Categorical Imperative Analysis

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The Categorical Imperative is a philosophical idea that has some important main ideas. The first one is that one must act as if the maxim that you are following is a universal law (if everyone else did it), secondly one must never treat a person as a way to achieve your goal. The idea of the Categorical Imperative was conceived by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804 (Rolff). Kant, famous for his other writings in metaphysics, aesthetics, and epistemology, was no amateur in the philosophical world of time, also contributing ideas to political science. In this paper, I will summarize the portion of the article in Reason and Responsibility by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau that carries Kant’s most important work …show more content…

A duty can either be a perfect duty or something that we are obliged to do all the time, or an imperfect duty (something we should do as often as possible but can not always be expected to do) (CUNY). The Categorical Imperative cannot differentiate between two perfect duties, for example, there would be no difference between lying and killing, both are seen as immoral actions and it does not matter if one is “worse”, they are both evenly bad. The Categorical Imperative also cannot differentiate between a perfect and imperfect duty. A perfect duty would be something such as killing, and an imperfect duty would be loving someone. While both are extremely different, one being encouraged while the other is highly persecuted, the Categorical Imperative cannot tell the difference between these two (CUNY). Such a lack of differentiation can be difficult to swallow, given that in our society nowadays, we differentiate between two crimes. A burglar most likely will not be imprisoned for the same length as someone who committed a first-degree murder. Many people will find the inability to differentiate or the rigidity of the Categorical Imperative cold-blooded or scientific, but that’s the purpose of the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative is a fascinating subject, and I have learned a lot of it by researching it. While it may have its difficulties, all philosophical-related subjects always find an objection pinned to them. And while it may be hard to swallow, I would have to say I agree with Immanuel Kant on most of it, but I find that it should be fixed to be able to differentiate between

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