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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 367 5. Imperatives I now propose an analysis of the term "ought," as it appears in moral contexts, that is based on the foregoing discussion of the loss of innocence - i.e. on the acknowledgement to which each of us is forced at some point in our lives, that we are not as we morally supposed ourselves and others to be. The slippage between an authoritatively established ideal descriptive moral theory and our conscious deviations from it is even greater in a categorical imperative than it was in a command. Kant defines imperatives as "only formulae ... for expressing the relation of objective laws of the will in general to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being - for example, of the human will" (G, Ak. 414; italics added). Since an objectively necessitating law is a command, an imperative for Kant is a formula for expressing the relation of a command to the imperfectly rational will it necessitates; i.e. the relation of an ideal descriptive principle to the non-ideal reality of human motivation. Rather than (11) You clean up your room. or (12) You will clean up your room. or even (13) Clean up your room. all of which express the factual authority of the indicative mood to some extent, the subjunctive mood of the imperative in (14) You ought to clean up your room. expresses something less. If a command expresses our conception of a law as requiring but not ensuring our compliance, a categorical imperative expresses, in addition, our conception of ourselves as unpredictable variables whose compliance with the law is in question. In Kant's writings, the German word usually translated in English as "ought" is sollen, which means more precisely "should," "shall," or, equivalently, "is supposed to." Sollen appears in sentences such as, (15) Die soll um sechs Uhr ankommen. which means, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
