I tend to read "categorical imperative" in the strongest, Kantian sense, an imperative statement that is a priori valid irrespective of context or reasoning - i.e. murder is just wrong and you just shouldn't do it period.
If "murder"=="the wrong kind of killing" then "the wrong kind of killing is just wrong and you just shouldn't do it period" is a tautology. It would seem you can get cheap categorical imperatives by jumping to tautologies, but they're mostly useless since you still have to establish whether it's m...
I've wondered this too. Without the the impedance of difficult goals, the amperage of intelligence drives up the voltage of pleasure; total wattage spikes for a brief moment, then the whole system burns out in a whiff of blue smoke. Rationality must be driven into some kind of load, else things tend to fail spectacularly. (You can probably tell I've spent too much time worrying about amp/speaker configurations.)
Isn't yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater a kind of langford basilisk?
Hear, hear! Arguably, resources like Wikipedia, the LW sequences, and SEP (heck even Google and the internet in general) are steps in that general direction.