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In On What Matters, Derek Parfit questions whether Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL) can provide agents with action guidance. The question arises because the FUL is in terms of maxims and there is a many–many relation between maxims and actions: even if the FUL is able satisfactorily to determine the deontic status of any given maxim, that has no obvious bearing on the deontic status of any given action. According to Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection, this has ‘unacceptable’ results (Parfit 2011: 290).
In this article I argue that recent attempts to deal with the Mixed Maxims Objection fail, in part because they fail to appreciate its scope. Parfit illustrates the objection with intuitively permissible actions that the FUL seems to render impermissible, and therefore Kantians have concentrated on the relationship between permissible maxims and permissible actions. But in so doing, they overlook other deontic categories, like the obligatory. This problem is then further compounded by the failure of recent and independent attempts to derive obligatory maxims from the FUL. I want to show that there is a solution to the problem Parfit raises, but I want to show that the solution is different from what recent philosophers have taken it to be.
The article is divided into four sections. In the first, I introduce Kant’s FUL and Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection. In the second, I explain and then criticize recent responses to Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection. In the third, I criticize recent attempts to show how the FUL can be used to determine the deontic status of maxims. In the fourth, I build on Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals to sketch my own positive solution to these issues.
1. Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection
Kant’s FUL is articulated first in part I of the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. It runs as follows: ‘I should never proceed otherwise than thusly, that I also could will my maxim should become a universal law’ (G, 4: 402.7–9). 1 From this it may be seen that the FUL is a moral test of maxims. If a maxim is universalizable, then it is permissible. If a maxim is not universalizable, then it is impermissible.
Kant gives various examples of impermissible maxims. One of the most...