Doth unto God

In a bold attempt, I'd like to answer a question from Luke: what is the morality of things we do to God?

If God cannot be immoral, whatever he does to us cannot be immoral, then if we do the same thing to God, would our action be also moral?

Kant does not see God in a traditional sense, but as a moral ideal. As Dr. J points out in class the traditional God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omnipresent.  However I do not find in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals a reference to God other than “the idea of moral perfection” (27).

This means, if God is rational, then His reason infallibly determines the will (31). Therefore, his action is “objectively necessary” and “subjectively necessary”. It is subjectively necessary because God has no choice but to produce a will that only follows His reason, completely a priori and completely good. This necessary good will cannot but produce the maxim on which He aught to act. A rational being’s will is a condition of her action. If God can have nothing but a good will, he can do nothing but a good action.

However, if this God Kant speaks of is the one described in the Old Testament, we see a possible contradiction. God does things as horrible as holocaust, on the basis of its aim for a greater good. This kind of action based on hypothetical imperative is the last thing Kant would call moral. We must either assume that Kant is talking about a different God than the Old Testament God, or assume that the good outcomes are not the motivation for God's superficially immoral actions. The former is a likelier case of the two; we can just say that Kant’s God is only an idea of the morally perfect and nothing else. For Kant, the Old Testament and all other accounts of God alike are only mythical tales (which is a notion widely held among the renaissance intellectuals).  

If we have to say God, as a rational being, did things such as mass murder to humanity, and we accept that God’s actions to be good because they follow a priori objective principles, then we come into a situation where we cannot see God’s reason as the same as that of humans’, a position impossible in Kant’s moral framework. For Kant, all rational beings share the same kind of reason, which under no influence of material/experience can only produce objective principles that are valid for all rational beings (38).

If we say God is in deed rational in the same way rational humans are rational, his reason is independent of the condition of the object, and his holocaust necessarily follows an objective principle that is valid for all rational beings. Would this mean holocausts committed by humans unto other rational beings must follow an objective principle? No. The actions of holocaust only have moral import if the human subject conducts it from her will following strictly objective principles that she follows by obeying categorical imperative. This leads to a disturbing result: holocaust can have moral import when they are done following an objective principle (which is generalizable).

To finally answer the question, if a human does horrible things to God, let’s say blasphemy (which is the only one I can think of that is feasible), the bad words are moral under one condition, namely when she blasphemes against God solely out of duty to obey categorical imperative. Now we need to think if we would speak irreverently against other people in a kingdom of ends. Our reason alone (supposedly) tells us no. 

Among the answers I present here concerning what Kant thinks of the actions God does to humans, the only one that does not lead to contradiction is the first proposed: God is only an idea for Kant and therefore he does not account for any action God does in the Old Testament. However what we humans do to God does have moral import if we do them out of respect for the objective principle. The moral import of what we do to God is not different from that of any action we do to any other rational being. 

Here is my question: do humans have more freedom when the moral imports of their actions are in theory attainable by merit of their reason, though not likely in the real world, as Kant argues? In this sense, humans are less morally perfect than God only because they cannot escape from a material world filled with experiences and therefore have to follow categorical imperatives to be moral. How do you feel about the idea that without experiences of our material world, we will be the same as God?