The list below is incomplete. Some of the items, Kant explicitly wrote about. Others are extrapolations that I’ve taken from his work and applied to my own values. My hope is that by the end of it, you see the incredible flexibility of this single moral maxim to extend to almost all areas of human life.
I would say that Kant’s Rule made all these diverse people happy — but Kant doesn’t give a shit about happiness.
Laziness – OK, I’m as lazy as the next guy. Full disclosure. And I often feel guilty about it. We all know that fucking off in the short term inevitably harms us in the long term. But for whatever reason, this short-term gain vs long-term loss calculation never seems to inspire us or move us. But that’s not why Kant thinks it’s wrong. In fact, Kant would say that this is the wrong way to think about laziness. It’s insufficient. Kant believed that we all had a moral imperative to do the best we can at all times. But he didn’t say to do your best because of self-esteem or personal utility or contributing to society or whatever. He went even further than that. He argued you should do your best because anything less is to treat ourselves as a means rather than an end.Yes, you can treat yourself as means, as well.
When you’re sitting on the couch, refreshing Twitter for the 28th time, you’re treating your mind and your attention as a mere pleasure-receptacle. You are not maximizing the potential of your consciousness. In fact, you are using your consciousness as a means to stimulate your emotional ends.
This is not only bad, Kant would argue, but it’s unethical. You are actively harming yourself.
Addiction – Believe it or not, Kant wasn’t a total party-pooper. He enjoyed some wine with his lunch. He smoked a pipe (but only at the same time each morning, and only one bowl of tobacco). Kant wasn’t anti-fun. What he was against, though, was pure escapism. He wrote that using alcohol or other means of escaping one’s own life was unethical because it requires you to use your rational mind and freedom as a means to some other end—in this case, getting your next high.6Kant believed in facing one’s problems. He believed that suffering is sometimes warranted and necessary in life. We tend to judge the immorality of addiction by the damage it causes to others. But Kant believed that, first, over-indulgence was fundamentally the act of being immoral to oneself, the harm it did to others was merely collateral damage. It was a failure to confront the reality of one’s own mind and own consciousness and this failure is akin to lying to oneself or cheating oneself out of precious life potential. And to Kant, lying to yourself is just as unethical as lying to others.
nice