ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why the dialectical necessity of Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) (its being a strict requirement of human agential self-understanding, “HASU”) makes the PGC the categorical imperative by synthesizing Gewirth's argument for the PGC with Kant's argument for the existence of a categorical imperative. Against the objection that dialectically necessary requirements are not categorically binding because one might not care that one contradicts them, it argues that it is not only a necessary condition of the existence of a categorical imperative (which can only be a dialectically necessary requirement by its concept) that one might not care that one contradicts one's dialectically necessary requirements. It is also a sufficient condition because all human thought presupposes the a priori powers of HASU, in consequence of which to deny that the PGC is the categorical imperative is to deny that one can deny that it is the categorical imperative.
