Kingdom of Ends

A good will is not a means to an end.  It is an end in itself.  Humans, insofar as we are defined by our good will (good practical reason), are also ends in ourselves.  A human is not to be used as a means to an end.  Kant imagines a kingdom of ends, where humans agree to abide by common law.  Because each person can legislate universal law by using his or her practical reason, each person is able to hold power over herself and others in a mutually consenting manner.  This power to legislate universal morality is what Kant calls the autonomy of the will.

Perfect and Imperfect Duties, Hypothetical and Categorical Imperatives

An imperative is the form that a command takes.  Imperatives are a grammatical category of statements.  Examples of imperatives include, "Please don't smoke here.", "Stop being racist.", and "Always act in such a way that your personal rule can be made a universal law."  This last imperative is the categorical imperative.  To say it is categorical just means to say that it is necessary and universal.  We can contrast categorical imperatives with hypothetical imperatives.  A hypothetical imperative is one that we need not follow necessarily and universally.  We only have a hypothetical duty if there is some other goal we have in mind.  For example, if a rational person wants to be happy, then they probably like being benefited by others (rather than have people interrupt their way of life or be harmful towards them).  Kant thinks there is an imperfect duty to benefit others if we want to be happy.  There is not a categorical imperative to perform this action because it pasts the test of the categorical imperative (it is logically possible to universalize a law that says not to benefit other people).  But if we want to be happy, then it seems like the same reasons that we are made happy will also apply to other people.  It is rationally consistent to benefit others if you like to be benefited by others.

There is also a hypothetical imperative to cultivate your own talents and skills.  Hypothetical imperatives lead to imperfect duties.  To say that we have a hypothetical imperative to cultivate our talents just means that we have an imperfect duty to cultivate our talents.  Imperfect duties are neither necessary nor universal.  Perfect duties, however, are necessary and universal.

Just as there are two imperfect duties that Kant talks about, there are also two perfect duties that Kant talks about.  First, there is a perfect duty to preserve your life.  In other words, the categorical imperative would forbid suicide.  If you want to kill yourself because you think it is good for you, then your will is self-contradictory because if you are dead, NOTHING is good for you.  In order for something to be good for you, then you must be alive.  Second, there is a perfect duty to keep promises/never to lie.

The Categorical Imperative: A Test for Maxims

The categorical imperative is not so much a rule about what to do but a rule about how to do it.  In other words, the categorical imperative provides us the form, or structure, of moral judgments.  According to Kant, an action is only good if the personal rule according to which you perform that action can be make a universal law.  In other words, you should only act in a way such that your personal maxim can become a universal law.

The categorical imperative is categorical insofar as it is how we should act at all times.  Contrast this with a hypothetical duty, which we only have if we have some other goal.  Kant thinks that the categorical imperative shows that we have a perfect duty to keep promises and to preserve our own lives.  In other words, you always have a duty not to break promises and not to kill yourself.  Let's see how the categorical imperative shows that we have a perfect duty to do these things.

In order to see if we have a perfect duty to preserve our own lives, we can ask if we could ever universalize a rule according to which we would kill ourselves.  For example, "It is ok to kill myself because it is good for me."  Kant says that it is contradictory to make such a law universal.  If I kill myself, then there is NO good for me.  There can be nothing good for me when I am dead because I am no longer alive to have things be good or bad for me.  Likewise, if everyone were allowed to kill themselves because it is 'good for them', then we would have a similar problem.  There could be no 'good' for anyone if there is nobody to have things be good for them!  Since we cannot universalize a law that condones suicide, then we have a perfect duty to avoid doing that thing.

The same can be said for promise-breaking.  To make a promise is to commit to do something.  You make this commitment to another person, who accepts your promise as evidence of your commitment.  Now if we tried to universalize "It is ok to break promises", then this would mean that nobody must follow through with their commitments.  If people felt like they could break commitments whenever they wanted, then nobody would believe anybody when they make promises.  So making a promise becomes impossible in itself, since making a promise requires that somebody believes my promise and takes my promise as evidence of my commitment.

In the case of breaking promises and committing suicide, rules that support this behavior become logically impossible if the law is universalized.  In the case of benefiting others and cultivating talents, the case is different.  Laws such as "I will not help other people" or "I will not cultivate my own talents" can be followed universally.  The universal application of the law does not preclude the possibility of its fulfillment.  So it passes the first test of the categorical imperative.  We can universalize the rule.  But would a rational person want to live in such a world?  It seems like so long as a  person wants, say either good things for himself or wants to be benefited by the skills and kindness of others, that it is rationally consistent to also do such things himself.  So while we do not have a perfect duty to help others and cultivate our own talent, we have an imperfect duty to cultivate our own talents and to help others.  In other words, there is a hypothetical imperative to perform these actions insofar as we should do these things to meet some goal we have (e.g., happiness).
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Kant Vocab

Your will is your practical reason. In other words, your will is what allows you to identify what is good in terms of certain goals (23).

An imperative is the form that commands take. The representation of an objective principle insofar as it demands the will be a certain way is called a command of reason. The form of a command is the imperative (24).

Hypothetical imperatives are commands that must be followed in order to reach some goal (25). Hypothetical imperatives are commands to perform actions as a means to an end.

A categorical imperative is a command that must always be followed because the action is good in itself. In other words, a categorical imperative is a command to perform an action that is good as an end (ibid).

A perfect duty is a universally necessary duty (30).

Imperfect duties are duties that we must sometimes perform (ibid).

Properly speaking, Kant says that true 'duty' is always categorical (33).

There are three practical principles of the will. First, the ground of all duties lies objectively in the form of universality. Second, the end of all rational beings is rational beings. In other words, rational beings are ends in themselves. Third, the will of every rational being is a will that legislates universal law (autonomy of the will).

Acting from Duty vs. Merely Acting in Accord with Duty

Kant says that actions only have positive moral value if they are done from duty and not merely in accord with duty. One example that Kant talks about is a shopkeeper who does not overcharge his customers. We can say that this person has a duty to charge a fair price to all customers. Now, if the shopkeeper only does this because he doesn't want to lose business, then he is acting in accord with duty but not out of duty. He is only acting out of duty (or from duty) if he charges a fair price because he knows it is the right thing to do.

Here is another example. You have a duty to preserve your own life. In other words, you have a duty to keep yourself alive. The person who loves life and continues to live because they love life is acting in accord with duty but not out of duty. However, the person who hates life and only continues to live because it is the right thing to do is acting from duty. The person who continues to live because they want to is not doing anything morally good (they are not doing anything bad, either). But the person who continues to live even though they don't want to but because they know it is the right thing to do is doing something morally good.

Kant: The Good Will, Maxims and the Categorical Imperative

The basis of Kant's ethics is a good will.  The good will is the only thing that is good without qualification.  It is also the highest good.  It is good not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.  Compare this with intelligence.  Being smart is good for lots of reasons; it can help to achieve many ends.  But being smart can also be used for bad goals, such as robbing a bank or assassinating someone and getting away with it.  Unlike intelligence, the good will is always good.  It is good not because it brings about some consequences but because it wills correctly.  Actions are good actions if they are actions of a good will.

But how do we tell if an action is an action of a good will?  Well, we text the maxim, or the personal rule according to which a person was acting.  Another name for a maxim is a principle of volition.  The idea is this.  For every action, there is some personal rule that a person is following.  In order to test if this maxim is good, we must use a certain kind of test for this rule.

The test we use is the Categorical Imperative.  The categorical imperative states that one should only act according to rules that can be made into universal law.  For some rules, it is logically impossible to make them a universal law.  For example, if you wanted to make "It is ok to tell a lie whenever you want" a universal rule, this would be logically impossible.  Lying means telling someone falsehoods under the pretense that they are truths.  In other words, lying means telling someone something false under the assumption that they will believe your words anyway.  If everyone lied whenever they wanted to, then nobody would ever believe anyone.  Lying would be impossible because lying requires that the person to whom you are lying believes your lies.

Here is another example.  Say I am in a hurry at Starbucks and I want to cut in line.  So I act according to the maxim, "It is ok to cut in line when I want".  If this rule became a universal law and everyone cut in line whenever they wanted, then lines would cease to exist.  If the rule became universalized, then it would become logically impossible to follow that rule.  The point is not just that it would be an impractical rule to be universalized.  Rather, it would be logically impossible to universalize this rule because if everyone followed it, then following it would become impossible!