Rightness as Fairness

Abstract

We are now in a position to derive moral principles from the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative. Chapter 5 showed that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative entails the following method for determining which actions satisfy it:

The Moral Original Position Formulation: voluntarily aim for its own sake, in every relevant action, to act on interests it is instrumen-tally rational to act upon from the standpoint of a ‘Moral Original Position’ in which you assume that your voluntary, involuntary, and semivoluntary interests could turn out to be identical to those of any human or nonhuman sentient being(s), where relevant actions are defined recursively as those it is instrumentally rational to treat as such from the standpoint of the Moral Original Position.