The Teleological Heart of Kant's Categorical Imperative — Epoche B2
Where Teleology Enters Kant's Ethics It is often said that Kant's moral philosophy contains teleological elements that its formalist reputation obscures [1] , and the usual evidence is the Formula of Humanity: rational beings are ends in themselves. That observation is true and settles nothing, because Kant says it himself [2] , in those words, and no reader of the Groundwork has ever missed it. An end in itself is expressly not an end to be brought about, and calling its presence teleology tells us only that Kant used the word 'end'. The interesting question lies elsewhere. It is whether the universalisation test — the part of Kant's ethics that is supposed to be purely formal — can deliver a single moral verdict without a premise about purposes. This essay maps where such premises enter, and argues that they are load-bearing. Kant's own worked examples appeal to a teleology of nature that his critical philosophy is not entitled to use. The best-known repair, Christine Korsgaard's practical contradiction interpretation [3] , removes that appeal for one class of cases and cannot remove it for the rest. The conclusion is not that Kant is a covert consequentialist. It is that the teleology is relocated, from purposes in nature to a functional account of rational agency, and that this is a real cost, because the contrast with teleological ethics was supposed to be a contrast of kind. The formal picture Kant's first formulation, in the second section of the Groundwork (1785 [4] ), directs us to act only on that maxim through which we can at the same time will that it become a universal law. He immediately gives a variant that does the work in his examples: act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. The attraction of the test is that it appears to need nothing but consistency. It does not ask what would happen, or what is good, only whether a maxim can be thought or willed as universal. Kant reinforces this in his preface, where he insists that moral philosophy must not be grounded in anthropology or in anything drawn from how human beings happen to be. The four examples, and what they lean on He then applies the test to four cases, and it is worth looking at what each argument actually contains. The man contemplating suicide from self-love asks whether his maxim could be a universal law of nature. Kant's answer is that a nature whose law it was to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose office is to impel towards the furtherance of life would contradict itself. The contradiction is not logical. It arises only if the feeling of self-love has an office — a function it is for. Strike that premise and the maxim universalises without difficulty: we can perfectly well conceive a species that ends its own lives when suffering outweighs satisfaction. The man neglecting his talents fares similarly. Kant grants that a nature in which everyone let their gifts rust could exist; the failure is that one cannot will it, because a rational being necessarily wills that all his capacities be developed, since they serve him and are given to him for all sorts of possible purposes. Given to him by whom, and for what? The argument rests on the powers having a point. The false promise is different, and this matters later. There the contradiction is that if everyone made promises they did not intend to keep, promising would collapse as an institution, and the maxim's own means would be unavailable. No premise about nature's purposes is needed, only a fact about how the practice works. The fourth case, refusing all help to others, turns on the agent's needing help himself, and so on what he wants. So of the four, one runs on conventions and three on purposes. Hegel's charge that the imperative is an empty formalism [5] , pressed in the Philosophy of Right , is usually met by pointing at the examples. The examples are exactly where the emptiness is being filled, and the filling is teleological. Why Kant cannot have this teleology The difficulty is not that appeals to natural function are unrespectable. It is that Kant himself denies they are available. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) he argues at length that purposiveness in nature is a regulative principle: an indispensable way for us to investigate organisms, and not a claim about what organisms are for. We are entitled to study self-love as if it had a function. We are not entitled to a moral verdict that holds only if it really has one. The suicide argument uses the premise constitutively. It needs the office of self-love to be a fact, not a heuristic, because otherwise there is no contradiction to find. The standard repair Korsgaard's 'Kant's Formula of Universal Law' (1985) separates three ways of reading the contradiction. On the logical reading, the universalised maxim is self-contradictory. On the teleological reading, it conflicts with a natural purpose — the reading Kant's suicide argument uses. On the practical reading, the universalised maxim would defeat the agent's own purpose in acting on it. The practical reading is the strongest, and it handles the false promise beautifully. My purpose is to get money by promising. In a world where the maxim is universal, nobody would accept promises, so the means I proposed would not work. The contradiction is between the maxim's end and the maxim's efficacy, and it needs no purposes but mine. Where the repair stops Now run the practical reading on the suicide case. My purpose is to end unbearable suffering. In a world where everyone acted on that maxim, ending one's life would still end suffering; the means would work as well as ever. No practical contradiction arises. The same holds for the talents: in a world of universally neglected gifts, my idleness serves my comfort exactly as before. The pattern is clear. The practical reading works when the maxim's means are conventional, so that universalising the maxim destroys the convention. It has