How does Kant tie together the two different formulations of his categorical imperative?
Well the Stanford EoP seems to think that you can tie all of these loose ends together by looking at the resulting actions. Kant has said that he does not think that his ethics is grounded solely in logic (a defining characteristic in many ways). So there is not necessarily some basic rule that is going to connect them and it seems as though the two may not even collapse into each other. What we can do is look at how things turn out using each theory. The plan is to take a possible action; should I punt this baby? We look and see what both theories say. No and no. We can tie the two theories together if all of the possible cases align themselves in this manner. So if every possible situation can be correctly addressed by using either theory, then we can say that the theories are essentially the same. Kant seems to imply that this is because both theories are basically the same theory just seen from a different perspective. Hope that helps.
