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AspiringRationalist comments on You don't need Kant - Less Wrong
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The problem with the Categorical Imperative is that it is sufficiently vague that it implies anything you want it to. You can (almost?) always make the "maxim" of your action specific enough to make your action permissible, for example:
Can this be willed as a universal law without contradiction? I certainly can't find a contradiction.
I remember in my advanced logic class, taught by the philosophy department, a latter section of the book formalized the golden rule into a logical system, i.e., do unto others as you would have them do unto you in the same situation. In other words, be consistent. I never worked through that chapter, but I read through the setup and the whole system suffered from a vagueness similar to Kant's: when does a situation count as "the same?" As far as I could tell, everything was moral because no two real life situations could be the same - surely something in the universe moved somewhere. Maybe just an atom.
Btw, yes I really did get a D in world lit because of attendance, and no, I'm not really that upset about it. It was a couple of years ago, after all.
In matters of morality (as opposed to law, In matters of morality (as opposed to law), the important thing is to follow correct principles, not to find technicalities. As soon as someone writes on the bottom line "X is a moral act", where X is what he/she happens to want to do at the moment, any further "moral reasoning" is just self-deception. Any reasonable person can tell that such an incredibly specific situation is useless for forming a categorical imperative. The fact that the idea of a categorical imperative breaks down when it is so vaguely specified is strong evidence against that particular implementation of it, but only weak evidence against the concept as a whole. It would require more work to define a standard of reasonableness for what situations can and can't be generalized before one can say whether the categorical imperative does or doesn't make sense.
That said, I suspect that if one starts with a naive categorical imperative like Matt expresses above and iteratively finds and patches flaws, one will eventually converge towards consequentialism. I could be proven wrong about this, though.