contrast, is something you need to do all the time: there are ethical rules that don't depend on the circumstances, and it's the job of the categorical imperative to tell us what they are. Here, we will consider two distinct expressions of Kant's categorical imperative, two ways that guidance is provided.