Categorical Imperatives

For many years, the philosopher Immanuel Kant has argued for the existence of categorical imperatives. He defines categorical imperatives as rules that must be followed regardless of external circumstances, and that have content that is sufficient enough in and of itself to provide an agent with reason to act in a certain way. He is certain that moral rules fall under this label, and since his death, many of his followers have fought to support this claim.
However, in 1972 a woman named Phillipa Foot presented an argument against this claim in her paper entitled, “Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives.” Although she asserts in the paper that Kant is incorrect, an analysis of her argument may reveal that she does actually agree with him to an extent, but merely considers his account of categorical imperatives to be incomplete. In other words, moral imperatives may be categorical in the sense that they are unconditional, but not in the sense that they themselves provide agents with reasons to act in a certain way. Now, in order to explain that moral imperatives are not, in

If you assume at first that she is going home, you might advise her to buy a ticket for a train that is heading for New York, where she lives. However, if you then discover that your initial assumption was incorrect, and that she is actually at the train station to buy a ticket to see her friend in Charleston, then you would retract your advice that she purchase a ticket to New York, because doing so will not lead to her getting what she desires. Now, Foot is not the only philosopher who has written about the issue of moral reasoning. A man named Bernard Williams has also written about the topic, and in his article “Internal and External Reasons,” he provides a framework for how we can organize Laura’s thought process, which he calls the sub-Humean model of the internal