A tale of two conflicts : on Pauline Kleingeld’s new reading of the Formula of Universal Law
Date
19/12/2018Author
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Abstract
Pauline Kleingeld’s “Contradiction and Kant’s Formula of Universal Law”, published in this journal in 2017, presents a powerful challenge to what has become the standard (‘practical’) reconstruction of the categorical imperative. In this response to Kleingeld, I argue that she is right to emphasise the ‘simultaneity requirement’ - that we must be able to will a proposed maxim and ‘simulataneously’, ‘also’ or ‘at the same time’ the maxim in its universalised form - but I deny that this removes the categorical imperative test from the world of universalisation because the agent must be understood as part of that world. There are two distinct types of conflict: a contradiction that results from non-universalisability and Kleingeld’s ‘volitional’ conflict, located within the will of the immoral agent. The standard ‘practical’ reconstruction of the categorical imperative remains largely intact.
Citation
Timmermann , J 2018 , ' A tale of two conflicts : on Pauline Kleingeld’s new reading of the Formula of Universal Law ' , Kant-Studien , vol. 109 , no. 4 , pp. 581-596 . https://doi.org/10.1515/kant-2018-4003
Publication
Kant-Studien
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0022-8877Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1515/kant-2018-4003
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