ABSTRACT

Among the premises that underwrite Parfit’s Ultimate Derivation is one that invokes Kant’s Formula of Universal Law, but this crucial premise is based on a particular reading of that formula. Parfit’s distinctive reading of Kant’s universal law attempts to raise serious doubts—vis-à-vis what Parfit calls the Rarity Objection and the Mixed Maxims Objection—about Kant’s original version of the universal law by questioning, in part, the viability of the cardinal Kantian notion of maxim. Then Parfit offers a reformulation of Kant’s universal law, which, in Parfit’s view, escapes the objections he had leveled against Kant’s original version—particularly since the reformulation makes no use of that allegedly dubious notion of “maxim.” Parfit concludes that his reformulation of Kant’s universal law is not only less objectionable and more philosophical significant but also quite Kantian in spirit. To that end, Parfit presents what he calls Each–We Dilemmas. In view of it, Parfit defends Kant’s universal law as one that enables us to clearly see the sometimes precarious effects of what we do, are doing, or have done. Parfit’s two objections—the Threshold Objection and the Ideal World Objection—are discussed with a view to showing that Parfit’s unique reading of Kant’s universal law is unmistakably consequentialist, and to that extent it raises the question, “Just how Kantian is Parfit’s reformulation of Kant’s universal law?” This, of course, has clear implication for Parfit’s Ultimate Derivation.