"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?
Kant is addressing the need for a moral philosophy to be coherent, in that you have to play out the consequences of what it would lead to. However, you are not asked to put yourself in anyone else's shoes; if you were a rich and powerful person, you might want to act in deference to rich and powerful people, and think it would be great for everyone to act that way universally.
Rawls is asking you to create a rule book the you would be willing to follow no matter who you were in society. If you are rich, you are supposed to imagine if you would still support the rules if you were poor. So from our previous example, would you want everyone to defer to rich and powerful people if you were poor?
The important aspect of The Original Position is that you are supposed to come up with a system where you wouldn't be against it no matter who you were in society.
It's often said that Rawls is a restatement of Kant for modern liberals, though there's plenty of dissent over that claim. Besides, Rawls restricted himself to political philosophy whereas Kant is talking about knowledge and morality (and also politics).
(P. C. Hodgell) "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
For one thing, Kant's formulation has a problem that Rawls' doesn't: at what level of detail should you make your categorical imperatives?
Is there always a moral obligation to obey the law, or to be truthful? Clearly not, there are obvious counterexamples to both. You could try to refine your rules-based morality system, but you're never going to account for all possible edge-cases.
It's not the same thing as saying hold yourself to the moral standard that you wish were applied to everyone.
Successful leaders would probably refine it and create subcategorical categories that can be handled in ways that are a better fit for their special local case of imperativeness, which means you might still be on the right track after all
You're right, yes, I should have gathered that from both the name and the use of that maxim, which is clearly singular.
> it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth
That's not right, it's talking about morality.
> it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches
I'm not sure what you mean here.
I don't see a serious refutation of my main point. Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail, and trying to cover all edge-cases in a rules-based morality is a losing battle.
From a quick look at Wikipedia [0] it seems Kant's categorical imperative falls at the first hurdle - he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Decepti...
> That's not right, it's talking about morality.
Not quite right then - 2 out of 3 aint bad
>I'm not sure what you mean here.
it is something of a hunch that categorically noone is going to have a porsche or everyone. I will rephrase that maybe.
>Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail,
Which detail? how does it matter what kind of food you give a hungry person?
>rules-based morality is a losing battle
Now were talking - you want something that will work with real humans while I am admiring the concept.
>he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.
exactly - the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth
Kant was a moral philosopher. There is a difference. And there's a reason why Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant never came up with Rawl's "veil of ignorance": because it is itself ignorant.
How is Rawls’ view ignorant?