Or just Kant’s philosophy in general
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Kant was dissatisfied with moral systems that relied on “hypothethical imperatives”. An imperative is something that commands one to action, and a hypothethical imperative is something that commands one to action in order to achieve an end. Eg:
“I must study to pass this exam”.
If you want to pass an exam, you’ve got to study. But otherwise, you could neglect studying. Kant wasn’t very satisfied with this line of thinking, because for instance what about murder? “I must not murder if I don’t want to end up in prison”. Well, and what if I don’t care about ending up in prison? That’s a bit of a problem there, because such a moral system only restrains people so long they care about the consequences.
So the idea of the categorical imperative is that it’s something that creates an unconditional rule, that must be obeyed in all circumstances, no matter what. Kant expressed it like this:
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”.
Now, one important thing here is that the Categorical Imperative is all about logic, and unconcerned with consequences. So for instance Kant derived that one must never lie. His reasoning for that is if lying is allowed universally, it would contradict the reliability of language, and all truths would be assumed to be lies.
So, tell the truth, always. It doesn’t matter if it gets you, or somebody else in trouble. It doesn’t even matter if telling the truth causes something really awful to happen.
Of course, the idea is not without its issues. For instance there’s the classical “What if the Nazis come asking if I’m hiding any Jews?”
Kant actually answered this question: You tell the truth. Some people think they could wiggle out of this one by say, distracting the Nazi and avoiding the question, but first, Kant’s conclusion is that all deception is forbidden. And second, if you do this you don’t truly agree with Kant’s morality because to a true Kantian consequences don’t matter, and so there’s no reason to try to look for alternate solutions in the first place.
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
the big part here is that universal law part.
unlike “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” which at first glance seems similar, your personal preferences are eliminated. for example you might enjoy being slapped, so with “do unto…” you’d slap others, but with the categorical imperative (CI) you wouldn’t because getting slapped shouldnt become a universal law (even if you’d enjoy it).
Kant then applies this to various aspects of life, reasoning that lazyness, theft, lying, etc can be reasoned to be violating the CI and thus be morally wrong.
but others will probably be able to give you a more-indepth-answer than this little bit that I remember from school 😀
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