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Categorical Imperative Of Kant

Decent Essays

Introduction:Kant’s categorical imperative and the Emptiness Charge in Kant’s Moral Philosophy
The emptiness charge derived from best Hegel’s known criticism of morality, at the first glance it is Hegel’s criticism of the first formulation of Kant’s category imperative, namely‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, it soon became somehow Hegel’s whole objection to Kant’s moral law. Hegel find many shortcomings in Kant’s morality, and most of all, the moral law in Kant’s ethical theory has no moral content, there is no criterion at all of moral right and wrong (PR § 135R). Hegel summarizes Kant by referring to‘the supreme principle of morality’ or the ‘the ultimate norm for …show more content…

(4:421) Kant defines a categorical imperative as follows: The categorical imperative would be the one that represented an action as objectively necessary by itself, without reference to another end. (4:414), there are other passages stating that C1 and C2 are equivalent, for example, Kant observes that the two are ‘at bottom only so many formulas of the very same law’ and that the principles they express are ‘basically the same’ (imGrundeeinerlei). (Gr.436, 438) Hegel’s narrow emptiness charge is mostly towards C1 therefore is also towards Kant’s whole categorical imperative. To make clear the number of formulations of categorical imperative is not my purpose of this thesis, but the discussion of equivalence thesis and distinctions between these formulations are rather vital in order for Kant’s readers have a view on Kantians’ strategy upon the emptiness charge. My discussion on equivalence thesis is in Silber’s formalist reconstruction

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