And do you also have the intuition that this is a moral act?

There’s an argument to be made that the universal law should be that nobody needs to go into a shelter, because it causes a very large waste of time relative to the benefit (5 minutes times 8 million citizens = about 76 years — one person effectively lives about 50 years if you subtract sleeping time). You can think of traffic accidents as a risk similar to being hit by a missile — you could prevent that risk by blocking the roads, but the harm to citizens would be so great that it’s better that a few hundred die each year than that nobody drive on the road.

To Judah, I didn’t understand. I wrote that there is a moral obligation to act this way. Even from a consequentialist perspective, this would lead to saving human lives (from the same consideration behind the categorical imperative). Are you asking whether I feel that intuitively? Why is that important?

To Oren,

I don’t think it’s right to look at human life in such a quantitative way. Beyond that, harm to a person in wartime has significant morale-related and political implications. In traffic accidents we’re talking about changing our entire normal way of life, so there we don’t do that. Maybe if we lived under missiles all our lives the situation would be different (as in the communities around Gaza).

From the recent lectures I understood that the imperative is a means of arriving at moral understanding, not a reason in and of itself. So I asked whether the means achieved its goal.

In my opinion it is a reason in and of itself. What I said is that sometimes it explains people’s moral intuitions, even in situations where the categorical imperative itself is neither clear to them nor known to them. But I don’t think intuition is a condition for applying it. At the end of column 208 I wrote that if there is an opposing intuition, there is room to deviate from it (as with any rule).

What is the rationale of the categorical imperative?
(If the answer is too long and the Rabbi has a reference to somewhere else where the Rabbi discussed this, that will be enough for me.)

I don’t think you can give it a rationale. It’s like asking what the rationale is for being moral. Kant goes in the opposite direction: assuming that the moral imperative has validity, he argues that this imperative must necessarily be the categorical imperative. The philosophical path is quite convoluted and not entirely valid, but in my opinion the conclusion is correct.

Rabbi Michi,
what do you think of the following criticism that has been voiced against the categorical imperative:
If a murderer asks me where his victim is hiding, I ought to tell him the truth and not lie, because I want everyone to tell the truth. Intuitively, it seems that I should lie to that murderer.

(I thought the refutation would be that according to the principle of the imperative I should lie, because I would want it to become a universal law that if good comes from a lie, everyone should do so. But it turns out that Kant held that it is forbidden to lie in the above case.)

This is an old criticism of Kant’s Yekke-like extremism. As you wrote, by the same token you could say that I would want everyone to lie in such a case. I commented on this at the end of the column about Feiglin. Some have expanded this criticism even further, and their conclusion is that this rule has no practical implication at all. You can always say that you would want whatever is right to do to become a universal law, such that in this exceptional situation one should do this or that.

I never understood the categorical imperative. If I don’t like smoking and want nobody to smoke, does that make it a binding moral imperative? Or rather the opposite: if I don’t want something to become a universal law, then it’s probably immoral.
Isn’t the categorical imperative more or less a successful expression of “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”?

That’s a caricature. We’re not talking about questions of taste, what you like or don’t like, but about a value-based question.

But that’s exactly what you’re trying to define באמצעות the categorical imperative. How do you even know in advance that this is a value-based question?

The categorical imperative does not define morality; rather, it gives us a diagnostic tool for what counts as a moral act. It does this through situations that are good in a value-based sense (which is a clearer concept).

I didn’t understand what “it does this through situations that are good in a value-based sense” means. Do you mean that I know in advance that the act is morally charged and I’m trying to understand which side is correct?
Didn’t Kant mean this to define morality? Did he mean it only as a testing tool? That’s not how I understood the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

The assumption is that a state of affairs that is good or bad in a value-based sense is a clear matter (at least for each person according to his own approach). On that assumption, the categorical imperative comes to give you a tool for examining how to act.
I don’t know what they wrote on Wikipedia, but clearly this is not a definition of the good (the good state of affairs), but a definition/diagnosis of the good/moral act.