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The general concept or principle of moral universalizability is that moral principles, maxims, norms, facts, predicates, rules, etc., are universally true; that is, if they are true as applied to some particular case (an action, person, etc.) then they are true of all other cases of this sort.
A maxim is a moral rule or principle, which can be considered dependent on one's philosophy. A maxim is often pedagogical and motivates specific actions. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines it as: Generally any simple and memorable rule or guide for living; for example, 'neither a borrower nor a lender be'.
It states that an action can only be moral if it is motivated by a sense of duty, and its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law. Central to Kant's theory of the moral law is the categorical imperative. Kant formulated the categorical imperative in various ways.
The concept of universalizability was set out by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as part of his work Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.It is part of the first formulation of his categorical imperative, which states that the only morally acceptable maxims of our actions are those that could rationally be willed to be universal law.
Laws (or commands), by definition, apply universally. From this observation, Kant derives the categorical imperative, which requires that moral agents act only in a way that the principle of their will could become a universal law. [xi] The categorical imperative is a test of proposed maxims; it does not generate a list of duties on its own ...
This leads to the first formulation of the categorical imperative, sometimes called the principle of universalizability: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." [1] Closely connected with this formulation is the law of nature formulation.
The maxim has been invoked by the United States Supreme Court in various cases, such as the 1798 case Calder v. Bull ("a law that makes a man a Judge in his own cause [...] is against all reason and justice") and the 1974 case Arnett v. Kennedy ("we might start with a first principle: '[N]o man shall be a judge in his own cause.'
Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals", [1] regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other distinguishing feature. [2]