The ONE RULE for LIFE – Immanuel Kant’s Moral Philosophy – Mark Manson

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[Music] Depending on your perspective, Immanuel Kant was either the most boring person on the planet or a productivity hacker’s dream. For over 40 years, he woke up every morning at 5:00 a.m. and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours. Following that, he had lunch at the same restaurant each day. In the afternoon, he would take an extended walk through the same park on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time every day. Kant spent his entire life in Königsberg, Prussia. I mean that literally; he never left the city. Despite the capital being an hour away, he never saw it.

Kant was efficiency personified. He was so mechanical in his habits that his neighbors joked they could set their clocks by when he left his apartment each day. He would leave for his daily walk at 3:30 p.m., have dinner with the same friend every evening, and return home to finish work and go to bed at exactly 10 p.m. It’s easy for us to scoff at a guy like this—what a loser, right? But Kant was one of the most important and influential thinkers in modern history. He did more to steer the world from his single room apartment in Prussia than most kings and armies ever did before or since. If you’re living in a democratic society that protects individual rights, you have Kant to partially thank for that.

He was the first person to ever envision a global governing body that would guarantee peace across much of the world. He prescribed space-time in such a way that it later inspired Einstein’s discovery of relativity. He came up with the idea that animals could potentially have rights themselves. He invented the philosophy of aesthetics and beauty and resolved a 200-year philosophical debate in just a couple of hundred pages. He reinvented moral philosophy from top to bottom, overthrowing ideas that had been the basis of Western civilization since Aristotle. Kant was an intellectual powerhouse.

If brains had physical strength, Kant would have been made of steel. His ideas, particularly about ethics, are still discussed and debated in thousands of universities today. That’s what I want to talk about—Kant’s moral philosophy and why it matters. Now, you might be saying, “Really? Moral philosophy? Who cares?” Well, that right there is moral philosophy. Anytime you say “who cares” or “what’s the big deal,” you’re essentially questioning the value of something. Is it worth your time and attention? Is it better or worse than something else? These are all questions of value, and they all fall under the umbrella of moral philosophy.

Our moral philosophy determines what we value, what we care about, and what we don’t care about, and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives. Got it? Kant’s moral philosophy is unique and counterintuitive. He believed that for something to be good, it had to be universal. That is, it can’t be right to do something in one situation and wrong to do it in another. If lying is wrong, it has to be wrong all the time. It has to be wrong when everyone does it. If it isn’t always right or always wrong, then it cannot be a valid ethical principle.

Kant’s universalized ethical principles, known as categorical imperatives, are rules to live by that are valid in all contexts, in every situation, for every human being. It sounds impossible, but Kant made a serious attempt at creating categorical imperatives. Some of those attempts were quickly criticized by other philosophers, but others have actually held up over time. One of them, in particular, has kind of stuck. In all my years reading and studying philosophy, psychology, and other sciences, it is one of the most powerful statements I’ve ever come across. Its implications reach into every part of each person’s life. In a single sentence, it sums up the bulk of our ethical intuitions and assumptions, and in each situation, it points to a clear direction of how we should be acting and why.

Okay, enough preamble. Here’s Kant’s rule: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.”

Kant believed that rationality was sacred. When I say rationality, I don’t mean like Sudoku or chess grandmaster rationality. I mean rationality as the fact that we are the only known creatures in the universe that can make decisions, weigh options, and consider the moral implications of each action. Basically, consciousness is the only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the universe. This is special—exceedingly special. For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously, and rationality and protecting conscious choice must be the basis for all our moral reasoning.

Kant wrote that without rationality, the universe would be a waste, in vain, and without purpose. To Kant’s mind, without intelligence and the freedom to exercise that intelligence, we might as well just be a bunch of rocks—nothing would matter. Therefore, Kant believed that all morality is derived from the protection and promotion of rational consciousness in each individual.

So how do you do that? Well, Kant’s rule above can be restated in more modern language to make it more easily digestible: “Each person must never be treated only as a means to some other end but also be treated as an end themselves.”

Let’s say I’m hungry and I want a burrito. I get in the car, drive to Chipotle, and order my usual double meat burrito. In this situation, eating the burrito is my end goal. It’s ultimately why I’m doing everything else—getting in the car, driving, buying gas, and so on. All these things I do to get the burrito are the means. If you call a friend to find out how they’re doing, calling them is a means; finding out how they’re doing is your end. If you leave a party early so you can wake up in the morning, leaving the party is the means, and waking up early is your end.

Means are things that we do conditionally. I don’t want to get in my car and drive, but I want a burrito; therefore, driving is the means to my burrito end. An end is something that is desired for its own sake. It is the defining motivating factor of our decisions and behaviors. If I wanted to eat a burrito only because my wife wanted a burrito and I wanted to make her happy, then the burrito is no longer my end; it is now a means to an even greater end—making my wife happy.

If I only wanted to make my wife happy so I could hopefully get closer to her, now my wife’s happiness is a means to a greater end. Kant argues that treating any human being as a means to some other end is the basis of all unethical behavior. So treating a burrito as a means to my wife’s end is fine; after all, burritos don’t have rational consciousness. But if I treat my wife as a means to the end of intimacy, now I am treating her as a means, and Kant would argue that is wrong.

Let’s give Kant’s rule a common-sense check. Lying is wrong because you are misleading another person’s conscious behavior in order to achieve your own goal. You are therefore treating that person as a means to your own end. Therefore, lying is unethical. Cheating is unethical for a similar reason; you are violating the expectations of other rational and sentient beings for your own personal aims. You are treating the rules and expectations agreed to with others as a means to your own personal end—that is wrong.

Kant’s formulation checks all the boxes we would expect from a theory of morality, but it goes way beyond common-sense morality. In fact, I will argue that Kant’s rule plausibly extends to pretty much everything we value as right and good today.

The moral implications of Kant’s rule are vast. Some of the items Kant explicitly wrote about, while 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 will see the incredible flexibility of this single moral maxim to extend to almost all areas of human life.

Example one: Laziness. I can be as lazy as the next person, and I often feel guilty about it. But we all know that procrastinating in the short term inevitably harms us in the long term. For whatever reason, this short-term gain versus long-term loss calculation never seems to inspire 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. He believed we all have a moral imperative to do our best at all times. But he didn’t say to do your best because of self-esteem or personal utility or contributing to society. 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 a means as well. If you’re sitting on the couch refreshing social media 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.

Example two: Addiction. Believe it or not, Kant enjoyed some wine with his lunch and smoked a pipe, but only at the same time each morning and only one bowl of tobacco. Kant wasn’t necessarily anti-pleasure, but he was against 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 intoxicated. Kant believed in facing one’s problems. He believed that suffering is sometimes warranted and even necessary in life.

We tend to judge the immorality of addiction by the damage it causes to others, but Kant believed that first, overindulgence 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 consciousness, and this failure is akin to lying to oneself or cheating oneself out of precious life potential. To Kant, lying to yourself is just as unethical as lying to others.

Example three: People-pleasing and seeking approval. Okay, I know it’s not a good strategy to be overly accommodating, but is it really unethical? Isn’t being nice to people and making them happy an ethical thing to do? Well, not necessarily. Seeking approval and people-pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think and feel. So right there, you are already treating yourself as a means rather than an end. But it gets worse because if you alter your speech and behavior to make others like you, then you are also treating them as a means to your end. You are manipulating their perceptions of you to garner a pleasant response from them. Kant would undoubtedly argue that this is also unethical.

Example four: Manipulation or coercion. Even if you’re not lying but you’re communicating with an attitude and a purpose of gaining something from someone without their full knowledge or explicit consent, then you are being unethical. Kant was big on fully informed consent; he believed it was the only way for there to be healthy interactions between individuals. This was radical for his time, and it’s something that people still struggle to accept today.

There are two areas in the modern world where I think the consent issue is huge, and Kant would have a lot to say about it. The first is obvious: sex and dating. Under Kant’s rule, anything short of explicit, fully informed, and fully sober consent is ethically out of bounds. This is a hot-button issue today, and I personally think people make it far more complicated than it needs to be. It basically just means being respectful.

The other modern area that is problematic is sales and advertising. Pretty much every marketing tactic is built around treating people as a means to some end—making money. In fact, Kant struggled much of his life with the ethical implications of capitalism and wealth inequality. He believed it was impossible for anyone to amass a fortune without some degree of manipulation or coercion along the way. Therefore, he was dubious of the entire system. He wasn’t anti-capitalist per se, but the staggering wealth inequality of his time did make him uneasy. He believed anyone who amassed a fortune had a moral imperative to give much of it away to those in need.

Example five: Bigotry. Kant, despite saying some pretty awful things about race early in his career, turned the intellectual corner and realized later in his life that no race has any right to subjugate any other. It makes sense; after all, racism and other forms of bigotry are textbook cases of treating other people as means rather than ends. Kant came to the conclusion that if all rationality is sacred, then there’s nothing permitting one group to have special privileges over another. He also became vehemently anti-colonialist. Kant argued that regardless of race, the violence and oppression required to subjugate populations would destroy people’s humanity in the process. It was the ultimate unethical institution.

This was completely radical for the time—radical to the point of being considered absurd by many. But Kant reasoned that the only way to prevent war and oppression was to form an international government that organized and bound nation-states together. Centuries later, the United Nations would largely be based on his vision.

Example six: The duty of self-improvement. Most philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that the best way to live was to increase happiness as much as possible and reduce suffering as much as possible. This approach to ethics is called utilitarianism and is still the predominant view held by many thinkers today. Kant had a completely different take on how to go about improving the world. Let’s call it the Michael Jackson Maxim because Kant, like Michael, believed that if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change.

But instead of dancing, Kant made his argument with brutal rationality. He argued that generally, it is impossible to know whether a person deserves to be happy or suffer because you can never truly know what their intentions and aims were when they acted. Similarly, even if you should make others happy, there’s no way to precisely know how to make them happy. You do not know their feelings, values, or expectations. You do not know the implications your actions will have on them.

Kant argued that the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves. This is because the only thing we can truly experience with any certainty is ourselves. Kant defined self-improvement as developing the ability to adhere to the categorical imperative, and he saw self-improvement as a duty—an undebatable obligation put on us all. To Kant, the reward or punishment for not following one’s duty was not in heaven or hell but in a life made for oneself. Adherence to morality produced not only a better life for yourself but a better life for all those around you.

Kant’s rule has a ripple effect. Your improved ability to be honest with yourself will increase how honest you are with others, and your honesty with others will influence them to be more honest with themselves, which will then help them improve their lives. This is true for all aspects of Kant’s rule, whether it’s honesty, productivity, charity, or consent. The Michael Jackson Maxim suggests that Kant’s rule, once adopted by enough people, will generate a snowball effect in the world, enacting more positive change than any calculated policy or institution.

The duty of self-respect: Kant intuitively understood that there is a fundamental link between our respect for ourselves and our respect for the world. The way we interact with our own psyche is the template we apply to our interactions with others. Little progress can be made with others until we’ve made progress with ourselves. He would likely be critical of the self-esteem movement today, seeing it as just another way of treating people as a means to some end of feeling better.

Self-respect isn’t about feeling better; it’s about knowing your own value—knowing that every human, no matter who they are, deserves basic rights and dignities. Every consciousness is sacred and must be treated as such. Kant would argue that telling ourselves that we are worthless is just as wrong as telling others that they are worthless. Lying to ourselves is just as unethical as lying to others. Harming ourselves is just as repugnant as harming others. Self-love and self-care are therefore not something you learn about or practice; they are something you are ethically called on to cultivate within yourself.

The impact of Kant’s philosophy is profound. If you dive into it, you may find inconsistencies and issues, but the power of his original ideas has undoubtedly changed the world. Strangely, when I came across them a year ago, they changed me. I had spent most of my 20s pursuing many of the items on the list above, but I pursued them for practical and transactional reasons. I pursued them as a means because I thought they would make my life better. Meanwhile, the more I worked at it, the emptier I felt.

Reading Kant was an epiphany. In just 80 pages, Kant swept away decades worth of assumptions and beliefs. He showed me that what you actually do doesn’t matter as much as the purpose behind doing it. Until you find the right purpose, you haven’t found much of anything at all. Kant wasn’t always a dull, routine-obsessed individual. In fact, in his younger years, he was a bit of a party-goer. He would stay up late, drink wine, and play cards with friends. It wasn’t until he turned 40 that he dropped it all and developed the routine life he later became famous for.

He said he developed this routine at 40 because he realized the moral implications of his actions and decided he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time or energy his consciousness had left. Kant called this developing character—building a life designed around maximizing your own potential. He believed most people can’t develop true character until they reach middle age because until then, they are still too seduced by the fancies and whims of the world, blown this way and that from excitement to despair and back again.

We’re too obsessed with accumulating more means and are hopelessly oblivious to the ends that drive us. To develop character, a person must master their own actions and master themselves. While few of us can accomplish that in a lifetime, Kant believed it’s something we each have a duty to work towards. In fact, he believed it was the only thing worth working towards.

[Music] What’s up, everybody? Mark Manson here, and what you just heard is an excerpt from the number one