Is the categorical imperative a law that applies to all rational beings? What is the categorical imperative? .
Response.
According to Kant the categorical imperative is a principle in which you have an obligation to act morally in any given situation and is not dependent on a person's desires. Kant's explanation of this is that our actions should have a form of moral conduct meaning they should be derivable from some universal principle (Kant 284). An example of this would be lying when you feel like it or killing when someone has wronged you. Kant explains that these acts are only okay if you want them to be willed into a universal law. It is the foundation of morality because it gathers reasons as to how our moral actions allow each person to act out of their own personal desires in which this could distract ones judgments on a situation. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher born in 1742 and the proponent of the law of the categorical imperative. .
In this essay I will be explaining Kant's theory of judgments, the synthetic, a priori and a posteriori law, his explanation on motivations, as they are explained as conditional and unconditional, as well as motivations from duty and joy, and finally showing the negative and positive aspects of his theory the categorical imperative explaining why we all follow this law. We will also be answering the question as to whether Kant's law of the categorical imperative applies to all rational beings or whether it is a flawed observation by which many do not see or believe to not occur in their lives. .
Kant's explanation of judgments begins with his theory of two basic forms of judgments, analytic and synthetic, which prove whether a judgment is true or false. A judgment will be considered analytic when the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject (Kant 235). For example the phrase all bachelors are unmarried men, this is analytic because it portrays the true definition of what a bachelor is.
