Climbing the mountain

Abstract

The work explores the relationship between practical rationality, morality, and the nature of value. The central arguments are that practical reasons are provided by facts about what is in itself worth achieving or preventing, and not by our desires or aims; that we have both impartial and self-interested reasons, but these reasons are not comparable, so that it is often rational to act on either set of reasons; that Kant’s Formula of Humanity is best understood as a statement of two principles, the Consent Principle and the Mere Means Principle; that the Formula of Universal Law has several flaws, but can be revised by appealing to principles that are universally willable, and not to the agent’s maxim; that the Kantian Contractualist Formula, according to which we ought to follow the principles that everyone could rationally will, implies Rule Consequentialism; and that all these claims can be combined in the Triple Theory, according to which an act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable. – AI-generated abstract