The Two Dogmas of Königsberg-7

This is the first part of a two-part critique of Kant. The second part — As Free as a Turnspit — covers Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments, his acausal free will, and the question of why the supposed champion of Enlightenment had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for faith.

On the third planet of the binary star system Königsberg-7, there lived a civilisation that had solved a remarkable problem: it had developed an ethics that could under no circumstances fail the test of reality. Not because it was particularly good, but because it was constructed so that reality was fundamentally not competent to judge moral questions. Morality came from pure reason. Reality was empirical. And between the two ran a border that was considered logically impossible to cross.

The civilisation of Königsberg-7 had two dogmas. The first ran: Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. The second: Every rational being possesses an inner dignity that is inviolable. Both dogmas had a remarkable property: they were immune to every objection. The first, because it said nothing anyone could disagree with. The second, because it was defined so that no observation could touch it. The philosophers of Königsberg-7 regarded this property as a strength. The physicists regarded it as a warning sign, but were not consulted on ethical matters because they worked “merely empirically.”

Then the Vogons came to demolish the planet. Ostensibly for a hyperspace bypass, actually to protect the reputation of several galactic psychologists who had published in a peer-reviewed journal that the planet was uninhabited and couldn’t be bothered to issue a correction. The Königsbergers knew the shutdown code for the demolition charges. The Vogons asked whether they knew it. A single white lie would have saved the planet. The ethics of the Königsbergers forbade lying. Categorically. Even when the questioner was himself lying. Even when the entire civilisation was at stake.

The Königsbergers told the truth. The Vogons demolished the planet.

The last words of the civilisation, recorded by a passing trader with a cheap subspace receiver, were: “But we acted in accordance with the moral law.” The trader noted in his log: “They did. It just didn’t help anyone. Not even God — who also doesn’t exist.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes laconically: “It was the only known civilisation to destroy itself by consistently following its own ethics. Most civilisations only manage that with their economic policy.”

On Earth, the situation is messier, because the author of this ethics — Immanuel Kant — is revered as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and his principles are embedded in every Western constitution. The question is not whether Kant was historically significant — the historical significance of bloodletting is also not in dispute. The question is whether his ethics works.

The First Dogma: Categorically Correct and Completely Empty

The most famous restaurant on Königsberg-7 was called “The Categorical Imperative.” It was remarkable in that it served no food. You walked in, sat down, placed your own sandwich on the table, and the waiter checked whether it violated any hygiene regulations. If not, you were allowed to eat it. The restaurant had no menu, no kitchen, and no chef — but five stars and an award for moral excellence. The Guide notes: “Nobody has ever starved there, but only because the guests brought their own food.”

Kant’s universalisation formula — “Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Kant, 1785, AA IV, 421) — works in exactly this way. It does not tell you what to do. It only checks whether what you already want to do is consistently universalisable. Hegel saw this in 1821: from the pure form of universalisability, any content whatsoever can be derived, as long as it is consistently universalisable (Hegel, 1821, §135). The categorical imperative is a sieve without mesh. The categorical imperative is categorically correct — because it says nothing anyone could disagree with. That is its problem, not its strength.

An ought-statement has content only relative to a goal — that is the basic structure of every ought-statement that has ever worked. Without a goal, the statement makes no claim about reality that could fail the test of reality. Wolfgang Pauli called such statements not even wrong (cf. Peierls, 1960, p. 186).

The telling thing is: Kant had the working structure in his hands. His hypothetical imperative — whoever wills an end ought to will the suitable means — is goal-relative, testable, and open to criticism. Kant dismissed it as a mere “counsel of prudence” and replaced it with a formula that is universal, absolute, and completely empty.

Kant also claims that his second formulation — “Act so that you treat humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of every other, always as an end and never merely as a means” (Kant, 1785, AA IV, 429) — is equivalent to the first. It is not: the first is purely formal, the second smuggles in a substantive standard — “human dignity” — that does not follow from the first.

Furthermore, the categorical imperative claims context-free validity — that is what “categorical” means. Nassim Taleb identifies the general principle: rules that claim universal and absolute validity produce fragility by eliminating local adaptability (Taleb, 2012). Karl Popper formulated the methodological criterion that applies here — the prohibition of immunisation against criticism: no theory may be constructed so that no experience could refute it (Popper, 1934/1959, p. 82). The categorical imperative eliminates boundary conditions from the equation and immunises the norm against reality.

The Second Dogma: Inviolable Because Untouchable

The constitution of Königsberg-7 rested on a single axiom: every rational being possesses an “inner dignity” — an intrinsic, unconditional, context-independent property that elevates it beyond all price. This dignity was inviolable, unquestionable, and unfalsifiable. Anyone who asked for its justification was informed that it required none. Anyone who asked how one distinguishes self-evidence from mere assertion was deemed philosophically immature. The Guide summarises: “The axiom of human dignity on Königsberg-7 was the philosophical equivalent of a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign — not on a door, but on an argument.”

Kant’s formula of humanity rests on precisely this concept: the human being as an end in itself, endowed with an “inner worth.” The concept goes back to Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486). Kant secularised the idea but kept the structure.

Human dignity is indeed inviolable — not because it is so fundamental, but because it is immunised against all criticism. It fails on four counts.

First, it is dogmatically posited. Hans Albert showed in the Münchhausen Trilemma that every attempt at ultimate justification leads into one of three dead ends: infinite regress, logical circle, or dogmatic termination (Albert, 1968/1991, p. 15). Human dignity is the third dead end.

Second, it is empirically untestable. No observation could ever show that human beings lack “inner dignity,” because the concept is defined so as to depend on no empirical fact. In Pauli’s sense, not even wrong.

Third, it violates ought implies can: what cannot be accomplished cannot be demanded (Albert, 1968/1991). To treat every human being equally as an end in itself — regardless of proximity, relationship, context — is psychologically and practically impossible. The demand is structurally identical to the Christian commandment “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” which originates in religious revelation, not in rational argument. Kant did not justify Christian charity — he secularised it.

Fourth, it rests on a false form of predication. Value, as Mario Bunge and Martin Mahner show, is a relational predicate: something is valuable for a subject, relative to a goal, under given circumstances (Bunge, 1989; Bunge & Mahner, 2004, p. 173). “Dignity in itself” — detached from subject, goal, and context — hypostasises a relation into an intrinsic quality. Turtles all the way down, except the turtles are imaginary.

Article 1 of the German Basic Law states: “Human dignity is inviolable.” Correct. One could delete this sentence without changing anything substantive — because a sentence that cannot fail any possible test of experience has no empirical content. It stands there like a heading over an empty chapter. The problem is not the sentence — the problem is that entire legal orders are erected on its foundation.

That human dignity appears in the German Basic Law, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of the United Nations does not make it truer — it demonstrates the political reach of an unjustified posit.

What Now?

There is an alternative. It consists not in abandoning ethics but in taking it seriously enough that it can fail the test of reality. Ought-statements have content only as goal-relative, empirically testable promotion claims. The ultimate goal is not freely choosable but teleonomically reconstructable — evolutionary theory identifies lineage fitness as the goal toward which every living being is oriented through selection history. Ethics whose observance systematically works against lineage fitness are refuted not by philosophical arguments but by reality itself — populations that follow them disappear. Just like the Königsbergers.

I lay the groundwork for this in my paper The Solution to the Is-Ought Problem and in my post Hume’s Is-Ought Problem and Its Solution.

The next post — As Free as a Turnspit — shows why Kant’s project was never Enlightenment in the first place, but its opposite.

Or, as was once remarked at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe over a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster: “The problem with morality was never that there were no answers. The problem was that people found answers that couldn’t be wrong about anything and then called that a feature.”

References

Albert, H. (1991). Traktat über kritische Vernunft. Mohr Siebeck. (Originally published 1968)

Bunge, M. (1989). Treatise on Basic Philosophy. Volume 8: Ethics: The Good and the Right. D. Reidel.

Bunge, M. & Mahner, M. (2004). Über die Natur der Dinge. S. Hirzel.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1821). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Nicolaische Buchhandlung.

Kant, I. (1785). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. J. F. Hartknoch.

Peierls, R. E. (1960). Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, 1900–1958. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 5(1), 174–192.

Pico della Mirandola, G. (1486). Oratio de hominis dignitate.

Popper, K. R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson. (Originally published 1934)

Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.