Does the Categorical Imperative Give Rise to a Contradiction in the Will?

Abstract

The Brave New World-style utilitarian dystopia is a familiar feature of cultural landscape; Kantian dystopias are harder to come by, perhaps because, until Rawls, Kantian morality presented itself as a primarily personal rather than political program. This asymmetry is peculiar for formal reasons, because one phase of deliberative process on which Kant insists is to ask what world at large would be like if everyone did whatever it is one is thinking of doing. I do not propose to write a Kantian Brave New World myself, but I am going to ask, of what these days is called the CI-procedure, what would happen if everybody followed it. I will argue that if CI-procedure works as advertised, it exposes a practical incoherence in commitment to having it govern one's actions: in Kantian vocabulary that goes with territory, that Categorical Imperative gives rise to a contradiction in will. (Less formally, that it is self-refuting.) My target will be a recently influential interpretation of Kant, due primarily to John Rawls and a number of his students, most prominently Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Barbara Herman, a group I will for convenience refer to as New Kantians.1 Although it does draw on earlier interpretative work, this body of writing is relatively self-contained, and manageable in a way that Kant literature as a whole no longer is. I don't myself wish to take a stand on whether New Kantian reading is exegetically correct; it suffices for present purposes that it has proven itself interesting, plausible, and powerful enough to have moved Kantian moral philosophy back from marginalized position it occupied a little over a quarter-century ago to center of contemporary ethics. I will begin by rehearsing CI-procedure and theory that accompanies it; reader is warned that setup will take more time than is usual in papers of this kind. Kant himself used label 'Categorical Imperative' to mark three ideas that he thought were at bottom same: practical priority of universalizability, of respect for persons, and of autonomy. They are, however, at any rate on surface, rather different, and in order to sidestep issue of whether different versions of Categorical Imperative are in fact equivalent, I