How to Be Perfect

This may all seem like semantics—or worse, a loophole—but since intentions are all that matter to Kant, if we pull this off we can maybe eat our cake (saving more lives) and have it too (not disappointing Immanuel Kant

We can reasonably argue that we would have pulled that lever if no one were on the other track, so if the result of following our maxim is “one guy gets smooshed,” well, that sucks, but it was not our intention.
Philippa Foot was actually addressing this exact point in her original paper—it has to do with the doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century

practical imperative. It adds a rule to Kant’s philosophy that isn’t nearly as difficult to follow:
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.
In other words: don’t use people to get what you want

Friedrich Nietzsche, who found Kant overly moralistic and schoolmarmish:
Some moralists want to vent their power and creative whims on humanity; some others, perhaps including Kant, suggest with their morality: “What deserves respect in me is that I can obey—and you ought not to be different from me.”
Or, to paraphrase, “Ugh. Get over yourself, Kant

Sometimes, behaving ethically can be a “trust your gut” type of exercise, and Kant is here to tell us our guts are stupid and we shouldn’t listen to them. This is a frequent criticism of Kantian theory: trying to obey it is a purely intellectual exercise, and it’s really goddamn hard

So, if Kant had written a fun little poem to explain his philosophy, like Bentham did, it would look like this:
Act only out of duty to follow a universal maxim
Derive these maxims using your pure reason
Happiness is irrelevant
End of poem
Not quite as catchy.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law

Following the right rules = acting morally. Not following them = failing to act morally. End of story. No leeway, no loopholes, no excuses

believed that we should discern rules for moral behavior using only our ability for pure reasoning, and then act out of an unflinching duty to follow those rules. Some situation presents itself, we tease out the specific “maxim” we have to follow, we follow it, and we’re done

Deontology is the study of duties or obligations