Kant's Categorical Imperative

Kant's Categorical Imperative

In Kant's first publication, he describes the categorical imperative: actions that are inherently good in themselves and do not use other actions or people as a means to an end.

Immanuel Kant

Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

The Sophia Project
http://www.sophia-project.org/ethics.html

1785

Maxim Geller

Hume's Treatise

Passage

Moral Philosophy & Ethics

Now all imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. The former represent
the practical necessity of a possible action as means to something else that is willed (or at least
which one might possibly will). The categorical imperative would be that which represented
an action as necessary of itself without reference to another end, i.e. as objectively necessary.
Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and on this account, for a
subject who is practically determinable by reason, necessary, all imperatives are formulæ determining an action which is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some respects.
If now the action is good only as a means to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical;
if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will
which of itself conforms to reason, then it is categorical