(rough draft)
It kind of sounds like that would require addressing the distinction between categorical and hypothetical necessity. because to me it sounds like he wants to provide a foundation for common law when he looks for a universal duty. This utterly fails the individual in terms of finding their unique talents and divine purpose.
I think there is a way to take his thought to the next level in that regard.
To do what just anyone could do in any given situation is to do what is required of you in terms of a basic shared humanity. But to do what only you could do is to engage the talents that have been afforded to you alone. In this way you learn to do those things and cultivate those talents that you were given as an individual, and hence you are fulfilling your mission/ calling. Which in theory will bring you closer to communion with the one that sent you to do it.
I don't know too much about Kant's theology as such. I am assuming something of a Spinozistic version that could appeal to either a theologian or naturist, to either that idea of a god personality creating you or a the person you are as directed by natural evolutionary forces. either way, what is most unique to the individual is what sets them apart and defines their purpose in context to the collective. I believe the individual kind of gets whitewashed in standard interpretations of his thoughts on duty. Not sure how he would universalize individuality.
when I first came into contact with Kantian ethics, it struck me as odd that a medical doctor should have the same duties as a lawyer or a bricklayer, so this question of individuality has been rattling around in my brain ever since.
How should we behave in this life, in this world? The question changes according to your situation. What is the purpose of the question itself?
Many professors who teach ethics act as if the criteria for ethical reasoning are necessarily mutually exclusive, which I believe is a mistake in practice. It is fine to theorize about what the implications would be under any particular metaethical consideration, but in practice we can use any of the criterion that would be helpful to clarify our dilemmas. And that's the point to me as we talk about moral reasoning, is that we are trying to make a real world decision about something that confuses us
When he built his foundations on human freedom, he says we have to assume freedom even though we have no purely rational reason to do so because practically, we need to believe in freedom for the idea of moral accountability to make any sense at all. So it is freedom that duty ultimately serves, whether that freedom be our own or that of others. In other words, we are to serve the capacity to choose, as this is somehow central the dignity of persons. And by serving freedom, we are indeed serving God, who may be the only truly free being to exist at all. But the more free we become, the closer we get to communion, or thinking in line with the free being of God.
And of course we need to flesh this out quite a bit through discussions of negative and positive liberty. Freedom is more than just being "free from" outside influences, but also free from the contingencies of bodily existence and the hypothetical situations in which we find ourselves. He's trying to point us to a purely rational form of freedom where we are not simply slaves to our own hedonistic impulses.
It's just that to me we cannot get to a place of freedom in ourselves and our own life situations by abstracting ourselves to a universal condition of humanity that doesn't actually exist within any given individual. We have to be able to confront the world as we find it, and according to the very subjective ways in which we understand it. At the time when Kant was writing, they believed in the idea of objectivity, but that notion has been challenged by both the analytic and continental traditions.
so i guess part of the question has to do with to what extent are we trying to understand him better according to his own context and provide an exegesis for that time period, or are we trying to take what we can from his insights and apply that to our own times and all of the progress that has been made since his writing occurred? There have been many philosophers and theologians that have been influenced by his work. Hell, practically everyone has been effected by his thoughts on the subject even if they didn't know they were being affected. People from vastly different disciplines. So obviously his ideas have been important and it is in our best interests to understand what he was saying to the best of our ability. But why leave it back there in his time when we can bring him into our more contemporary discussions? Because I don't know that we have exhausted all that he has to offer. In the philosophy of law, especially, his work continues to be relevant. But I think it could also be extremely useful in the philosophy of education.
Education theorists want to make us useful members of society, which is not bad in itself. Except that Kant says we shouldn't be using each other, that we should treat people as ends in themselves. Meaning that people have their own unique capacities and hence destinies. For Kant, it is Autonomy that is of paramount importance. And so we need to understand how to cultivate greater autonomy in our students simultaneously while we help them to serve that useful function in society. So how do we navigate these waters? Is it possible to retain the individual's autonomy while simultaneously helping them to serve a function that is more utilitarian in orientation? This is the kind of practical real world problems we still need to address.
It also occurs to me that our political discussions as of late are at an impasse. I believe this failure of communication is because we are not clear as a society how to proceed with these kinds of questions. What is the proper relationship between the individual and collective? If we are only choosing between Kant versus Mill, we will remain stuck where we are. We need to look for a synthesis that takes into account both the needs for the dignity of the individual and the greater social welfare. It is because we haven't figured this out that we have no other recourse but to resort to physical and psychological violence on each other. So there is a pressing need to work this out.
My intuition is to say that as a society, we should not ask any one of our members more than we would ask any other of our members. In this way we are (somewhat) respecting Kant’s dictate that we should not use people to our own ends but rather see them as ends unto themselves. But as individuals, we would like to realize our divine callings and achieve our unique potentials, and so to that end we should voluntarily submit to serving the needs of the collective to the extent that we are uniquely qualified to fulfill them.