Morality Is Not a Matter of Choice
By Professor David Hillel Ruben, for the Jewish Ethics Project
HYPOTHETICAL IMPERATIVES
The great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) distinguished between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is based on one’s individual desires or wishes. A hypothetical imperative typically takes an ‘if, then’ form. It’s called ‘a conditional judgment’. It has an antecedent (the component in the ‘if’ clause’) and a consequent (the component in the ‘then’ clause). For example: if you want to achieve some goal x (the desired goal is the component in the antecedent clause), then do y! (the component in the consequent, ‘do y’, is an imperative, or call to action). Goals are the objects of our wishes and desires. Goals might be mundane, like the goal of getting into town or finding something tasty to eat, or they might be more serious, more profound, like achieving happiness or health.
But what both examples have in common is that they make the prescribed actions, ‘do y’, dependent on having those desires (the ‘if…,’ part). Hypothetical goals certainly display a kind of rationality: if one desires goal X, then do y as an efficient means of obtaining that goal. Taking effective means to a postulated end is a core part of the idea of rationality, even though it is not the only part of rationality. One’s goal might even be noble: being a good or virtuous person. So, the hypothetical imperative might be: if you want to be a good or virtuous person, then do such-and-such kinds of actions. But this makes the goal of being a good or virtuous person dependent on the wanting of whatever the goal is. The conditional judgment says nothing to the person who does not adopt the goal of being a good or virtuous person as their own. Without having adopted that goal, the action has no purchase on the individual.
THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE
Hypothetical imperatives contrast with categorical imperatives. A categorical imperative is an unconditional imperative (Do y!). No ‘if’ precedes it. It ‘commands’ something without any qualification. The imperative, ‘Do y!’, does not depend on anything we might want or desire. It is independent of any goals the person might adopt or fail to adopt. Its command is categorical. One can’t always tell whether an imperative is categorical or hypothetical just by its superficial grammatical form. When we see a door with a sign that says ‘Push’, we don’t understand that as a categorical demand. What the sign on the door really means is: ‘if you want to enter, push’, namely a hypothetical imperative.
What is an example of an unconditional imperative or command? Kant thinks that there is only one system of categorical imperatives: the laws of morality. Moral imperatives command us to act in certain ways and to refrain from acting in other ways, without making such commands dependent on anything we want, or indeed on anything else. Morality’s demands from us actions unconditionally, independently of any of our own personal goals or wishes. Morality’s demands don’t depend on what we have chosen to pursue; those demands, as it were, pursue us in the form of unconditional requirements
THE NATURE OF MORALITY
Kant’s insight is both profound and challenging. Morality is a system that takes the individual out of the realm of his or her subjective wishes and desires and prescribes for each of us a set of duties or ways of behaving to which all human beings, insofar as they are rational agents, are subject. Those demands don’t even say: if you want to be fully rational, adopt morality. Those demands just say: Be moral. But they are addressed to all rational agents.
This characterisation of morality describes our own tradition’s understanding: “Learn to do good; devote yourself to justice, aid the wronged; uphold the rights of the orphan, and defend the widow’s cause,” (Isaiah 1:17). The novi’s command is categorical. It simply says: seek justice. In short, morality unconditionally requires that persons act or avoid acting in certain ways, full stop. Morality presses upon the individual as an external force, demanding things of him or her, regardless of what their personal desire profile might be like. Put it this way: there is no escaping morality. It presses on us and calls us to action, whether we want it to do so or not. Morality demands unconditionally certain behaviours from us.
“There is no escaping morality. It presses on us and calls us to action, whether we want it to do so or not.”
DURKHEIM AND ANOMIE
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French social philosopher, was one of the founding fathers of social science, especially sociology. Born in Lorraine, he was a Jew, who came from a long line of rabbis, including his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He attended a yeshiva before turning to a secular academic life.
Perhaps one of his most novel concepts was the concept of anomie, lawlessness. His emphasis on law and regulation is in some ways congruent with Kant’s thought. He saw in the modern condition the unhealthy individual who suffers from lack of regulation by rules or norms. In a state of anomie, the individual suffers from ‘the malady of infinite aspiration’. Such an individual has seemingly unlimited desires and adopts ends or goals only insofar as they are believed by him or her to lead to those subjective goals. Religion, along with other institutions, has lost its unconditional moral force over the individual. Individuals have a basic need, on his view, to acknowledge norms that guide him or her, norms that are felt by the individual as an outside force which does not depend on his or her whims or choices. When they fail to respond to the pressure of these demands that arise outside their own motivational profile of wishes and wants, persons are in a state of anomie, which, according to Durkheim, is responsible for many of the ills of contemporary society.
There is a continuity in thought between Kant’s hypothetical imperatives, and Durkheim’s anomie. If all that people do is subject only to hypothetical demands, dependent on their individual adoption of the ends they desire, all sense of structure in their lives is lost, and most importantly the sense of a categorical morality disappears. Individuals need to feel norms and rules as a force requiring things from them. Combining Durkheim and Kant makes for a powerful message. Kant shows us that there is a moral authority which exceeds not only individual desires but may also provide a critique of any single community’s take on morality. Durkheim adds a social dimension to his, arguing that individuals who live on a purely individualistic plane are crippled in their lives in various ways.
Whether or not this anomic condition is responsible for the ills that Durkheim found in contemporary society (like suicide, for example), religious Jews will see in his description much of the contemporary social culture which they reject. Not everything is up to personal choice. Individualism has its limits. Morality is the best example. If we fail to understand the way in which morality makes demands on us, we remain trapped into a realm of subjectivity, in which everything will seem to us a matter of personal choice. A veritable smorgasbord from which the individual picks what suits him or her on each occasion. The Kantian unconditionality of morality shows us a way out of that unhealthy morass, and demands of us that we respond to the kind of claims on us that are so typical of our tradition: ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ (Michah 6:8).
