Against the categorical imperative

I reject the categorical imperative. I believe it fails to lead to sound moral conclusions, so I give it little credit as criticism against ideas—mine or others'.

The reason I mention this is so no one around here uses the categorical imperative to argue against something I write. I don't want anyone to have the expectation that I'll be influenced by what you have to say if that's the case. I reject the categorical imperative.

Not that anyone has done such a thing. As far as I remember, no one—myself included—has mentioned the CI here at JEC until today. But today's post is a prudent warning in case I someday make a comment such as, “Nearly all middle-class Americans would improve their circumstances if they spent a lot less money.” That sort of comment inspires CI-based reasoning these days.

For those of you wanting a refresher on the CI: it's the idea that you can determine an action as morally good or bad by asking yourself whether everybody doing that action would make for a better or worse world. If everybody doing it would be a good thing, then the action itself is good. Otherwise, the action is immoral.

This sort of reasoning goes on everyday. Sometimes it lends itself to pleasant ends, such as when someone decides not to litter because of the mess there would be if everyone littered. But sometimes the CI lends itself to unpleasant ends, such as when someone finds themselves pressed to tell the truth and admit that their friend's new haircut is ugly. As for the spending-less-money maxim I wrote two paragraphs earlier, the likely CI-inspired reaction is to worry about the consequence of wrecking the economy if all middle-class Americans consumed less. That's needless universality, I say.

My problem with the CI is that it starts from the assumption that monoculture is a good thing—that in a moral world all people would act the same when in the same context. Though I can accept a lot of axioms as hypotheticals, this is one I find too unlikely. First, there's the practical problem that people don't in fact act the same—one person deciding to do X isn't going to cause everyone to do X—and so measuring humans against such universality is questionable. But more importantly I believe monocultures are themselves bad things. Diverse ecosystems are stabler and more productive than monocultures, and so the best moral measurements will acknowledge that people ought to act differently—even when in identical contexts.

But don't let me convince all of you of this. We shouldn't all reject the categorical imperative. Proponents of monoculture fulfill an important part of our diverse ecosystem.