Two Dogmas of Kantian Ethics

Abstract

Kant claimed that there is just one supreme principle of ethics, the ‘‘categorical imperative...: Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’’ (G 4:421). According to this particular version of the principle, which he calls the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), a maxim (understood here via O’Neill’s schema as M: In circumstances C, I will do action A, to achieve end E) is morally acceptable just if it can be willed as a universal law; i.e., if its universal practice can be willed by some agent without thereby willing a contradiction in this same agent’s will. Such a contradiction appears when the agent wills both 1) the satisfaction of some end, and 2) the absence of some necessary conditions for satisfying this end or some other end the agent is rationally committed to, i.e. the agent thereby wills conditions under which it is impossible to satisfy such an end, or perhaps even to attempt to act upon the maxim in the first place (G 4:424). The second and fourth of Kant’s famous four examples (G 4: 422–423) exemplify maxims which generate contradictions in the attempt to will that all agents follow them. It is sometimes thought that the first and third examples do not make use of universalization, but actually these exemplify contradictions generated from willing the temporal universality of the maxim, i.e. willing that they had always been followed by previous time-stages of the current