In Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is a text that demands to be understood using some of the philosopher's best-known concepts, including the categorical imperative, which is presented in the book as a means of assessing the motivations for individual action. For Kant, a proposition declaring a certain action as necessary includes means of assessing the motivations for one's actions. This contrasts with the hypothetical imperatives that Kant suggests that describe the means to achieve goals: for example, if I want to feel energized, I must eat something with sugar. On the other hand, a categorical imperative conveys a universal. This is described in Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative as follows: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can, at the same time, will that it become a universal law” (Kant, 1993, p. 30). He suggests that through “pure practical reason” we can decide ethically what is right and what is wrong. It is important to note that Kant contrasts this with "pure reason", which is the ability to know whether something is true without ever having demonstrated it, and with "practical reason" which allows us to understand the world in which we live. This right is based on pure practical reason set out in the Groundwork. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay For Kant, the ability to use practical reason has an important role to play in morality because it evolves even without dependent incentives. For Kant, this means that human reasoning is based on purely practical reasoning of choosing actions at the basic level because they are good, which Kant describes as the foundation of the nature of good will. He argues that to be good and moral in oneself, one must act with pure practical reason, which is part of a larger transcendental law that impacts how humans use reason pragmatically. Kant developed his moral philosophy after becoming dissatisfied with the moral philosophy of his time. He determined that reason, different from how one experiences the world empirically, could also be used to examine moral events and circumstances. The concept of reason significantly foreshadowed Kant's work and became a fundamental principle of moral reason. For Kant, moral questions could be determined by examining them in relation to pure practical reason, independent of any other empirical factors. As such, morality is not defined by sense, but is achieved a priori, by pure practical reason. The determining principle that moral questions may or may not be considered, without regard to other sensual factors, is what makes morality, for Kant, universally applicable. As a result, moral universalism became predominant in Kant's moral philosophy and became one of his most notable contributions to the field. As humans, Kant believed that we all seek to exercise some measure of freedom and desire. However, for Kant, self-awareness meant accepting individual autonomy and the ability to exercise free will. According to Kant, “the faculty of desiring in accordance with concepts, insofar as the basis which determines it to action resides in itself and not in its object, is called the faculty of “doing or refraining from doing as we hear it.” pleases” (Kant, 1993, p. 213). This means that those who use free will have an interesting characteristic: they allow us toempirically seeing an object in action and with desire, are able to base the will on a deterrent choice of action. Strictly speaking, the will has no basis in itself, but it can be determined by what Kant calls "inclination" which fundamentally involves our human senses and the ability to see and judge situations empirically, which which comes into account in the autonomy of individual actions, because this actually relates to what it means to be "free", or to have free will, which Kant says one must be able to understand in relation to a power causal, but without causality to do so. In Kant's first formulation of universality and the law of nature, we find an example of how Kant develops the moral proposition necessary for what he calls the "universalizing principle" (Kant, 1993, p. 92 ). For Kant, this rests on a formulation of the law of nature that can be reduced to what Kant calls "Act as if the maxims of your action were to become, by your will, a universal law of nature" (Kant, 1993, p. 421). . Accordingly, Kant believed that to confer any sort of moral responsibility and/or moral autonomy, a property must contain the will to be a law unto itself. There is therefore a law of nature which has a universalizing force and morality as such is fundamental to understanding it. This allowed Kant to develop his idea of ​​the categorical imperative as universal. It follows that for Kant, the construction of the moral law rests at its most fundamental level on the categorical imperative, which operates independently of individual interests or desires. The pure practical reason described by Kant is a way of assessing the motivations for an individual's action and, as such, they determine what our imperative duties are based on. In short, an imperative is basically a commandment that governs our actions. For example, being told to pay taxes is an imperative, as is being told not to eat or kill animals. However, for Kant, it is the categorical imperatives that command an unconditional sublimation to what he calls the “universalizing principle” that bind morality. to categorical imperatives. He argues that for morality to function as such, it must be based on a universalizing commandment that cannot simply be ignored. This is how Kant's categorical imperative and pure practical reason come into play in morality. However, many philosophers have attempted over the years to debunk Kant's moral philosophy. Some critics have proposed a thought experiment in response to Kant's moral philosophy, who argue that it can be seen in relation to the "Golden Rule" (quote). One of the major challenges to Kant's reasoning in the Grounding came during his lifetime by a French philosopher Benjamin Constant, believing that Kant's categorical imperative was erroneous, proposed a thought experiment that showed its incorrigibility interior. Constant stated that according to Kant's categorical imperative, it would be impossible to lie to a known murderer, thus suggesting that there is a weakness and the core of Kant's moral foundation. Constant suggested that there was an inherent weakness in Kant's premises, because while one could not lie to a murderer, moral actions did not always arise from pure practical reason. This challenge considered the possibility of moral actions as a means to an end, which Kant denied in his response to this challenge, claiming that to do so would be to deny being free and rational actors in the first place. The claim that lying to a murderer undermines the Kantian premise of the categorical imperative rests on the simple assumption that all moral actions., 77(9), 515-572.