Kant's categorical imperatives and moral duty applied to taxation

Immanuel Kant

Freedom Motive and Duty

Kant believed possessing and maintaining one's moral goodness is the very condition under which anything else is worth having or pursuing. Intelligence and even pleasure are worth having only on the condition that they do not require giving up one's fundamental moral convictions. The value of a good will thus cannot be that it gains certain valuable ends, whether of our own or of others, since their value is entirely conditional on our possessing and maintaining a good will. Its goodness must not depend on obtaining any particular ends. A good will must then also be good in itself and not in virtue of its relationship to other things such as an individual's own happiness or overall welfare.

A good will is a will whose decisions are wholly determined by moral demands or Moral Law. Human beings view this Law as a constraint on their desires, and hence a will in which the Moral Law is decisive is motivated by the thought of duty. It is the presence of desires that could operate independently of moral demands that makes goodness in human beings an essential element of the idea of duty. Unqualified goodness means we act in certain ways that we might not want to, or the thought that we have moral duties.

Taxing the Rich

By these criteria taxing the rich would only be acceptable if one could maintain ones moral goodness. In other words, if motivated out of a sense of moral duty, than it is acceptable behavior. Conversely, if the rich pay taxes out of a sense of moral duty, believing that it is the right thing to do, and done for no personal ends, then that would be acceptable behavior.

The general rule, according to Kant, is that one may act in ways that one cannot will that everyone else should act too. If we tax the rich, we must tax ourselves at the same level. Of course this is in many ways impractical because an individual making $30,000 a year suffers a greater financial burden than a person making $300,000 if taxed at the same rate due to the differential in cash flow. The question then becomes is it morally good, or would a rational person tax the rich at a higher rate? If so, what is the motivation of this practice? If one concludes that the answer to the first question is yes, and the motivation for this action is not for self gain, then taxing the rich is justifiable. The real question is do the rich have a moral obligation to pay taxes?