God's Existence and the Morality of Murder in Kant

Introduction: Connecting God's Existence to Moral Law

To assert that murder is immoral because God exists is to connect a number of dots that, however logically arranged, nonetheless requires discussion in order to be properly understood. As Immanuel Kant points out, God is viewed by people as having attributes that 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 critical thinking, behavior, and understanding of right and wrong ("Kant's Philosophy of Religion," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 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 in which 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 God's existence determine the morality or immorality of any action, let alone murder? Kant moved beyond even these questions to assert that human beings routinely projected onto God their own concepts of morality, thereby sidestepping the issue of God's existence and using it instead as a means of validating their own ethical or moral systems. This paper discusses the question of whether murder is immoral if God exists, from the standpoint of Kantian philosophy, and shows how, according to the philosopher, the existence of God was a question that could not be answered except by subjective assertions — and therefore lacked credibility as a universal or objective foundation.

Kant on Faith, Reason, and Objective Moral Truth

For Kant, his philosophical view gradually arrived at 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 is skeptical of faith, approaching it from a position quite opposite to 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 God's existence — 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 or objective truth that is available to a thinker like Aquinas. The question is whether he does so because he lacks faith in God as the Supreme Being, all Good.

Subjectivity, Experience, and the Limits of Universal Moral Claims

Kant's difficulty in reconciling objectivity and subjectivity — and therefore any objective sense of moral law in universal terms — stems from his disposition toward a moral order that can be perceived by man through his use of the intellect, that is, 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, therefore, could not provide objective evidence of a first cause or First Mover. All that would ordinarily follow from the first cause could not follow 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 moral character 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 asserting that if God exists, murder is immoral. One could not say for all human beings that God existed; one could only say that, insofar 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 immoral, largely because of the Western religious traditions associated with God, namely the Judaic and Christian religions. If one chose not to admit of God's existence, what was the precondition for establishing a rightness or wrongness to actions? What was the external standard by which one could judge?

Conclusion: Duty Over Divinity

Kant took the question of causation and turned it around to ask what could be objectively concluded — which was that every individual holds a subjective understanding of the moral law, shaped by the duties and imperatives impressed upon them by their own circumstances. 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.

If God exists, is murder immoral? This is something of a loaded question that must be unpacked before it can be adequately answered using the concepts found in Kant's philosophy. For Kant, the existence of God as a first cause was irrelevant to the discussion of morality or immorality; he was not impressed by philosophical doctrines of causation. Kant looked instead to the ways in which humans ascertain their duty in connection with their place in life. In other words, Kant viewed morality as having a subjective quality that could only be effectively understood by contextualizing it within the structure of the individual's own life and mind. For an action to be immoral for an individual, it would have to violate the duty to which that individual was bound. Duty thus carried a kind of divine or God-like command for people, and insofar as one's actions correlated with this sense of duty, they could be judged moral or immoral.

In the case of murder, therefore, it would only be judged immoral if it did not correlate with the duties of the individual who committed it. A better question, from a Kantian perspective, might be: what is the duty of an individual? If that can be determined, then one may determine whether murder for that individual is immoral. While the concept of God would play a part in shaping how morality is viewed, the main gauge of determining the morality of murder would be the duty to which the person was bound. As for conventional morality and a sense of right and wrong from a lawful perspective, in Kant's time, the concept of morality was still broadly accepted as being grounded in the Western traditions then in place.

Works Cited

Byrne, Peter. Kant on God: Exploring the Notion of the Divine in the Critical Philosophy. Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology.

Cahn, Steven, and Peter Markie. Ethics: History, Theory and Contemporary Issues. 5th ed. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central.

"Kant's Philosophy of Religion." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/