Kant's categorical imperative may perhaps sound noble - formulated as it is in terms of "categorical", "imperative", "maxim", "universal law" - but it is nonsense, and remains so if reformulated with less pretentious terms, say as "one's moral duty is to act according to principles all could act on".

The problem is that this forbids such perfectly natural acts or desires as scratching one's ass, or making love to one's wife, to name just a few examples, at least when the imperative is taken literally ("I wouldn't want everyone to scratch my ass or make love to my wife, and I also wouldn't want everyone to scratch his own ass or make love to his own wife if or because I do") - and if it isn't, or can't, or shouldn't, it seems useless to propose universal moral principles that cannot be acted on as they are stated.

One problem for universal moral laws is that what is good (or bad) depends much on the context and the intention of the act that is committed (or ommitted).

Are there then no universal moral laws that hold for all human beings in all circumstances? Or if not in all at least in most? There seem to be at least two reasonable positive answers to this, one factual and one theoretical.

The factual one is that all the major religions agree on several moral laws, including the following important idea, surely more useful than Kant's categorical imperative, if also not completely free from logical objections, namely: 'Do not do unto others as you would not be done unto'.

Indeed, this has the great merits of appealing to one's individual experience while presupposing that this holds a valid clue to how other human beings feel and think.

The theoretical one is that any moral law that is supposed to be of universal validity for all human beings must be based on those needs and capacities all human beings share. As human beings do have many needs and capacities in common, it is quite easy for them to understand what would please and what would hurt any other human being in very many circumstances, and therefore one such possible general moral law might be: 'Do not hurt others, except in self-defense'.

Also, one might propose principles of cooperation and consent, based on the notion that, in principle, every human being is capable of harming or helping any other human being that is near enough, and a principle to the effect that, at least, one should not lie to one's friends, based on the notion that every human being is capable of both lying and telling the truth about many things, and that falsities, when believed and acted upon, tend to harm people.

And it may also be observed that what is needed for morals is not so much simple universally applicable rules, as general ends, that are formulated in terms of human needs and capacities, and what is required to keep a human society peacefully together, and rules that further these in many circumstances.

In any case, Kant's categorical imperative is useless for morals, and hardly better than "if in Rome do as the Romans do", that I like to explain as "if among cannibals, do as cannibals do".