Neither did Kant when he devised the
Categorical Imperative.
The
categorical imperative (CI) shows in each case what we have to do to avoid the failure to be moved by a law endorsed by our own will--to avoid, that is, the failure to act for reasons.
We can and must reconnect with the
categorical imperative of business: Create growth.
For Kant the commands of morality are
categorical imperatives; in fact, there is only one such command (which can be given at least three different formulations), and so he calls it the
categorical imperative (G 416).
For example, in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game one might be tempted to induce cooperative behavior by appealing to the
categorical imperative.
10) Lacan thus highlights the ways in which Kant's
categorical imperative is analogous to perversion, defined by psychoanalysis as the pathological fixation of enjoyment that persists within the post-Oedipal economy of drive-satisfaction (that is, within the symbolic order).
The libertarian nonaggression principle is but one implication of the undeniable
categorical imperative that proper ways to resolve disputes ought to be determined by argumentation or argumentatively validated methods among the parties to a dispute.
Yet Stephen Engstrom's excellent recent book, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the
Categorical Imperative (Harvard University Press 2009), demonstrates that there are still fresh, illuminating ways to think about the general form of the
categorical imperative and its law of nature variant.
This section will consider an ethical analysis of the living will according to the first and second formulation of Kant's
Categorical Imperative.
He contends that Kant's notion of the
categorical imperative is a (social-) contractualist (pace Rousseau) "conception of rationality as universal agreement, or what is acceptable as a universal law" (230).
In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, any secret would constitute an exception that invalidates the
categorical imperative, to act such that one's action could become the maxim for a universal moral law.
Yet, notwithstanding a superficial plausibility, the
categorical imperative proves inadequate as a basis for ethical universality.
