Can trivial and ridiculous perfect duties be constructed?

Question

First, formulate a maxim that enshrines your reason for acting as you propose. Second, recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in these circumstances. Third, consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world governed by this law of nature...

If your maxim fails the third step, you have a ‘perfect’ duty... if your maxim passes all four steps, only then is acting on it morally permissible.

One example is lying:

The maxim of lying whenever it gets what you want generates a contradiction once you try to combine it with the universalized version that all rational agents must, by a law of nature, lie when it gets what they want.

Imagine there is a dance called the hokey cokey (there actually is, but I don't think this is it) which involves two people. They stand side by side, and the one on the left starts by putting their left leg in, out, and shaking it all about. Then the person on the right does the same, with their right leg.

According to wikipedia, a maxim is

1) the action, or type of action; (2) the conditions under which it is to be done; and (3) the end or purpose to be achieved by the action, or the motive

So what if we consider the following maxim:

• If you want to dance the hokey cokey (3) start with the left foot (1) when music is playing (2)

This seems impossible to universalise: so why isn't it immoral (and, moreover, a perfect duty not) to deliberately do the hokey cokey to music?

As there is no way for everyone to start with the left foot, and still dance the hokey cokey to music, because to do the hokey cokey you need a dance partner who goes second.

Unless (I suppose) you can do the dance by accident.

Answer 1

In our legal system Judges, who are assigned that role by others, can levee fines. If I go out and levee fines, it is extortion. That is not a conflict with universality, it is just another precondition in the maxim.

The proposed maxim is naturally universal, once you state it completely, specifying the role of the person who is to do the action. If you do it the other way, you are simply doing a different dance. In fact simple definitions and logical tautologies are always immediately universal. So they basically lack ethical content.

The only way a simple fact can have moral content is to be culturally embedded, and for the user of the fact to have a contingent duty to be truthful about its use. If the hokey pokey (that is the name, at least in the US) had moral content, the duty would rely upon the idea that it communicates a specific message in a specific context. If that message is important enough, by doing it wrong, you are lying, and in a way that is unethical. (If you do the statistical 'dance' of computing a p-value in a science paper wrong, it is unethical.)

But the hokey pokey is not the Medieval Mass, (or even the modern peer-review process) or some similar cornerstone of deep cultural definition. So its definition is not going to be 'categorical' enough to be a general truth or rule of conduct, at least not up to Kant's standard for generality.