my notes on kantian formalism

we should start with this question: what is the right thing to do?, which Kant considers takes us into ethical territory.

this territory requires several PERSON properties:

Reason, Freedom and free will.

the human faculty dealing with this is "practical reason." there is Reason (our thinking faculty) and the "practical" side of reason, which how we represent a proposition before we act: say, 

for example: "breaking a promise is wrong"

according to Kant these propositions (which exist in the language and in the culture) express the action of the will.

this brings the idea of moral obligation. Kant says: "the will is a faculty of choosing only what reason (irrespective of inclination) as practically necessary."

in this tree-diagram reason is supervenient, freedom is there hanging, and the will is the one which acts.

the form that expresses this model above is the categorical imperative, what makes an action right is that everyone can act on it and you would be willing to have everyone acting on it.  

there are two aspects here: the yellow underline means universalizability, the green underline means  reversibility, which is expressed by the categorical imperative diagram below.

the Categorical Imperative (above) expresses moral obligations, derived from the idea of DUTY (Pflicht). 

The action must satisfy the two branches simultaneously. 

There are two maxims here, the left (universalizability) and the right (reversibility). 

"R" Reversibility: is one-to-one, and it requires "a putting in the place of b" the old Golden Rule: "do onto others as you would have them do onto you".

"U" Universalizability: one imagines oneself as representing the club of "Homo Sapiens," sort of saying: "my action now becomes universally required for all moral agents" (a one-to-all relationship).