How am I misunderstanding the Categorical Imperative?

I’d like to work my way out of this one, but I just Kant.

OK, so I decide that, all things considered, I’d rather be in Seattle. This entails me giving my time and talents to that region’s economy, as opposed to, say, St. Louis’ or New York City’s economies. I do this for purely selfish reasons: I like places where the regional totem is a loogie and the drizzling cuts the ganja smoke.

However, according to the Categorical Imperative, I must regard my end and imagine what the world would be like if everyone did the same. Obviously, if everyone moved to Seattle, the place would become a stinking hellhole, destroying the world economy and plunging us all into caffeinated chaos.

The same logic works for anywhere I might want to live: If everyone moved there, the whole system collapses and it’s my fault for not reading Kant closely enough.

How would the Real Pissant have picked a place to live?

I can’t claim any real familiarity with or understanding of Kant’s works, but maybe you’re just applying the Categorical Imperative at too low a level of abstraction. In other words, maybe it should be: “What would the world be like if tomorrow everyone up and moved to their favorite city?”

Your thought experiment has proven that “I must live in Seattle” is NOT a categorical imperative - it doesn’t work if everyone follows it.

If there was a CI in this respect, it might be something like “Everyone should live somewhere that makes them happy and productive.” While this might generate some population shifts, it’s not going to have everyone piling into the same city.

All that certainly sounds like a reasonable conclusion.

The problem I see with this is that if everyone decided to do this, the resulting population shifts might cause at least some places to be no longer conducive to happiness and productivity for at least some of the emigres. For example, all lovers of xyz may move to the city known for having the best xyz, thus depleting the available xyz in that city.

Yes, essentially you’ve misunderstood what acting in accordance with the categorical imperative means. The reply saying that you’re applying your thinking “at the wrong level” has it right.

Kant’s moral theory is extremely complicated but the basic summary is this: Kant’s goal is to find the ultimate principle of morality. He starts with what he believes is the self-evident statement that “it is not possible to think of anywhere in the world, indeed even outside it, that can be held to be good without restriction except for a good will”. Anything else could potentially not be good: even qualities like courage or happiness are not good if they’re used for evil ends, or experienced by evil people. They’re only good if the person experiencing them has a “good will” at the same time. So only good will itself is unconditionally good. He doesn’t provide much justification for this, but there you go.

This means that the consequence of an action has nothing to do with whether it was “good” or not. The only thing that matters is whether the person had a “good will” when they did it - ie. whether their intention was right. Kant then argues that since human reason must have a purpose (you have to run with him a bit on these things), the purpose of our human reason must be to produce a good will. The production of a good will is the only goal of morality.

Kant then makes the step into explaining how this goal of morality translates into our “moral duty” in everyday life: he says that there are two types of actions, actions from duty (ie. moving cities solely because you’re trying to act in accordance with the moral law) and actions from inclination (ie. moving because you like a different football team). If your action is motivated by any element of inclination at all, it is not moral. This has the side effect of meaning it’s impossible to tell if someone else has acted morally or not, because you can’t know what their intention was. Furthermore, an action is not good because of its aim, but because of the maxim you were acting up when you did it. It doesn’t matter if you saved a little girl’s life with the aim of simply “saving her life”; what matters is that you were acting for the right reason, in accordance with the right maxim, called the “principle of willing”.

Kant then says that from these previous two points we can automatically draw the inference that “Duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law”. The law which creates this duty, itself, must be our only consideration when we make any action, if we want that action to be moral, regardless of its consequences or our aims. Since any form of inclination is not moral, the only thing this law can be is “act only in such a way that you could will your maxim to be a universal law”. This is an always and everywhere the only moral imperative - it is the categorical imperative (there’s only one).

So, to answer your question: these maxims that we must act upon, if we are to act in accordance with the categorical imperative and thus morally, are broad maxims concerning morality and containing no element of inclination. “I want to move to New York because I like the food” is not moral because you’d be acting from inclination. Moral maxims are wider and broader than that, and basically you’re applying them at the wrong level, with the wrong approach in the OP.

That’s just a summary of his introduction; like I said, it’s all very complicated and there’s no one alive who believes any of it is remotely correct any more, a situation I found with most famous philosophical theories. But it’s interesting I suppose.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative applies only to moral decision.

Practical or idiosyncratic decision about where to live would not qualify as a
moral choice in Kant’s book, I don’t think.

Viz: if everyone wanted to move to Seattle (or Kaliningrad, nee Koenigsberg)
the limiting factors would be practical and idiosynratic, not moral: how many
people could afford to move there, practically, and how many would decide to
bear the expense, idiosyncratically?

If you wanna take a shot at Kant’s Categorical Imperative the best place to do it
concerns his position on whether it is ever permissible to lie. IMO Kant’s position
here is not merely untenable, it is ridiculous.

As Kant would have it, *it is never permissible to lie. *If a homicidal maniac came
up to you and asked "“where is so-and-so, I want to find him and kill him”,
according to Kant it would be immoral for you to lie about the location of the
maniac’s intended victim.

This problem could only arise on Twin-Earth, though.