CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

From Philosopedia

CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant defined the ultimate moral obligation that applies a priori to everyone in all circumstances:

• Act according to that maxim which you could wish to be a universal law of nature upon which every one should act at all times;

• Always treat humanity in yourself and others as an end and never as merely a means;

• Act always as if you were a member of a merely possible kingdom of ends.

Following such commands, he believed, is a categorical imperative, a moral obligation that is unconditionally and universally binding. McCabe, however, said that Kant “was a man of very isolated and eccentric life who had been reared in a strict puritanical environment, and he never attempted to study the moral consciousness of others, so that his ethical philosophy is rather an analysis of one highly sophisticated individual conscience. His critics said that as he had destroyed the foundations of the ordinary arguments for God and immortality in his Critique of Pure Reason, he felt compelled to appeal to ‘practical reason.’ Neither psychology nor the modern science of ethics countenances his idea.” {CE; ER}