I am, like almost everyone here, a product of what is called the counter-culture. I naturally distrust authority, and believe in individualism and spontaneity. Appeals to tradition and order make me grit my teeth. I, like almost everyone else who has grown up with a mixture of tales of the 1960s, and movies where the ragtag oddballs show up the arrogant power structure, have an innate distrust of anyone who lays down any type of absolute rule. And yet in certain ways, I consider myself much more conservative than my peers, and discussions of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative are one of the ways this always comes out. The belief that people have the ability to see their actions in terms of universal laws, and that such an ability to universalize your actions is important on a practical and spiritual level, is something that I find very important; but that many of my educated friends think is (paraphrasing loosely), a piece of authoritarian, absolutist nonsense.
And for a long time, I thought about ways to get over this seeming hurdle. And the other day, actually in the middle of a bad headache, and after some experiences that made the matter more pressing, I had a realization about what one of the major misunderstandings of the categorical imperative was.
The categorical imperative is not a rule about the way you should behave. The categorical imperative is a rule about rules.
And this greatly changed my understanding of the theoretical and practical meaning of the categorical imperative. When a person chooses to do something, they are not constrained by the categorical imperative. When someone chooses to do something, and does it because they are following a rule, the rule that they follow, however, is constrained by the categorical imperative. If you have any type of rule to guide you, you have already accepted the validity of rules.
Kant's formation of the categorical imperative was for a rational mind. One of the ways a rational mind can be described is as capable of understanding rules about the world. On the descriptive level, a rational mind understands that various different objects and phenomena are affected by the same laws and processes. A rational prescriptive mind would form prescriptive laws in the same way. It may be theoretically possible to have a rational mind with only a descriptive rationality, with no prescriptive rationality, but I think that the two go together.
Especially, (and this is where much of the anthropological, psychological application of this comes in), people make rules all the time. If there is an intelligence capable of living without prescribing, I have yet to meet it. Much as Hume said about skepticism, living even three hours with total lack of prescriptivity would be too much for anyone. Individuals, groups, societies, and nations are constantly making rules and laws. Most rules that people make don't become formal law. Most rules that people make don't even get spoken. Most societies keep their rules as a constant stream of hints, comments, glares, and tacit approval and disapproval for various behaviors. One of the main reasons that the rules don't get spoken too much, I believe, is once they are spoken, they can be critiqued. What is the basis for the rules that most societies and individuals believe in, but don't always speak?
The first example I thought of was a line from Chris Rock's book: "There's only one thing worse than a 35 year old man still living with his parents, and that's any woman willing to sneak into his room." How would this rule, the rule that adults should be economically independent, turn out when examined with the categorical imperative? This is a simple, even silly example. There are a host of other rules, stated and unstated, that are reversed quickly under the categorical imperative. People are under a constant unspoken barrage of beliefs about how they should live, work, eat, believe, dress, play, and feel. If all of these pressures were laid out clearly, would they pass the test of being universal laws?
I am sympathetic to people who claim that Kant's conception of the categorical imperative denies the deepness and uniqueness of human feeling, that the goals and movement of life is too complex to reduce to an abstract formula. But I find that in many of these cases, the real dislike of Kant's formula might be that it would disintegrate whatever small rules they put together to keep them and their clique in power.