An imperative is a statement of what should be done. It has been previously stated that Hume realised a 'should' statement cannot be produced from an 'is' statement. In other words, experience may only provide us with HYPOTHETICAL IMPERATIVES (If you want to be healthy, you should exercise) A description of the way the world IS cannot tell us the way it SHOULD be.
A Categorical Imperative is a should statement, but it is not based on experience, and doesn’t rely on a particular outcome. Rather, it logically precedes experience, or helps us make sense of experience. In another area of thinking, Kant showed that we must presume that time moves forwards – our mind imposes this on our experiences to make sense of them. We therefore could never demonstrate or prove this through experience.
It is like that with the categorical imperative: certain actions are logically inconsistent and would make no sense as universal laws, such as lying. As a result, ‘Do not lie’ is a categorical imperative. This understanding that our mind plays an active role in ordering and shaping our experience was revolutionary, and is Kant’s greatest achievement.
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