Were Kant's hypothetical imperatives wide-scope oughts?

Simon Rippon*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

I defend the claim that Kant held a wide-scope view of hypothetical imperatives, against objections raised by Mark Schroeder [2005]. There is an important objection, now commonly known as the bootstrapping problem, to the alternative, narrow-scope, view which Schroeder attributes to Kant. Schroeder argues that Kant has sufficient resources to reply to the bootstrapping problem, and claims that this leaves us with no good reason to attribute to Kant the wide-scope view. I show that Schroeder's Kantian reply to the bootstrapping problem cannot fully answer it. Schroeder also offers three main textual arguments for attributing to Kant the narrow-scope view: from Kant's claim that the moral imperative is unique in virtue of its categoricity, from Kant's distinction between problematic and assertoric hypothetical imperatives, and from Kant's conception of analyticity together with his claim that hypothetical imperatives are analytic. I argue that each of these views can be understood as cohering with the more plausible wide-scope view of hypothetical imperatives.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)783-788
Number of pages6
JournalAustralasian Journal of Philosophy
Volume92
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Oct 2014

Keywords

  • Categorical Imperative
  • Hypothetical imperative
  • Instrumental principle
  • Kant
  • Wide-scope

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