Recent Work on Kantian Maxims I: Established Approaches 1 Rob Gressis* California State University, Northridge Abstract Maxims play a crucial role in Kant’s ethical philosophy, but there is significant disagreement about what maxims are. In this two-part essay, I survey eight different views of Kantian maxims, presenting their strengths, and their weaknesses. Part I: Established Approaches, begins with Ru ¨diger Bubner’s view that Kant took maxims to be what ordinary people of today take them to be, namely pithily expressed precepts of morality or prudence. Next comes the position, most associated with Ru ¨diger Bittner and Otfried Ho ¨ffe, that maxims are Lebensregeln, or ‘life-rules’ – quite general rules for how to conduct oneself based on equally general outlooks on how the world is. These first two interpretations make sense of Kant’s claim, made in his anthropological and pedagogical writings, that we have to learn how to act on maxims, but they become less plausible in light of Kant’s probable view that people always act on maxims – after all, how can people learn how to act on something they always act on anyway? The next two views, each advanced, at different times, by Onora O’Neill, make better sense of the fact that people always act on maxims, for they hold that maxims are intentions – either specific intentions, such as ‘to open the door’, or general intentions, such as ‘to make guests feel welcome’ – and it is perfectly sensible to claim that people always act on intentions. However, they face the same problem as the two previous views, which is that if people always act on maxims, what sense does it make to say they also have to learn how to act on them? Henry Allison, the main representative of the fifth view, claims, on the basis of Kant’s doctrine of the ‘highest maxim’, that maxims are princi- ples organized hierarchically, such that an agent endorses one maxim because she endorses a more general maxim. Unfortunately for Allison, there is little direct textual support for his claim that maxims are organized hierarchically. 1. Introduction Maxims play a crucial role in Kant’s ethical philosophy. First, to determine an action’s deontic status (whether it is morally permissible, obligatory, or forbidden), you have to ‘test’ the action’s maxim according to the ‘Formula of Universal Law’ 2 (FUL), i.e., you have to determine whether you can conceive of or will a world in which everyone acts on that maxim (i.e., whether you can universalize that maxim). 3 If you cannot, then the maxim is morally forbidden; if you can, then it is either morally permissible or morally obligatory. Second, to determine an action’s moral worth (whether it is morally praise- worthy or not), you have to see whether the agent performed the action because its maxim is universalizable (in which case the action was done from duty) or not (in which case the action was done merely in conformity with duty). 4 Actions performed from duty are morally praiseworthy, whereas actions done merely in conformity with duty are not. Third, to determine whether an agent is good or evil, you have to see whether his ‘high- est maxim’ (Rel, 6:32) is to subordinate the incentives of duty to those of self-love, in which case he is evil, or whether it is to subordinate the incentives of self-love to those Philosophy Compass 5/3 (2010): 216–227, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2009.00254.x ª 2010 The Author Journal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd