Kant’s most prominent formulation of the Categorical Imperative, known as the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), is generally thought to demand that one act only on maxims that one can will as universal laws without this generating a contradiction. Kant's view is standardly summarized as requiring the 'universalizability' of one's maxims and described in terms of the distinction between 'contradictions in conception' and 'contradictions in the will'. Focusing on the underappreciated significance of the simultaneity condition included in the FUL, I (...) argue, by contrast, that the principle is better read as requiring that one be able to will two things simultaneously without self-contradiction, namely, that a maxim be one's own and that it be a universal law. This amounts to a new interpretation of the FUL with significant interpretive and philosophical advantages. (shrink)

In this paper, I confront Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection. I argue that recent attempts to respond to this objection fail, and I argue that their failure is compounded by the failure of recent attempts to show how the Formula of Universal Law can be used to demarcate the category of obligatory maxims. I then set out my own response to the objection, drawing on remarks from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals for inspiration and developing a novel account of how the Formula (...) of Universal Law can be employed to determine the deontic status of action tokens, action types, and maxims. (shrink)

According to a widespread view, Kant's claim that moral wrongness has its ground in a contradiction underlying every immoral action is a “bluff” rooted in “dogmatic moralism”. Ever since Benjamin Constant's exchange with Kant, counterexamples have played a crucial role in showing why Kant's “universalization procedure” fails to determine the moral validity of our judgments. Despite recent attempts to bring Kant's ethics closer to Aristotle's, these counterexamples have prevailed. Most recently, Jesse Prinz has launched another attack along the same lines. (...) Prinz insists that Kant's universalization procedure fundamentally begs the question and fails to generate plausible results. Even authors who are very sympathetic to Kant, such as Allen Wood, have tried to downplay universalization, focusing instead on other formulations of the categorical imperative. In this paper, I respond directly to four of the most prominent counterexamples. In each case, I aim to show how we can uphold Kant's fundamental claim that the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative articulates the form of our particular moral judgments. (shrink)