Generating Correct Moral Judgments: Extending Kant’s Categorical Imperative Procedure Beyond Rawls and Wood

Kant’s account of moral judgment reveals that the Categorical Imperative functions not as a corrective rule but as the law of judgment itself: correct moral judgments arise directly through testing maxims for moral worth. Allen Wood’s realist reading misinterprets this relation by subordinating moral character to intellectual capacity and treating the imperative as a means of correction. John Rawls’s constructivist interpretation captures Kant’s procedural intent more faithfully, viewing moral judgment as the outcome of a four-step Categorical Imperative Procedure that tests whether a maxim can become a universal law. Yet a procedure grounded solely in the Formula of Universal Law cannot examine the moral motive or the autonomy of the will. Integrating Kant’s Formulas of Humanity and Autonomy yields a six-step model that supplements universalizability and willability with two further criteria: the end-test, ensuring that humanity is treated as an end in itself, and the legislation-test, confirming that the will legislates universally and autonomously. This augmented structure preserves Rawls’s constructivist framework while meeting Kant’s demand that moral worth derive from duty, respect for humanity, and the self-legislation of reason, thereby providing a more coherent and textually grounded account of how correct moral judgments are generated within a Kantian framework.