Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative is to act according to that maxim which you can simultaneously will to be a universal law. However, I think that there are no maxims regarding actions alone that may be coherently willed universally, because one can easily contrive a situation where any action is permissible to prevent a greater evil. Instead, there are combinations of actions and sets of motivations that may coherently be willed to be prohibited or permissible. In the foregoing text, I propose and explore an augmentation of Kant’s formalization that resolves this central weakness.

Leave a comment