• enlightenment, marked by increased secularism,
• replace religious authority with reason,
• recognized religion latching onto ethics,
• the categorical imperative:
  • "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law"
    • ad literam, act only according only to rules that can become universal
      • tangential: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
  • "act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means"
    • tangential: "do not make someone a priority that considers you an option",
  • the voice of our own rational self,
  • central duty of government is to ensure liberty
    • liberty should not be thought of in liberterian terms; we are free when we act according to our own best nature, we are slaves when we are under the rule of our own passions or those of others,
      • "a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same"
• the critique of judgment; art and beauty
  • life a constant struggle between duty and pleasure
  • love of beauty is disinterested, a reminder of our common better being,
  • the role of art is to embody the best moral ideas,

Some critiques offered by Wizardry and Steamworks.

The phrase "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" masks the concept of universality and is logically flawed without addressing the issue of universality. For instance, assume that subject A has interest i and that subject B has interest j, then it would follow per the definition that A shall do interest i onto B, yet we know that B does not have interest i but rather interest j, in which case A cannot act under the definition. Conversely, subject B cannot act onto A because A and B share no common interests.

The rule "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" works if and only if there exists a non-empty intersection set of interests between all the subjects - otherwise, in the case that for all subjects the intersection set of interests is the empty set , there is no way for the subjects to interact with one another under the "categorical imperative".

The same reasoning applies to the direct quote "act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" since given divergent interests of all involved subject with an empty intersection set of interests, the subjects themselves would not be able to act at all.

Even if the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is reversed to "do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you", the exact same reasoning applies and leads to the same problems.

Given subjects with diverse backgrounds and, as it follows, sufficiently varied interests that do not share the same baseline, it stands to reason that, from a political standpoint, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" would imply the reduction of the state such that the intersection set of interests would be minimal enough to satisfy the common interests of all the subjects. Furthermore, assuming that there exist subjects that do not share any common interest with any other subjects, applying the rule could lead to cases of tyranny of the majority.