In matters of morality (as opposed to law, In matters of morality (as opposed to law), the important thing is to follow correct principles, not to find technicalities. As soon as someone writes on the bottom line “X is a moral act”, where X is what he/she happens to want to do at the moment, any further “moral reasoning” is just self-deception. Any reasonable person can tell that such an incredibly specific situation is useless for forming a categorical imperative. The fact that the idea of a categorical imperative breaks down when it is so vaguely specified is strong evidence against that particular implementation of it, but only weak evidence against the concept as a whole. It would require more work to define a standard of reasonableness for what situations can and can’t be generalized before one can say whether the categorical imperative does or doesn’t make sense.
That said, I suspect that if one starts with a naive categorical imperative like Matt expresses above and iteratively finds and patches flaws, one will eventually converge towards consequentialism. I could be proven wrong about this, though.
In matters of morality (as opposed to law, In matters of morality (as opposed to law), the important thing is to follow correct principles, not to find technicalities. As soon as someone writes on the bottom line “X is a moral act”, where X is what he/she happens to want to do at the moment, any further “moral reasoning” is just self-deception. Any reasonable person can tell that such an incredibly specific situation is useless for forming a categorical imperative. The fact that the idea of a categorical imperative breaks down when it is so vaguely specified is strong evidence against that particular implementation of it, but only weak evidence against the concept as a whole. It would require more work to define a standard of reasonableness for what situations can and can’t be generalized before one can say whether the categorical imperative does or doesn’t make sense.
That said, I suspect that if one starts with a naive categorical imperative like Matt expresses above and iteratively finds and patches flaws, one will eventually converge towards consequentialism. I could be proven wrong about this, though.