Kant's Universal Formulation Of The Categorical Imperative

In this essay, I hope to argue that Kant’s Universal Law Formulation of the Categorical Imperative fails to consider individual situations as they are in the context of the world in which they were created. Instead the formulation seeks to generalize all scenarios, making each of them impossible to analyze due to this lack of specificity. For that reason, in order to appropriately apply Kant’s Universal Law Formulation of the Categorical Imperative it is necessary to first understand the definition of the Universal Law Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, and the context in which it is applied. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, ran a multitude of experiments in order to properly study lying and the scenarios that would cause them to …show more content…
More specifically, it would not be fitting to analyze solely the maxim that caused Ariely to conduct the study where he decided to lie to his participants in order to study lying, but also the maxim that motivated the participants to lie in the first place. In the study, it could be inferred that participants began to cheat on their exams in order to as well as they could on their exam and to maximize their rewards overall. While it is reasonable to argue that the act of cheating (and lying) is immoral through using the Universal Law Formulation because most people would not want it to become acceptable for lying to be the norm throughout society, is the motivation to maximize their reward an immoral principle in and of itself? This introduces a bigger question if it is wrong to maximize one’s opportunity. Following the logic of the Universal Law Formulation, it is reasonable to believe maximizing one’s opportunity would be a universal law because it is something most people seek to do. Let’s say that in Dan Ariely’s experiment, the reward of increased accuracy is more money. Additionally, in this situation, one of the participants is a homeless individual who would greatly benefit from a few extra dollars. By cheating and improving his accuracy, and obtaining more money, the individual might be able to afford to eat this day or afford to have a place to stay. This situation, shows one of the main pitfalls with the Universal Law Formulation -- it views maxims in an extremely elementary point of view and is willing to condemn actions without seeking to understand a deeper context. The problem with generalization is that it vilifies actions that have good intentions. With this knowledge, I ask if Dan Ariely is truly acting immorally is he is simply acting as a means to