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By: Steve Kant – The Categorical Imperative “The ordinary man needs philosophy because the claims of pleasure tempt him to become a self-deceiver and to argue sophistically against what appear to be the harsh demands of morality. This gives rise to what Kant calls a natural dialectic—a tendency to indulge in plausible arguments which contradict one another, and in this way to undermine the claims of duty. This may be disastrous to morality in practice, so disastrous that in the end ordinary human reason is to be found only in philosophy, and in particular in a critique of practical reason, which will trace our moral principle to its source in reason itself.” “A reviewer who wanted to find some fault with this work has hit the truth better, perhaps, than he thought, when he says that no new principle of morality is set forth in it, but only a new formula. But who would think of introducing a new principle of all morality, and making himself as it were the first discoverer of it, just as if all the world before him were ignorant what duty was or had been in thoroughgoing error? But whoever knows of what importance to a mathematician a formula is… will not think that a formula is insignificant and useless which does