Because the imperative is something that stems from the rational will, adherence to it is really only adherence to the law that the will itself created. The will, that is, is acting as the will tells itself it has to. Due to the circular nature of the will's imperative to behave a certain way, obedience to the imperative is actually obedience to the self, and obeying moral law requires nothing more or less than complete self-direction. The premise that moral law -- the categorical imperative -- is born out of the rational will is central to Kant's theory of ethics: "each individual agent regards itself as determining, by its decision to act in a certain way, that everyone (including itself) will always act according to the same general rule in the future" (Kemerling 2002). This is why the imerative is categorical, or universal, and at the same time an entirely anonymous creation of each independent rational will. Though Kant's ability to employ logical and rhetorical devices is far beyond my own, I do not fully trust the conclusions he has come to. more precisely, I do not trust his assertion that the rational will is responsible for creating the categorical imperative, or that morality can be a truly autonomous act. Rationality is shaped by experience; it is impossible to know ro even conceive of anything in a vacuum. Determining how one should act is precisely a determination about external events, and rational decisions must be made with information that might be internalized, but was at some point external....
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