Philosophy: Explanation and Summary of Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative

Deontological ethics is the school of thought in philosophy that judges an action's goodness based not on its consequences but on its adherence to a set of rules or duties. Other ethical theories like utilitarianism and ethical egoism have advocated judging an action's ethical standing based upon its consequences. In contrast, deontology is often called duty ethics or nonconsequentialist ethics.

Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative is perhaps the most significant and important idea in deontology. The two critical elements to the categorical imperative are:

Perfect Duty to Universalizability
A perfect duty is one that must be met. A person who fails to meet a perfect duty has done something wrong. Kant argues that all people have a perfect duty to act in such a way that their actions could be universalized and no logical contradiction would occur. In other words, actions should not be relative to the person performing them and in order to be judged good, must be such that, if everyone performed them, harm would not result and there would not be logical contradictions between the actions of people or groups of people.

Ends In Themselves
The second portion of the categorical imperative is that we should act in such a way that we do not treat people as mere means to ends, but as ends in themselves. This requires respecting the humanity of our fellow human being and treated them as unique and valuable individuals rather than means through which to obtain things we want.

Other Kant Highlights
While Kant has much to say about ethics, and far too much to cover in a brief summary, there are some elements of Kant's philosophy that are helpful in understanding the categorical imperative.

Kant, unlike some other philosophers, argues that people have free will. While he points out that there can be no such thing as a perfectly free will acting without outside influence, he is a strong critic of determinism, the philosophy that argues against human free will.

Kant made statements about the ethical standing of some actions, and he is perhaps best known for his belief that lying is always wrong because it treats people as means rather than as ends in themselves. He also argued against suicide, stating that its universalization would result in a logical contradiction.