Kant and the Question of Murder

To assert that murder is immoral because God exists is to connect a number of dots, albeit logically, that nonetheless requires discussion in order to be properly understood. As Immanuel Kant points out, God is viewed by people as having attributes which determine the order upon which one should base his own actions. In other words, “the concept of God” has a “function” that man should be aware of, as it informs his own critical thinking, behavior, and understanding of right and wrong (“Kant’s Philosophy of Religion”). Indeed, Kant “sought to locate the concept of God within a systematically ordered set of basic philosophical principles that account for the order and structure of world” (“Kant’s Philosophy of Religion”). Into this order and structure would fall questions such as, “Is murder immoral?” Kant’s system was not stagnant, however; it developed over time and evolved into something where subtle distinctions emerged to raise new questions about how right and wrong could ultimately be determined. To what extent did moral judgments depend on the existence of God? Or, to rephrase it, to what extent did knowledge of the existence of God determine the morality or immorality of any action, let alone murder? Kant moved beyond even these questions to assert that human beings routinely placed on God their own concepts of morality and thus sidestepped the issue of God’s existence, using it instead as a means of validating their own ethical or moral systems. This paper will discuss the issue of if God exists, is murder immoral from the standpoint of Kantian philosophy and show how according to the philosopher the existence of God was a question that could not be answered but by subjective assertions and therefore lacked credibility as a universal or objective application.

For Kant, his philosophical view gradually came to the conclusion that people “attribute to the concept of God” certain moral and religious concepts that do not necessarily derive from God (“Kant’s Philosophy of Religion”). Kant shies away from the idea of faith, viewing it skeptically, from a position opposite of that of, say, Aquinas, who viewed faith as resting upon reason. For Kant, faith does not presuppose reason: Reason presupposes doubt and doubt leads to the questioning of the existence of God—or at least of God as a kind of polestar by which one’s actions can be judged. In short, Kant eradicates the concept of universal truth or objective truth, which is available to one like Aquinas—but does he do so because he lacks faith in God as a the Supreme Being, all Good?

Kant’s difficulty in reconciling objectivity and subjectivity, and therefore any objective sense of moral law in universal terms, stems from his disposition towards a moral order that can be perceived by man through his use of the intellect—i.e., the combination of the five senses informing the mind of reality. In Prolegomena to any future metaphysics, Kant indicates that applying a universal label to anything is a mistake because all judgments are based on personal experience; he states: “I passed off as universally valid that which was a condition for the intuition of things…because I referred it to the things in themselves and did not restrict it to conditions of experience” (Kant 86). As Peter Byrne adds, Kant did not view religious assent as a precondition for understanding moral law: for a proposition to have objective merit or universality, it had to “be something that can be communicated to others and that can command universal agreement. Religious experience as a ground of assent fails this test, for Kant” (Byrne 53). In short, Kant did not view faith in God as a means of knowing right from wrong. For Kant, God’s existence was a matter determined by faith. One could not provide objective evidence of God’s existence and so, therefore, could not provide objective evidence of a first cause or first Mover. All that should ordinarily follow from the first cause could not because the first cause, for Kant, could not be objectively established. This condition negated any ability to arrive at conclusive evidence as to whether actions had a universal or moral character to them that could be objectively defined or even identified. On the contrary, Kant insisted that actions like perceptions could only be known subjectively and that this prevented one from making the assertion that if God exists, murder is immoral. One could not say for all human beings that God existed: one could only say that in so far as he or she was concerned, God existed and thus that person applied to his moral framework a set of conditions that would typically include murder as being immoral (basically because of the Western religion associated with God—i.e., the Judaic and/or Christian religions). If one chose not to admit of the existence of God, what was the precondition for establishing a rightness and wrongness to actions? What was the external ruler by which one could judge?

This does not mean that Kant does not have a view on morality or ethics. His view ultimately was that ethics for an individual depended upon one’s duty. So for instance, if one’s duty was to be a soldier, would it not correlate that it was his ethical responsibility to kill the enemy? Morally speaking, the murder of his fellow human being would be justified by the person’s duty. For an individual whose duty was to be, say, a banker, murdering his fellow man would not correlate with his duty and thus would be viewed as immoral.

By contextualizing morality within the framework of the individual and the duty of the individual, Kant was able to maneuver around the issues of universalism and objectivity, which troubled philosophers, and apply and subjective framework that would make logical sense for him. Nonetheless, it still included a sense of moral law that determined moral to be wrong in the first place. This judgment could be said to be a carryover from the Western moral tradition in place at Kant’s time, for Kant himself does not explicitly address the question of why the existence of God should lead to the conviction that one action is right or wrong. He does attempt to explain how individuals come to understand morality and make moral judgments but he does not place emphasis on God as a first cause in moral law. Kant’s focus is more on man as discerner of God and the moral law for the individual at a given point in time.

Kant’s position is different from that of the classical philosopher in that it does not presuppose a moral or objective order. In the Nichomachean Ethics, there is the sense that moral virtues exist because they are either practiced or taught. For Kant, moral virtues are identified by the extent to which they are in conformity with the moral law that applies to every individual separately (Cahn, Markie). It is all about the context of the situation and Kant describes it as the duty that the person owes to him or herself, the duty that is expected of him by society. It is a complex arrangement but it ultimately has little to do with the existence of God as a precondition. Religion and the existence of God is, rather, a means of expressing for the individual the faith that the individual has in the moral order supposed or expressed by the guidelines of that faith. As Byrne explains, Kant defined religion “as the recognition of duties as divine commands” (viii). Thus, in the context of this paper, murder would only be acceptable as a divine command if it was in deed one of an individual’s duties. Only very certain lines of work would fit with this description: an executioner, for instance, or a soldier—for these would be positions recognized by society as being granted certain objectives that make killing necessary and thus a dutiful activity.

However, the question shifts, at that point, to whether or not the rightness or wrongness of an action depends upon society’s sanctioning of it. Does society provide the justification for the so-called “divine command” or does God—or does the individual? Yet, stepping back from this question, one sees that, again, it is a meditation upon first causes, and this is not a line of inquiry with which Kant is entirely comfortable since for him the question of objectively settling the matter is impossible. As Byrne states, terms such as “first cause” are not ones that Kant found meaningful: the “language introduces no cognition of an object and presents us with no real possibility. For key concepts in it, such as that of cause, remain” elusive (63). Thus, Kant insisted on the recognition of duty as the main arbiter of morality and steered clear of the relationship between the determined or objectively-apparent existence of God and the morality or immorality of actions.

In conclusion, Kant took the question of causation and turned it around to look at what could he objectively conclude—which was that every individual helped a subjective understanding of the moral law, in so far as his own circumstances impressed upon him a sense of his own duties or imperatives. Thus, Kant judged that the morality or immorality of an action, such as murder, was not dependent upon the existence of God, per se, but rather upon the understanding of an individual’s duty. For that reason, it could be said to be immoral for a barber to commit murder, but for a soldier murder would not only be condoned but expected—for such would be the duty of the soldier on the battlefield after all.