 The term ‘hypothetical imperative’ comes from Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, in which it is contrasted with the ‘categorical imperative’. A hypothetical imperative is a command, or ought-statement, that depends for its reason-giving force on the agent having a certain purpose. For example, someone’s ability to say that I ought to purchase an airplane ticket to New York today typically depends on whether I have the purpose of going there. If I lack that purpose, or give up on it, then there is no sense in which one could continue to maintain that I ought to buy the ticket. By contrast, categorical imperatives do not depend on our possession of any special purpose for their reason-giving force; they have normative authority for us regardless of our purposes. In MSHI Foot sets out to challenge the then widely held assumption that morality must consist of categorical imperatives because whether something is your moral obligation seems obviously not to depend on whether one has a certain purpose or desire. She undertakes to show that the surface grammar of moral judgments, stating what we ought morally to do, is misleading; when we make claims about what someone ought morally to do, we certainly appear to be making categorical claims. We tell children that they should not fib even when a successful fib would serve their overriding purpose of escaping blame or punishment. Yet Foot argues that this appearance is deceptive, making her case for this point by drawing an analogy between morality and etiquette. 