ABSTRACT
Certain contemporary moral philosophers seem to overlook the fact that even if all lawful maxims of action are universalizable, it does not follow that all universalizable things are eo ipso maxims of moral action. There are good S-F stories dealing with this problem and bad ones. The Russians, who as dialectical materialists reject all theological or God-related transcendent grounding for personal value have found themselves in a curious position with dolphins. Morality, the treatment of Ends or Others as Ends, is an overcoming of this epistemic isolation; it is a transcendence of the subjectivity of the subject, itself a transcendence of the world. Behind the ultimately irrelevant and tedious rationalism of the Groundwork there is a valuable piece of conceptual analysis at least begun: Kant is attempting to refine, and to provide a humanistic and a-theological translation of, the commandment to “Love they neighbour as thyself”.
