Immanuel Kantian Ethics

In early fall of 2015, news agencies across the U.S. were publishing stories about a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency detailing violations of the Clear Air Act by Volkswagen automobiles. It had been discovered by investigative teams that Volkswagen had been cheating emissions control tests with illegal software in their programmable diesel engines. The engines were programmed to lower their nitrogen (NOx) emissions during standard testing when in real-world driving, they actually produced roughly 40 times more NOx than standards allowed by the Clean Air Act. Global regulatory investigations were launched and Volkswagen stock, reputation, and sales plummeted. The cheating was found to have been implemented since 2009 diesel
engine cars were deployed, roughly 11 million vehicles worldwide. One year later, senior engineer James Liang pleaded guilty to charges of designing and implementing the software system that allowed Volkswagen cars to cheat emissions tests. Offering his compliance with current investigations, James Liang accepted a reduced penalty for his crime and offered his insight in to the transgression Volkswagen had committed for nearly 7 years.
James Liang’s actions are a perfect scenario to analyze ethically.
Kantian ethics can be used to analyze the moral implications of James’ decision without considering the consequences that occurred afterwards. Immanuel Kant’s theory of morality is based off of two virtues: good will and duty. Kant believed that good will is pure when analyzed morally whether or not the intentions of the good will succeeded or failed. To broaden the critique, a person’s good will can also be analyzed alongside a person’s duty to do some hypothetical good. A person who’s goodwill goes beyond what society may expect for example, would be held higher morally than someone who simply performs in accordance with their duty.
Duties can be categorized in two ways: perfect or imperfect. Perfect and imperfect duties are differentiated by one’s moral obligation to fulfill that duty always and completely or only situationally to varying degree. Perfect duties are the ones that must be fulfilled always and completely, imperfect duties the ones that allow variance. For example, Kant considers honesty a perfect duty; one must never tell a lie. Philanthropy is considered an imperfect duty; it is good to give, but an individual can decide the amount, recipient, and timing of the
giving.
Lastly is Kant’s starting point for moral analysis: the categorical imperative. Kant’s categorical imperative is the rule and the command that all people must follow in order to be judged as morally good. It states that a person should “act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” The maxim is a rule defined by the decision an individual intends to make. An individual must consider that his or her decision forms a new moral rule for that situation for anyone who may encounter it; that is called a maxim. To then analyze the morality of that situation, one must consider the implications, but not the actual consequences, of that maxim becoming a universal law, which everyone would follow were they to be in the same situation. This is the key difference from rule utilitarianism. Kant’s theory decides the morality of a decision based on the implications that decision if it were to become universal whereas rule utilitarianism judges the morality of decision based on the rules already implemented by society concerning the decision. Using honesty as an example again, Kant would deem any lie as immoral as if everyone were to lie as a universal law, communication would be impossible and society would fail. Rule utilitarianism would judge the lie against societies pre-existing rules. A white lie or lying to protect a child’s innocence could be deemed morally good. All these concepts, when combined, are an effective tool for analyzing the morality of decisions both small and large like that of James Liang in the Volkswagen “dieselgate” scandal.
In the case of James Liang, his decision was to design a cheating system for his company despite its potential liability and environmental impact.
However, the decision was not so black and white. James was a senior engineer for Volkswagen and had been with the company for 25 years prior to being transferred from Germany to the US to aid in the clean diesel program. In order to analyze this situation using Kantian ethics, James’ duty must be derived. He had duties to Volkswagen as well as to the general public and environment. With James’ help, Volkswagen knew their 2009 diesel automobiles would not meet the NOx standards. Therefore in this situation, he had an imperfect duty to complete a job for his company as well as an imperfect duty to report their wrongdoing. As James did admit to completing the job of aiding Volkswagen cheat the emissions tests, the maxim can be stated as the decision to agree to complete a job for one’s company despite its obvious legal and environmental implications. If this maxim were to become universal law, that is if everyone were to ignore the legality and negative environmental impact of a task given by their employer, would that be bad? In this particular case, James’ decision can be deemed morally permissible. A world where employees always complete tasks given by their company superiors despite some obvious potential for negative fallout would still function rather
normally.
It is important now to distinguish James’ decision from Volkswagen’s decision. What the company, and its leadership, wanted to do was illegal and would have negative environmental impact. The company’s decision to lie is morally wrong and impermissible from a Kantian perspective. James, as an employee, had the decision of agreeing to complete the task necessary for the company’s cheating, or not to, potentially risking his employment. This is where James’ decision attains its permissibility. James’ imperfect duty to himself to maintain employment and his imperfect duty to his employer to complete assigned tasks slightly outweigh the failure of overlooking the legality and negative environmental impact the decision carried. It is important to note that from an act or rule utilitarianism perspective, James’ actions would be deemed morally wrong as the consequences were reprehensible and the societal expectation or rule for not cheating tests was broken.
In conclusion, despite the negative consequences, Kantian ethics can be used to determine James Liang’s decision to help his company cheat emissions tests as morally permissible. His decision when compared against the categorical imperative does not provide any society breaking implications in order to judge the decision as morally negative, though it definitely can be deemed morally good in any way.