Immanuel Kant’s 300th Birthday, Human Dignity, and the German Constitution

Immanuel Kant, born on April 22, 1724, would have celebrated his 300th birthday this year. And the German Constitution, the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) turns 75 years old in a few days. What do these two mean to each other? What does Kant’s philosophy have to do with the Basic Law?

All the faves are flawed. Kant invoked dignity, freedom and equality – and he betrayed those values at the same time. The Basic Law did not adopt his or any other philosophy – yet it certainly drew on it in three ways (see, in more detail and with references, here, pp. 680-687 [in German]): With its guarantee of human dignity, the Basic Law adapted (1.) Kant’’s self-purpose formula for the categorical imperative, (2.) the prohibition to treat humans like things and (3.) the idea of human dignity as a source of categorical, or absolute, prohibitions, as elements of Kant’s philosophy. However, in the face of the Holocaust and as its counter-image, they were given a historically new meaning.

According to Kant’s so-called self-purpose formula, the categorical imperative is, firstly, the commandment to „never treat all others merely as means, but always at the same time as ends in themselves“, as it says in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant formulates the prohibition of using people as mere means, secondly, also as a prohibition of reifying them, of degrading them to a thing. They are „not a thing – not something to be used merely as a means”, or, as Kant puts it in the Metaphysics of Morals: „[A] human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things: his innate personality protects him from this“.

Thirdly, according to Kant, human dignity is a source of categorical ethical duties to refrain from certain acts. In the fundamental controversy between „deontological“ and „consequentialist“ ethics, Kant is one of the founders and main proponents of a deontological approach. Such a deontological understanding of human dignity is diametrically opposed to the idea of justifying violations of dignity by weighing up and offsetting it against gains for a greater good. Kant makes this clear, for example, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: „In the realm of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as an equivalent; what, on the other hand, is above all price, and therefore does not allow for an equivalent, has a dignity.“

In Kant’s system, these remarks on human dignity belong, as cannot be emphasized strongly enough, to the doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre), not to the doctrine of law (Rechtslehre). However, he also drew on some of the basic ideas in his doctrine of law, for example in justifying a prohibition of cruel forms of executing the death penalty.

In drafting Germany’s Basic Law in 1948 and 1949, the Parliamentary Council drew on this common understanding of Kant’s formulations, which were generally known at the time as part of the general educational heritage. It is therefore possible to defend the thesis of a partial, historical reception of Kantian ideas by the historical framers and adopters of the constitution.

However, such a reception or adaptation does (of course) not mean incorporation. Instead, it is at the same time a reinterpretation. Three important differences between Kant’s philosophy and the Grundgesetz should be particularly emphasized.

Firstly, Kant’s moral and legal philosophy would at least offer considerable resistance to such an incorporation. For one thing, as already mentioned, Kant does not equate the doctrine of virtue with the doctrine of law, and much less he equates it with positive law. Even where the doctrine of law takes up basic ideas of human dignity, this does not necessarily mean any influence on positive law for the arch-positivist Kant, who denied any right of resistance.

Secondly, in its deliberations, the Parliamentary Council attached great importance to the ideological neutrality of the Basic Law, which forbids blanket incorporation of a particular philosophy as much as that of a particular religion. In the debate on natural law, Theodor Heuss and Carlo Schmid in particular emphasized that the Basic Law could not be interpreted by recourse to Christian natural law, for example, but that the constitution’s concretization of the values of dignity, freedom and equality must be and remain decisive for its necessary further development.

And thirdly, unlike Kant, the framers and adopters of the German Constitution regarded the capacity for autonomy not as a necessary prerequisite for human dignity, but only as its centrally protected good, where it exists. This results in particular from the fact that the Parliamentary Council classified the „euthanasia“ murders of mentally disabled people as a paradigmatic case of a violation of human dignity.

There was therefore no incorporation of Kant’s philosophy into the constitution. There was, however, an adaptation and reinterpretation of certain elements and formulations of Kantian philosophy – above all the self-purpose formula and the prohibition of treating people like things, but also the basic deontological idea of rights which are inviolable in the sense of being balancing-proof, meaning that they cannot be outweighed by even the greatest gains for a supposedly greater good.

When we commemorate Kant today, on his 300th birthday, his racism must be taken into account just as much as the blind spots of Western Enlightenment philosophy. These include, for example, the idea that a philosopher could determine substantial principles of morality or the philosophy of law a priori in his chamber, without regard to the historical circumstances and the processes of democratic decision-making, as well as an unreflected belief in progress in the theory of history.

At the same time, however, it does not seem out of the question to adapt elements of Kantian philosophy in a timely fashion, as the approaches of John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas show, for example – if they are themselves updated, for example with Danielle Allen or Anna Katharina Mangold, and the rights to democratic participation and equality are given their proper weight. The positive constitutional law of the German Constitution shows considerable correspondence with such approaches, not least thanks to that dynamic development by the Federal Constitutional Court which its original public meaning demands. There is no reason, then, to abandon the Enlightenment idea of equality, according to which everyone has the same right to dignity and the free pursuit of their happiness.

This blogpost is an English translation of the German version „Immanuel Kants 300. Geburtstag und das Grundgesetz“ (created with the help of DeepL).