Kant's notion of a 'maxim'

"We approach the moral outlook once we begin to examine our maxims as to their compatibility with the maxims of others. By maxims Kant meant the more or less trivial, situational rules of action by which an individual customarily regulates his actions. They relieve the agent of the burden of everyday decision making and fit together to constitute a more or less consistent life practice in which the agent's character and way of life are mirrored. What Kant had in mind were primarily the maxims of an occupationally stratified, early capitalist society. Maxims constitute in general the smallest units in a network of operative customs in which the identity and life projects of an individual (or group) are concretized; they regulate the course of daily life, modes of interaction, the ways in which problems are addressed and conflicts resolved, and so forth. Maxims are the plane in which ethics and morality intersect because they can be judged alternately from ethical and moral points of view. The maxim to allow myself just one trivial deception may not be good for me--for example, if it does not cohere with the picture of the person who I would like to be would like others to acknowledge me to be. The same maxim may also be unjust if its general observance is not equally good for all. A mode of examining maxims or a heuristic for generating maxims guided by the question of how I want to live involves a different exercise of practical reason from reflection on whether from my perspective a generally observed maxim is suitable to regulate our communal existence. In the first case, what is being asked is whether a maxim is good for me and is appropriate in the given situation, and in the second, whether I can will that a maxim should be followed by everyone as a general law.

The former is a matter for ethical deliberation, the latter for moral deliberation, though still in a restricted sense, for the outcome of this deliberation remains bound to the personal perspective of a particular individual. My perspective is structured by my self-understanding, and a casual attitude toward deception may be compatible with my preferred way of life if others behave similarly in comparable situations and occasionally make me the victim of their manipulations. Even Hobbes recognizes a golden rule with reference to which such a maxim could be justified under appropriate circumstances. For him it is a 'natural law' that each should accord everyone else the rights he demands for himself. But an egocentrically conceived universalizability test does not yet imply that a maxim would be accepted by all as the moral yardstick of their actions. This would follow only if my perspective necessarily cohered with that of everyone else. Only if my identity and my life project reflected a universally valid form of life would what from my perspective is equally good for all in fact be equally in the interest of all.

A categorical imperative that specifies that a maxim is just only if all could will that it should be adhered to by everyone in comparable situations first signals a break with the egocentric character of the golden rule ("Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you"). Everyone must be able to will that the maxims of our action should become a universal law. Only a maxim that can be generalized from the perspective of all affected counts as a norm that can command general assent and to that extent is worthy of recognition or, in other words, is morally binding. The question "What should I do?" is answered morally with reference to what one ought to do. Moral commands are categorical or unconditional imperatives that express valid norms or make implicit reference to them. The imperative meaning of these commands alone can be understood as an 'ought' that is dependent on neither subjective goals and preferences nor on what is for me that absolute goal of a good, successful, or not-failed life. Rather, what one 'should' or 'must' do has here the sense that to act thus is just and therefore a duty."