Can the Categorical Imperative Test Final Ends?

“Upon those that step into the same river different and different waters flow…. It scatters and…gathers…it comes together and flows away…approaches and departs.”1

Christine Korsgaard is prominent among the group of philosophers known collectively as the

New Kantians. Grounded in the work of John Rawls, these philosophers—most notably Korsgaard

herself, Onora O’Neill, and Barbara Herman—base their account of Kantian moral philosophy on what

they refer to as the “practical interpretation” of the Categorical Imperative. 2 I’ll be presenting a

problem for this family of views that address the nature of commitment underwriting intention their

shared notion of intention. In particular, I want to examine commitments associated with long-term

goals and final ends. Experience suggests that long-term commitments fluctuate in the midst of pursing

them, and that includes the option of abandoning one’s goals all together. Using the New Kantian

account of intention and decision as a case study, I’ll argue that recognizing this should have

consequences for a theory of intention. Thus this investigation of the contemporary Kantian position is

important for current theorists working in normative ethics and practical reasoning more generally,

indicating that they ought to incorporate a more careful understanding of commitment into their

accounts of deliberation and decision.

1 Heraclitus, “Fragment 12,” in The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, ed. and trans. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) 196. 2 While each of these philosophers puts forward a distinctive philosophical account, they overlap on the core elements of the so-called practical interpretation. My purpose is to focus on those features, so I will not be addressing the details of each position. My emphasis on Korsgaard is prompted by her recent and prominent publications in this area. See Onoral O’Neill, Acting on Principle (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1975), published under the name Onora Nell; Christine Korsgaard, The Standpoint of Practical Reason (New York, NY: Garland Press, 1990); and Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009). Barbara Herman, on the other hand, distances herself from the orthodoxy somewhat. She presents a serious problem for the position in her essay, “Moral Deliberation and the Derivation of Duties,” in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 132-158. Still, she does not forego the philosophical commitments about intention that are my concern in this paper.

I’ll begin by trying to motivate an alternative picture of intention, one that sees the plasticity of

practical commitment as a feature that is relevant to deliberation and decision. Afterwards, I’ll present

the contrasting picture of intention presented by the New Kantians. Looking to their discussions of the

Hypothetical Imperative, it will become clear that they understand intention as a practical analogue of

causation, and thus their interpretation of the Categorical Imperative operates in the light of that

paradigm. I will then examine their rendering of the Kantian tests for contradictions in conception and

the will. I’ll follow this discussion up by showing that, when we replace the causal notion of intention

with what is an appropriately weakened construal of intentional commitment, practical contradiction do

not arise under this version of the Kantian tests. As a result, the practical interpretation of the

Categorical Imperative is untenable. I will end my discussion by offering a brief observation on how a

more nuanced account of commitment can inform our grasp of deliberation and decision.

1

In Self-Constitution, Korsgaard tells us that theorists of practical rationality see efficacy—

understood as producing the end that one has in view—as the primary standard for the assessment of

action.3 She takes issue with that criterion and goes on to replace it with the aim of constituting one's

self as an agent. Her comment might initially suggest that she is abandoning traditional worries about

efficacy, but we quickly see that nothing so radical is on the agenda. Constituting oneself through

action involves identifying with every element of an action, including the proposed end.4 Thus self-

constitution requires achieving one’s end, and efficacy remains as a criterion for evaluating action.

There is certainly no doubt that ends, or goals, are immensely important, and that individuals

generally tend to see final ends—ones they pursue throughout life—as most significant. The idea of

3 Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 8. 4 Ibid., 11.

action as production gives expression to our apparent investment in achieving these ambitions.

Moreover, the predominant model of deliberation—the instrumentalist, means-end conception—

presents reason as exclusively concerned with achieving goals in the realm of practical rationality. But

as Korsgaard rightly suggests, there is more to say about the role that ends—including final ends—play

in our practical lives. Unfortunately, the traditional deification of efficacy leaves no room in a model of

rational deliberation for elaborating on the various ways in which having ends inform how we live and

act.

One feature of our lives that the model obscures is the dimension of change: practical

circumstances evolve over time. In contrast, instrumental reasoning presumes that goals are stable. An

end’s fixity is what makes it inferentially tractable. Modifications of attitude or circumstance thus

becomes external to the decision-procedure. When shifts occur and the parameters of a deliberative

problem alter, it triggers a return to means-end planning, where means-end reasoning imposes the

assumption of stability once again. Of course, this assumption is an idealization. Circumstance and

experience conspire to reshape both our desires and goals all the time. Even the biological and

psychological stages of life force recalibrations of what matters to us and thus kind of goals we pursue

over time. In point of fact, our practical lives are infused with constant change. The upshot is that

deliberation is constantly in flux.

In light of that observation, it matters that final ends take a long time to achieve. Long intervals

between a present action and its end means that the probability of some significant change of plan

along the way is quite high. So we expect piecemeal alteration as well as more radical plan

transformations to occur frequently. We typically re-specify long-term goals and reconstruct plans

quite a bit: consider the twists and turns that happen in a person’s life story. In fact, we typically

abandon more final ends than we achieve. We know that life doesn't end up looking like the

straightforward means-end trajectories we construct.

Instrumentalism’s idealization of stability in both one’s means and ends is, from the standpoint

of deliberation, a necessary one. But we need not apply that assumption to our lives. Because what

happens is not as stable, we are in a position to recognize that the link between planning is not a direct

one. That suggests that the function long-term plans play in decision is not as straightforward as

instrumentalist theories would have it. Plans are fundamentally organizational tools. Most tools,

however, can and do serve more than one purpose. This insight is what gets lost under the rubric of

“action as production” and the associated inclination to interpret the role of instrumental reasoning in

deliberation so transparently. An alternative account would recognize that our practical thinking is

versatile enough to exploit its tools in various ways. As a warm up to such an approach, consider that

most theorists in practical rationality emphasize the coordination of various activities and goals made

possible through having plans. We integrate the ends of daily maintenance, like personal hygiene and

walking the dog, with projects that need undivided attention, such as study and work. We also

accommodate psychological and environmental cues that force us to do things on the fly. As a result,

it’s clear that successful planning is flexible. Thus it serves two purposes: on the one hand, plans sketch

the course of action we are going to take. On the other, they are the deliberative ground for managing

necessary departures from a given plan.

We can take this sort of organizational consideration a step further by pointing out that acting in

accordance with a plan creates experiences in the short and medium-term that are relevant to pursuing a

long-term goal. In getting feedback about what we are doing, the plan structure helps us to see and

understand how those experiences are relevant going forward. For example, practicing law is the means

to the end of having successful career as a lawyer. The experience of practicing law—the good, the bad,

and the ugly obligations of the day-to-day job—is the resource one looks to in directing oneself toward

a satisfying career. But this shows that acting according to plan does not simply move us toward a goal:

the plan itself provides a rubric for systematizing information as it comes. How the daily grind at a

corporate law firm feels now is an important resource for deliberating about the next stage of the plan.

In particular, it tells you whether the plan or the goal needs to change. A plan's structure provides a

valuable schema for registering and managing shifting attitudes as they happen. In the context of long-

term plans, where we can expect significant transformations, following the plan isn’t really about

achieving the goal. Rather, it’s about monitoring what’s happening in a way that feeds directly into a

new episode of deliberation. Given a background of ongoing change, such organizational features are

their central deliberative value of long-term plans: performing this function is valuable, whether or not

one achieves the associated goals.

What underwrites this account of long-term deliberation is a conception of practical

commitment that is more nuanced than what theorists in normative ethics and practical rationality

typically put forward. I began with the observation that change is a practical constant, and that led me

to proffer an alternative interpretation of the function that long-term planning serves in deliberation. On

that view, the means-end structure of a plan can serve decision-making without holding on to the idea

that it does so in virtue of leading us to achieve our goals. I now want to make a similar claim about

commitment. In assuming that goals remain stable, instrumental reasoning implicitly posits that an

individual's commitment is not only stable, but also thorough-going. But again, that is an idealization.

In reality, commitments range across a continuum, and they are also sensitive to the ongoing flux of

experience.

Acknowledging that commitment is a gradient measure does not undermine the notion of

commitment as such; it simply changes our perspective on it. Long-term goals and plans perform well

in organizing current deliberation because they help to set current concerns and interests against the

broadest frame of consideration. That perspective tends to have a stabilizing influence on short-term

decision and action. But more importantly, claiming that having extended plans serves to organize

deliberation across an evolving personal agenda just is a way of pointing out that a plan's structure

helps track the vacillations of motivation and commitment. It is one of the virtues of long-term plans

that we can link the dynamics of both deliberation and motivation together in a way that highlights

practical significance. They are, as it were, ready-made to handle practical dilemmas and conflicts as

they arise.

If that's right, our account of intentional attitudes must accommodate that feature: whether or

not one has an intention may be a yes or no question, but what that means practically is not thereby

definitively clear: long-term intentions are not necessarily about getting the goal as we presently

conceive it, and that is because our commitments are not stable or thorough-going most of the time.

I’ve just argued that we can distinguish two functions played by long-term goals and plans.

Without question, they operate according to the received instrumental view. Our goals allow us to

determine a means-end course of action for achieving them. But they also provide the framework for

managing change across the plastic dimensions of preference, circumstance, and commitment. Thus we

come to see that long-term goals are not just valuable in virtue of achieving them. Simply having long-

term goals in view is independently valuable in virtue of being a mechanism of control over the various

aspects of one's deliberative context. So the traditional instrumental account of long-term goals is not

false; it’s incomplete. Long-term goals are valuable regardless of whether we achieve them later on.

As I will now argue, failing to take account of these considerations casts serious doubt on the

New Kantian interpretation of the Categorical Imperative. For it is a crucial claim in their argument

that long-term intention is a commitment “to be the cause of the end,” and so they are working with a

false picture. Practical contradictions arise when you try to achieve an end through an action that isn’t a

means to it. It's a contradiction because one cannot rationally commit to causing an end through an

action that is not a means. If an intention does not commit one to being the cause of a given end,

however, the recognition that one's action may fail to bring it about does not produce practical

contradictions. I now turn to the New Kantian notion of intention and the role it plays in practical

judgment, after which I will examine the practical interpretation of the Categorical Imperative’s tests

for establishing the rationality of a potential course of action.

2

The New Kantians construe the Categorical Imperative as a decision procedure, often referred

to as the “CI-procedure.” Agents are to use it as a method for evaluating the status of an action.

Assessment centers on one’s maxim, which is a principle for guiding action. Those maxims not

rejected by the procedure are rational and morally permissible. On their view, an agent’s intentions

underwrite the construction of a maxim. A proper intention, namely, one that can become a maxim, and

so be presented as a candidate for evaluation by the CI-procedure, must meet the following

requirements: (i) the agent must believe that a proposed course of action is a means to the given end; (ii)

the agent must see herself as being able to carry out that action; and (iii) the intention must be grounded

by a commitment to achieving the end.5 Taken together, these considerations have been referred to as

the “success condition.”6

5 Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, xii. 6 I take the term, “success condition” from Barbara Herman’s discussion in “Moral Deliberation.” For confirmation Herman that she accepts this account of intention, see “Moral Deliberation,” 138. For John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 358-365.The discussion of intention in this section draws heavily on O’Neil’s discussion in her book, Principle, 59-83. One gets a similar discussion in Korsgaard, Standpoint, 91-135 as well as a shorter version of it in her later article, “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law” in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 77-105. In later work, O’Neill revises her position, claiming that one ought to direct the CI-procedure to “those underlying principles or intentions by which we guide and control our more specific intentions.” O’Neill, Onora, “Consistency in Action,” in Varieties of Practical Reason, ed. Elijah Millgram (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 305. This has important consequences for the resulting account of moral decision, requiring an elaboration of

In the preface to Self-Constitution, Korsgaard writes: “Conformity to the categorical imperative

renders us autonomous, and conformity to the hypothetical imperative renders us efficacious. These

imperatives are therefore … principles to which we necessarily are trying to conform insofar as we are

acting at all.” Since the Hypothetical Imperative is the guide for determining the efficacy of a maxim,

it is their interpretation of it grounding the demand that we achieve our ends.7 Their understanding of it

appeals to Kant’s conception of action as an analogue to natural causation in the practical realm. The

source of causal power is the individual.

Whoever wills the end also wills (in so far as reason has decisive influence on his actions) the

indispensably necessary means to it that is in his control. As far as willing is concerned, this

proposition is analytic; for in the willing of an object, as my effect, my causality is already

thought, as an acting cause, i.e. the use of means, and the imperative already extracts the

concept of actions necessary to this end from the concept of a willing of this end.8

Appealing to the notion of causation expresses the thought that, through their actions, agents bring

about their ends in a law-like way. Thus Herman writes:

The connections are as follows: to will an end is to will an object (state of affairs, etc.) as an

effect—something that will follow from some cause. But not just any cause. The Paton

translation is really insufficient here: “my willing of an object as an effect” does not capture the

full point of the German “als meiner Wirkung.” So what we have is: to will an end is to will an

object as my effect—that is, to will that an object (end) come about as an effect of some action

the relationship between “deep” intentions and “surface” intentions. I will not address these issues, since the move does not undercut the concerns I will be introducing about the account of intention in general. 7 Herman’s dissertation is a key source for the interpretation of the Hypothetical Imperative. See Barbara Herman, Morality as Rationality: A Study of Kant’s Ethics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990) 25-144. For a discussion of the traditional understanding of intention, see G. Harman, “Practical Reasoning,” Review of Metaphysics 29, no. 3 (March 1976): 432-63; H.P. Grice, “Intention and Uncertainty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 57 (1971) 263-279. 8 Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A German-English Edition, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 63; RPA 417, emphasis added.

of mine (as its cause). “The causality of myself as an acting cause” is the causality of a being

who is moved to act (cause effects) in accordance with its idea of a connection between means

and end. There is a conception of myself as a cause and of my ends as possible effects of my

causality.9

More recently, Korsgaard offers this take:

What the argument establishes is…that the hypothetical imperative is a constitutive principle of

willing. What makes willing different from merely desiring or wishing or thinking-it-would-be-

nice-if is that the person who wills an end determines himself to bring the end about, that is, to

cause it. And to determine yourself to be the cause of an end is to determine yourself to set off a

chain of causes that will lead to the achievement of the end. Thus the person who wills an end

constitutes himself as the cause of that end.10

This characterization of intentional action links the performance of action with the production of the

given end inextricably. But applying the interpretation to a contemporary account requires care: Kant

didn’t have the concept of intention. Each passage above discusses volition that is already endorsed by

the will. The question is whether the commitment to “be an acting cause” arises from the will's

endorsement or the intention being presented to the will for consideration.

The innovation of the New Kantian interpretation is to cast intentions as the basis for

constructing maxims, rather than beliefs. The will takes up proffered maxims for consideration.

Presumably, they must be properly formed in order to merit the will's consideration. If it turns out that

the maxim is rational, then of course, the underlying intention is as well. But the will is a rational

faculty. It doesn’t traffic in matters of motivational strength or weakness. It follows that the maxim

9 Herman, Morality as Rationality, 107. In the passage, Herman cites an additional passage from Kant’s Groundwork, which can be found at Kant, Groundwork, 53; RPA 412. 10 Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 68.

presented to the will already contains an expression of an agent's commitment as a component part of

the intention. The crucial point is that, if willing an end means understanding oneself as the cause of an

end, as the New Kantians point out, the commitment to be such a cause resides in the intention, which

is the contemporary analogue to Kant’s notion of inclination. In saying that a volition engenders one to

be an acting cause, therefore, the New Kantians are saying that properly formed intentions embody an

inclination that is strong enough to motivate being ‘an acting cause’.

By way of illustration, let’s say a person’s will endorses the maxim of, say, accepting a proffered slice

of cake to eat. Should it fall off the plate onto the ground, the underlying inclination diminishes.

Deciding not to eat the cake, however, is not disrespecting the will’s prior adjudication or its position in

deliberation. In this case, it is not the rationality of the proposed maxim that falls away. It is the

intention one abandons, in which case it must be a full-fledged intention. It is not simply a desire that

fades. For on this account, we distinguish between intention and desire in terms of the commitment

they embody, as Korsgaard signals in the quote above. Mere desires do not operate in the CI-procedure,

only intentions do. And the relevant aspect of the intention that goes missing is the commitment

component, not the associated beliefs. For the New Kantians, that means what one abandons is a

psychological attitude strong enough to motivate being an ‘acting cause’.

The causal paradigm also influences a maxim’s form. Korsgaard characterizes it in the

following way: “Since the connection between means and end is a connection of sufficient cause to

effect, one must include in the statement of the maxim all and only what is genuinely relevant to the

production of the effect – the purpose – in the given circumstances. A maxim is a proposed justification

of the action; and it is the connection between the action and the purpose that is supposed to justify the

action.”11 Here’s an example: To fish upstream if you’re looking to catch trout in order to have it for

dinner. Universalized, it looks like this: Everybody will fish upstream if they are looking to catch trout

in order to have it for dinner. The emphasis on the structural parallels between maxims and causal laws

ties the account to the Categorical Imperative’s Formula of the Law of Nature. “So act as if the maxim

of your action were to become by your will a UNIVERSAL LAW OF NATURE.”12

Generally speaking, the New Kantians emphasize the ‘Universal Law’ and ‘Law of Nature’

formulas of the Categorical Imperative because of their emphasis on the form of law. Kant endorses

this priority in the Groundwork: “In moral judging it is better always to proceed by the strict method

and make the foundation the universal formula of the categorical imperative.” 13 Insisting on the

significance of the form of law forestalls a potential objection to the practical interpretation: if one can

see that the result of following a maxim universally created a state of affairs in which following the

maxim would become unsuccessful almost immediately, that wouldn’t constitute a practical

contradiction. Such an outcome “describes a situation that could not last rather than a situation that

could not be.” The Law of Nature formulation of a maxim is supposed to undermine this worry because

“the law of nature that could not last also could not be.”14

The causal level of commitment ascribed to an intention will turn out to be an crucial feature of

the view, since it is the only component of an intention that can generate a practical, rather than a

theoretical, contradiction. Now that the nature of intention and the role it plays in practical judgment is

clear, I can turn to clarifying how such contradictions come about.

11 Korsgaard, Standpoint, 143. 12 Kant, Groundwork, 71; RPA 421. See also Korsgaard, C. M., Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: University Press), 1996. 13 Kant, 101; RPA 436. 14 Korsgaard, Standpoint, 141-42.

3

We are now in a position to describe the practical interpretation’s CI-procedure. Agents are to

examine a maxim and the corresponding universalized maxim (UM) for contradictions arising in either

conceiving or willing them together.15 They do this by considering their maxim as a potential principle

of action in a hypothetical world where it also holds as a universal law. If this state of affairs is

conceptually and volitionally possible, then the action is in accord with duty. I’ll begin by looking at

the conceptual test, presenting an argument against the practical interpretation of it. Discussion of

contradictions in the will follows in the next section.

The practical interpretation takes an agent’s maxim and its UM to be intentions. Contradictions

arise whenever a rational will cannot embrace both intentions at the same time.16 This New Kantian

innovation requires providing an account of practical contradictions that does not ground out in the

more familiar notion of a theoretical contradiction. O’Neill is the primary source on this issue.

[The contradiction in conception test] asks whether we can simultaneously intend to do x

(assuming that we must intend some set of conditions sufficient for the successful carrying out

of our intentions and the normal and predictable results of successful execution) and intend

everyone else to do x (assuming again that we must intend some conditions sufficient for the

15 Korsgaard construes universalized intentions as the “standard procedure” for achieving an end. “It is not just that others with purposes like yours may behave or find natural the option of behaving as you propose to behave. That would not capture the full force of “law of nature.” A standard procedure is the natural, obvious, automatic way of doing something. It is the method used by the culture or society, the one learned by children, the one graced by the authority of tradition and convention.” See Korsgaard, Standpoint, 93. O’Neill construes them as the intentions of a universal legislator whose dictates are followed out of necessity. See Nell, Principle, 70. 16 So as to make the contrast clear: according to the more traditional “logical interpretation” of the Categorical Imperative, a maxim fails the contradiction in conception test because it cannot be conceived as a universal law without contradiction. See Herman, “Moral Deliberation”; Nell, Principle; Korsgaard, C. M., Standpoint, 42-50; and Korsgaard, C. M., “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,” in Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 81-87.

successful execution of their intentions and the normal and predictable results of such

execution).17

Intentions presuppose the stability of basic empirical facts about the context of action and the world in

general. If I intend to go fishing, then it must be a stable fact about the world that fish exist, that they

are accessible to me, and that there is a reasonably efficient technology for catching them. This is

because having an intention requires believing that a proposed course of action is in fact a means to a

given end. O’Neil’s thought also includes a belief that an agent is capable of carrying out the means

successfully. I will suggest later that this ought not be a criteria for having a long-term intention. But

the issue is not crucial to my argument. These features of an intention, i.e., the beliefs, can produce

nothing but theoretical contradictions, so they are not the source of contradiction to which the a

practical interpretation points.

A practical contradiction arises when an agent’s proposed course of action as an individual is

no longer a means to the given end in the hypothetical world of the UM. It’s a contradiction because a

rational agent cannot intend to achieve an end through a given action if it is not a means to the end.

While the thought experiment might create contradictions between beliefs, the decisive contradiction

on this account comes by way of the universal and personal commitments to be acting causes within

the intentions. A rational agent cannot commit to ‘be an acting cause’ of incompatible ends. It violates

the Hypothetical Imperative. Again, the practical contradiction does not lie in the fact that an agent so

situated believes it to be impossible. Rather, it is grounded in an inability to discharge one’s agency

17 Nell, Principle, 73; emphasis added. As I wrote in an earlier footnote, O’Neill later changes her view about how intentions relate to the CI-procedure. She does not, however, change her view on what an intention is. Since my objections are focused on the latter consideration, I will not address the nuances of her position. For a confirmation from O’Neill, see “Consistency in Action,” 311. For Herman, see “Moral Deliberation,” 138. For John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 358-365.

toward such a project from a rational point-of-view: no course of action could be a way of causing

incompatible effects successfully.

Korsgaard’s recent work shows that the question of whether practical commitment might not be

causally loaded does not arise. In arguing that the aim of action is to constitute oneself as an agent, she

takes the depth of intentional commitment one step further. For one’s status as an agent is at stake in

the performance of an action: one must achieve a given end not only because that’s what practical

causes do, but also because achieving ends is what makes us agents, and we commit necessarily to

being one. Thus failure to achieve a given end threatens one’s agency as such, and this is absolutely

unacceptable.

If your action is unsuccessful and you do not bring about the state of affairs that you intended, it

is not (or not just) the action that is ineffective. It is not as if you were effective in producing the

action, but then the action, once out there in the world, failed, like a defective machine you have

invented and then let loose on the world. The action is not your product: it was you that failed.

An unsuccessful action renders you ineffective. Therefore a successful action is one that renders

you effective.18

Korsgaard’s claims here are add-ons to the core components of the practical interpretation. Other New

Kantians do not need to follow her in this. But it is instructive that her arguments start from the idea

that intentions just are commitments to cause an end; the controversial aspect is whether we commit to

causing particular ends because we are committed to being agents.

The classic example of a conceptual contradiction is the case of deceitful promising. For the

sake of variety, I’m going to lay out an analogous but novel case. Let’s suppose an individual considers

the following maxim: “Never pay taxes, for the sake of enjoying greater luxury.” Tax evasion promises

18 Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 83-84.

increased luxury to all. For some, that translates into nicer clothing and better food. For others, it means

luxury condominiums and the furnishings to go with it. Universalizing, we get: “No one pays taxes, for

the sake of enjoying greater luxury.” Following the New Kantians, we are led to the conclusion that

this maxim is impermissible. In a world where no one pays taxes, governmental protection of the

citizenry fails. Economic, political, and social institutions soon follow, and the economic status of

every individual is undermined. Where governmental services and protections are unavailable, no one

gets luxury. Under universalization, then, tax evasion is not a means to the proposed end, which means

that a rational will cannot produce a universal intention in accordance with the maxim. The

contradiction that arises is willing luxury for oneself through tax evasion in a world where it doesn’t

cause luxury. It is irrational as an intention because rational intending requires committing to a causal

success that is becomes impossible in the universalized world.

In order to see the problem with the practical interpretation, let's return to the discussion of

long-term intention with which I started. Translated now into the language of the New Kantian view, I

suggested that we do not commit to being 'acting causes' of our long-term intentions. The ubiquity of

change over time alters not only our plans and goals, but also the depth of one’s commitment to bring

about the end. We expect our goals to undergo significant alteration, and we recognize that our interests

evolve. That just means that long-term commitment is an abortive investment. So while it’s true that

willing an end certainly requires one to will the means, we cannot and do not take ourselves to be the

causes of our long-term, final ends. Moreover, long-term means-end strategies are highly flexible,

especially at the far end of the plan, and they link up with vaguely specified goals. This is not the kind

of deliberative structure that can underwrite a causal commitment. The argument I gave sought to

refocus attention on the deliberative role that merely having long-term intentions can play. I also

pointed out that the advantages afforded by the presence of long-term plans and goals are not

necessarily tied to achieving the goal.

This is a serious problem for the New Kantians: if I’m right, long-term intentions are not

commitments to being ‘an acting cause.’ And if our commitment to an end is less than that of causing

them, then recognition that the means will fail to produce the effect does not produce contradiction in

the CI-procedure. By altering the account of long-term intention to one in which long-term

commitment does not obligate one to being ‘an acting cause’, no causal impossibilities arise from

holding the particular and universalized intentions at the same time. Indeed, if you are not committed to

being a cause, failure to produce the effect is not relevant to evaluating the rationality of your

commitment. There may well be room for criticizing one who pursues an end via an action that is

unlikely to cause it, but we don’t always attack a person for betting on long odds. That’s because, while

it might be pretty foolish in certain kinds of cases, it’s not irrational.

Coming back to tax evasion, the New Kantians argued that it was impermissible because, where

everyone commits to causing luxury through tax evasion, that course of action is no longer a means to

the end, thus a commitment to this strategy as a way of causing the effect is irrational. In a hypothetical

world where long-term commitments are not causal, however, neither of the Kantian claims get traction.

In the first place, the universal intention does not set in place universal tax evasion. Some people will

be evaders over the long haul and others will not. Non-evaders will alter either their plan or their goal

at some point. In that kind of hypothetical world, we cannot determine whether an individual’s act of

tax evasion continues to be a means to the end of luxury. So we cannot conclude that such an outcome

is practically impossible. If everyone were a tax-evader, then a socio-economic system would fail. But

they can and do survive when only some citizens are tax-evaders. There’s evidence for that readily

available. Take present-day Italy, Mexico, or the United States, for that matter.

Universalizing commitments that are less than causal commitments produce worlds in which

ends are not universally realized. When that is the kind of hypothetical world we are examining, one’s

individual maxim will usually continue to be a means to the end. Thus evaluating our long-term

intentions—intentions in which there is no causal commitment—the practical contradiction in

conception test is not a viable tool for adjudicating their rational or moral value.

The New Kantians do not turn a blind eye to the reality that individuals often experience a

change of heart about their final ends. Everyone knows that desires come and go. But the CI-procedure

does not operate on desire. It’s about whether a rational will can endorse an intention presented to it in

the guise of a maxim. The New Kantians understand intention as a commitment to causing an end. The

psychological predictions about the stability of intention don’t matter; although intentions may be

transient, this account distinguishes them from mere desire in terms of the depth of commitment they

embody while they do exist. I’m claiming that long-term intentions do not incorporate the depth of

commitment they envision.

I wrote earlier that the New Kantian grounded their account of intention on a causal

interpretation of the Hypothetical Imperative. That may well be the right reading of Kant’s text, but it

should be clear that foregoing a causal understanding of intention, while altering the force of the

Imperative does not undermine it as a law of practical reason. When you will an end, you also will the

means. That can be both true and law-like without making assumptions about the success of your

endeavors or the depth of a practical commitment. In fact, human beings generally do act in accordance

with a less demanding interpretation of the Hypothetical Imperative. We pursue goals we aren’t sure

we can achieve, and we also pursue goals we aren’t sure about whether we should achieve them.

Insofar as we will them in some measure, it makes sense to do both. And it makes sense to criticize

those who do not. That just is how we manage long-term goals.

3

The contradiction in conception test is usually seen as a more crucial component of the CI-

procedure than the contradiction in the will test because it adjudicates particular actions. Having argued

that the practical interpretation of it is not viable, I am going to move on to the test of volitional

contradictions. Since the same view of intention remains operative in both tests, we should expect

similar problems to emerge here as well. The contradiction in the will test assesses an agent’s ends and

purposes. The basic procedure is the same as the CC test, but the agent now focuses on whether success

in the hypothetical world of the universalized maxim would produce a rationally acceptable outcome.

Typically, the decisive consideration is whether the outcome proves advantageous to us as individuals

in the business of pursuing our particular aims. The New Kantians assume, perhaps controversially,

that rational agents must have the goal of maintaining the efficacy and integrity of their agential

abilities. Thus any maxim that would diminish our agential powers under universalization creates a

contradiction with that necessarily maintained goal and so must be rejected. The issue at stake is not

whether we can cause the end of our particular intention. Rather, the question is whether doing so

disrupts the ongoing commitment to “cause” or maintain agential efficacy. 19

Suppose one is considering the maxim of living fast and dying young. Universalization of the

intention construed in the New Kantian mold—as a causal commitment—produces a world in which

everyone lives fast and dies young. In such a world, no one plans or saves resources for the future, and

19 If you are operating under the assumption that intentions manifest a causal commitment to achieving an end, it’s obvious that you cannot will to live in a world in which your ability to succeed would be diminished. But even if the commitment we make to our goals is not always full-blooded, we are always pursuing a variety of ends, and that we will walk away from a number of them doesn’t revoke an interest in maintaining our agential abilities. Thus the partiality of practical commitment doesn’t undermine the goal of agential efficacy: human agents rightly will resist outcomes that imperil future success. Still, there are circumstances in which agents choose to abandon that goal. Some terminal patients seek to end their lives in the face of great suffering, and there is a good case to be made for doing so. In Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard seems to acknowledge this. Her official philosophical position, however, would force her to reject the claim. She confirms that in Self-Constitution: “We owe it to ourselves, to our own humanity, to find some roles that we can fill with integrity and dedication. But in acknowledging that, we commit ourselves to the value of our humanity just as such.” See Korsgaard, C. M., Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: University Press, 1996), 160-164, and Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 24-25.

no governmental or social institutions are put in place to safeguard future security or well-being. Living

in a such world, individuals will eventually find themselves in need of things that they cannot produce

in a timely fashion, and there will be no outside sources on which to draw. This circumstance is one in

which our power of agency is undermined, since we could not look to other individuals or social

institutions for help in times of need. More technically, living in this world systematically removes a

whole range of means that we regularly make use of in the pursuit of our aims. As a result, the New

Kantian CI-procedure rejects the maxim as irrational.

But if we replace the causal interpretation of intention with one that recognizes long-term

intentions as partial commitments as I have suggested, the CI-procedure of universalization does not

create absolute effects in the associated hypothetical worlds. In fact, the procedure does not reveal

anything decisive about that world. So more often than not, there will be no clear evidence for the

conclusion that agential capacities are at risk. No volitional contradiction arises. When only some

people end up living fast and dying young, it’s not clear that the social means we call upon to support

our individual agential efficacy would evaporate. The maxim of living fast and dying young might

seem foolish on balance, but it doesn’t produce volitional contradiction.20

The problem I am pointing out with the practical interpretation is not with universalization. The

problem is that the requirement gets traction as an evaluative measure only if we assume that, in having

an intention, agents commit fully to achieving the end. But as J. B. Schneewind writes:

A maxim incorporates what we know or believe about the basic features of the situation in

which we are proposing to act, but whether it passes the test of the categorical imperative does

20 One might want to suggest that it would be irrational to live in the UM-world of the maxim even if we treat it as a partial commitment. This is probably how most elderly folks felt about the purported aims of the Flower Children and the hippy subculture during the 1960s in the United States. You might think it's “crazy” to want to live on a hippy commune, but universalizing the proposal doesn't produce a practical contradiction definitively: communal living doesn't diminish our agential efficacy necessarily.

not depend on its accuracy in mirroring that situation. It depends on our long range motivations

and on the ways in which we conceptualize these.21

Conceptualizing long-term intention as a causal commitment is not a realistic picture of how long-term

goals function in our lives, so it’s not appropriate to draw on that picture in evaluating our long-term

plans and goals. Unfortunately for the New Kantians, imposing that requirement on intention is the

only way to generate practical contradictions. That requirement, however, renders their version of the

CI-procedure irrelevant to deliberation about whether we ought to act on our actual intentions of partial

commitment.22

Earlier, I registered the fact that the New Kantians assume that we are committed to our own

agential efficacy. The arguments I’ve presented provide an opportunity to how best to understand the

idea of agential efficacy. According to tradition, efficacy just is achieving the end. In the real world,

however, people don’t treat achieving a goal as the only kind of success to which their efforts can go.

Performing well by our own standards, and so meeting some standard of efficacy that we deem worth

applying to our practical lives, is not merely producing effects. Taking this observation in conjunction

with my claim that having long-term goals is valuable because of how they orient us within more

locally defined ranges of acting points to an alternative notion of efficacy. To illustrate, let’s take

vanity as an example. We all have it, but different long-term goals are more or less permissive about

expressing it. Like so many practices in the world of popular culture, the rules are not crystal clear. Still,

you won’t be efficacious in presenting yourself as being cool if you don’t let people know. At the same

21 Schneewind, J. B., “Natural Law, Skepticism, and Methods of Ethics,” in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. P. Guyer, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 16. 22 From a psychological perspective, we can predict that most people who take up the maxim of living fast and dying young will give it up before they actually succeed. But again, this consideration is not relevant to the New Kantian account of rational intention. For them, the claim that rational intentions must manifest a causal commitment to the end is compatible with deciding to give up such intentions, for any reason whatsoever. The New Kantians want to say that the rationality of an intention—during the period in which an agent has one—is determined by whether or not it meets the success condition at that time.

time, however, being cool absolutely forbids certain kinds of self-promotion. So, for instance, you can’t

just tell people you’re cool. You have to show it through your actions, many of which should pretend to

dismiss the issue entirely. In the business world, however, matters are entirely different: if you’re not

telling people exactly why you’re better than the next guy, you’re doing it wrong.

In most people’s lives, long-term goals change, and that means the way you make these sorts of

decisions will change as well. Until they do, the long-term considerations presently in view help to

determine the decisions about how to act and be in the world. Being good at decisions of this sort is

itself a kind of efficaciousness. Viewing local decision-making as a practical priority makes sense. For

without short-term success, there is surely nothing to gain from planning for the distant future. This

suggests our efficacy as agents is tied to managing local circumstances. Long-term goals and plans

support attempts to do exactly that, and we measure success in this context without regard to whether

we achieve our final ends. What this shows is that, being efficacious is a more qualitative and

contextually nuanced consideration than the rather more blunt identification of it with production that

Mill—and the New Kantians—have pressed upon us.

Conclusion

Developing an objection to the New Kantian CI-procedure, this paper casts doubt on a central

component of their ethical theory as well as the underlying account of practical rationality. I have

shown that, because long-term intentions involve only partial commitment to the final end, the New

Kantian method of evaluating them is not viable. In addition to presenting worries about this

contemporary version of Kantian moral philosophy, my arguments also create a problem for the

received view of how we decide what to do, since my primary target is widely held account of intention.

Kantian moral philosophy is currently one of the three main positions in ethics, along with

consequentialism and virtue-oriented accounts. Given its prominent place in contemporary debate, let

me suggest three morals to draw from this work. First, the conclusion I am offering is surprising in that

Kantian theory is often taken to be the sole live alternative to consequentialism, according to which the

moral value of an action is determined by its outcome. Rather than presenting an alternative to the

consequentialist preoccupation with achieving ends, however, the practical interpretation of the CI-

procedure shares an insufficiently critical focus on this notion of efficacy. The second lesson is that, as

we pursue normative moral theory, we must pay closer attention to the many gradations of practical

commitment. Third, and finally for now, a similar message applies to progress in the theory of practical

rationality. Accounts of decision will have to incorporate the results of reexamining human

commitment as well.

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