The first and second formulations of Kant's categorical imperative are logically equivalent
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Scholarship on Kantian ethics indicates that the various formulations of the categorical imperative, including the first and second, represent alternative statements or identical formulations of the same basic moral law.
This book offers new readings of Kant’s "universal law" and "humanity" formulations of the categorical imperative. It shows how, on these readings, the formulas do indeed turn out being alternative statements of the same basic moral law, and in the process responds to many of the standard objections raised against Kant’s theory. Its first chapter briefly explores the ways in which Kant draws on his philosophical predecessors such as Plato (and especially Plato’s Republic) and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. The second chapter offers a new reading of the relation between the universal law and humanity formulas by relating both of these to a third formula of Kant’s, viz. the "law of nature" formula, and also to Kant’s ideas about laws in general and human nature in particular. The third chapter considers and rejects some influential recent attempts to understand Kant’s argument for the humanity formula, and offers an alternative reconstruction instead. Chapter four considers what it is to flourish as a human being in line with Kant’s basic formulas of morality, and argues that the standard readings of the humanity formula cannot properly account for its relation to Kant’s views about the highest human good.
This chapter defends Kant’s claim that all the formula for the derivation of the categorical imperative are in some sense ‘identical’. I show that although Kant rejects the claim that the ultimate object of theology (God) can be a worthy object for us, nonetheless, Kant’s movement of thought still has a theological shape. This is because Kant is concerned with what would be a worthy object for a rational being, whose dignity is such that the object of attention must not be in any sense external. This is the oldest theological problem of all, reaching back through Aquinas, and back to Aristotle and Plato, gravitating towards a version of the perennial answer, ‘thought thinking itself’. Kant claims, not entirely perspicuously, that the different formulations are ‘three ways of representing the principle of morality’, and that although they are at ‘bottom only so many formulae of the very same law’, nonetheless ‘there is a difference among them…intended to bring an idea of reason closer to intuition’. Commentators have struggled to hold together Kant’s claims, with regard to the ‘sameness’ of, and the ‘difference’ between, the formulae, interpretative approaches tend to focus exclusively on either the purported identity or difference. It is suggested that if autonomy is a variation on the ancient theological problem of ‘thought thinking itself’, then we might find a fundamental unity underlying the different formulae, such that the will’s giving to itself its own self-conception is the single reality represented under different aspects, in the various formulae.
decision-making. This is what the first two formulations of the categorical imperative are about. They provide … of nature’.** As these two formulations of the categorical imperative are almost identical, we shall … consider them together. Kant’s various formulations of the categor- ical imperative are addressed to the agent:
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