NECESSITY AND UNIVERSALITY OF MORAL LAW

NECESSITY AND UNIVERSALITY OF MORAL LAW: BY Maxm D'Souza S

The characteristic features of a practical law are necessity and universality which elevate the law of an action to the status of a command of duty. Kant speaks about the necessity and universality of moral law in the context of "a priori synthetic" judgments. There are two kinds of judgments, namely, synthetic judgments, which are the result of synthesis of the facts, or data of experience, and analytic judgments, which are the result of the analysis of the subject and predicate, without immediate reference to experience. This classification does not satisfy Kant. He argues that analytic judgments does not provide ambience for the advance of knowledge at all, since they always remain within the concepts and make no advance beyond the data of the concepts. At the same time he also argues that the synthetic judgments have no scientific value, hence they must be contingent and particular. Therefore he proposes to introduce a third class, namely, a
priori synthetic judgments, which are synthetic because the content of them is supplied by a synthesis of the facts of experience, and a priori, because the form of universality and necessity is imposed on them by the understanding independently of experience. An example would be, according to Kant, "Every effect must have a cause." Our concepts of effect and cause are supplied by experience; but the universality and necessity of principle are derived from the a priori endowment of the mind.

Kant also says that the law is capable of inspiring respect by reason of its universality and necessity, and hence lays down the following general formula of the moral law: "Act so that the maxim may be capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings." Necessity and universality, he declares, cannot be derived from experience, whose subject matter is always particular and contingent, but from the mind alone, from the cognitive forms innate in it. Hence the moral law originates in pure reason and is enunciated by a priori synthetical judgment --a priori because it has its reason, not in experience, but in the mind itself; synthetical, because it is formed not by the analysis of a conception, but by an extension of it.

When a rational self legislates a law it has to be conformed to the universal law. The universal validity of the law rests on the fact that it is reason that recognizes the law and will that legislates. When will is free from all external causes such as inclinations and impulses then the will is enacting the law for itself and by itself on behalf of all rational beings. All moral laws shall be universal laws, which apply to everyone under any circumstance without any exception. The laws are also necessary in so far as without them the human living would be impossible. A moral law that is legislated by reason has an unconditional force because it derives its authority from reason that is not corrupted by nature. This law commands from all rational beings obedience. This unconditional force can be described as necessary and the laws are known in Kantian system rationally necessary laws.