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On Deriving Categorical Imperatives from the Concept of Action

In his 1974 presidential address to the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, Alan Gewirth proposes a novel, though semiKantian, solution to the is-ought problem.' While Kant attempted to derive a categorical imperative from the concept of law, Gewirth proposes to derive one from the very concept of action. Starting with an analysis of the generic features of action as such, Gewirth argues that since these necessary conditions of action cannot be relinquished by the agent without self-contradiction, the agent must necessarily claim a right to them and logically extend this right-claim, based on the inescapable generic features of action, to all other rational agents. But a generalized right-claim entails a correlative duty imposed on all agents, and thus a categorical ought is derivable from the mere concept of action as such, and therefore the is-ought gap has been bridged. Although I think that Gewirth's particular attempt to derive apodictic legislation from an analysis of the very concept of action fails,2 what I would like to argue in this paper is something more general: (1) that no categorical imperative derived from the concept of action as such can be commanded by a rational agent without becoming incoherent with the generic features of action from which it has been derived, and (2) that no imperative which can be commanded by a purposive agent without becoming necessarily incoherent with the generic features of all action can be commanded categorically.