According to Kant what makes something moral is the intentions that you put behind your actions. So with that in mind, if you do something based on a feeling of sympathy it isn’t necessarily moral because you did it. The reason behind this is because sympathy includes emotions by default and emotions can sometimes or even more often than not betray you. Doing things based on emotion isn’t moral; the actions you take based on good will and rationality is what makes things moral. According to Kant, he states that the categorical imperative is to act as if the maxim of your action would be universal law. Now if we try to apply the categorical imperative to an action based on sympathy it just wouldn’t work out. That would mean that every time you feel bad for someone, you would be having to help them in some way, shape or form. To give an example, say you’re walking out of an ice cream shop and as you’re walking out you see a kid’s ice cream fall to the ground. Now would you buy that kid another ice cream? Would you buy every kid that drops food a replacement meal/snack? In the real world that would be a hard no although we would all like to think that we would but there even if you wanted to there would be other extraneous circumstances that wouldn’t allow you to do so; you may not have any money.

Hypothetical imperative refers to an action to have something else happen or to further a current good or recover something that it bad. This, though, leaves a lot up to chance that can’t be controlled, predicting the future and, something much harder, predicting people’s actions. In contrast a categorical imperative is an action that must be good but without having to pass any qualifications of the sort. Now categorical imperatives must be based on reason and logic not emotion because emotion as stated earlier is too easily swayed and isn’t all-encompassing to everyone. For example a lot of people may feel sympathetic to the kid who’s ice cream fell but many might just walk right by thinking that it isn’t their duty to even think about the situation. Now logic and reason also isn’t all-encompassing but it does have more people backing a specific reason or logic as opposed people getting behind an emotion. For the most part, most people think logically and with reason. As an example, most people would say that it is not ok to molest children so that would be a categorical imperative. One could argue that there are some people that think it is okay to molest children that’s why there’s people doing it. The rebuttal to that is that rationality is needed. All of us who are able to rationalize situations and circumstances as how they should would know that it is ok. But those who do molest children may be unable to rationalize things correctly and therefore see nothing wrong with what they are doing so thus it is a categorical imperative.

There is no moral worth in actions taken because of emotion because emotions fluctuate depending from day to day mood and even person to person. One person may not have the same emotions to others around them based on their past and how they were shaped emotionally growing up. Rationality and logic is used to determine an actions moral worth. The categorical imperative, according to Kant, should dictate whether something is moral or not as well because whatever you do you have to think about if it would be an acceptable universal law.