Regarding Kant's maxim,

“...act as if the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature”:

Only in such artificial societies as have existed for the past several thousand years do such questions as these even come up.

In his more natural state, man applies Kant's principle, more or less, without even having to think about it. In his more natural state, for the sake of survival, man lives in close-knit groups with other men, and therefore can not easily separate himself from others by illusions and abstractions.

In the natural state, man reacts to others based on his natural self-protection instinct, as well as his natural instinct to sympathize with others. Both instincts are present in any social creature. Society results from the balance of these two instincts. The tension between these two instincts is in effect in any social group, whether it be a wolf pack, a chimpanzee troupe, or a human village.

Those religious, human-chauvinists who are inclined to ignore scientific evidence relating human and animal behavior would do well to regard such evidence as can be found in any nature show on television. As well, this kind of understanding is precisely the understanding which socialist and Communist ideologues seem to lack--those who think man in infinitely moldable. Man is not infinitely moldable. He has a nature, and it is an animal-like nature.

Both Christians and Communists do us damage when they ignore these realities. There is no such thing as total peace and total togetherness, as Communists and extreme Christians imagine, and there never shall be, as long as the world has any justice left in it. Life is about both cooperation and competition, not just the former.

This is law, so to speak. Those who disregard this law are going against life, are courting death, and are, so to speak, evil.