Claim. Kant’s ethics of duty and categorical imperative fails because he separated pure from practical reason, ignored consequences, and lacked knowledge of God’s purpose of creation — reducing all purposes to self-loving purposes and making moral law a ‘cold world of duty’ rather than a means for actualizing true love.
Elaboration. Lee’s appraisal of Kant (Unification Thought Appraisal of Kant’s Perspective of Ethics) raises three connected objections. First, separating pure reason (knowledge) from practical reason (action) generates absurd cases: person A, receiving the categorical imperative ‘you must help this person,’ takes the wounded B to a hospital against B’s wishes; A counts this as good (motive was right), but B finds it disturbing. Reason and act are one in Unification Thought: ‘we act while taking into account the result of our action, according to one and the same reason.’
Second, Kant’s universalizability criterion lacks a substantive standard. He knew people seek happiness but forbade aiming at it, then postulated God to guarantee that perfect virtue eventually coincides with happiness. The deeper problem: Kant treated all purposes as ‘self-loving and selfish.’ From the Unification view, humans have dual purposes — purpose for the whole and purpose for the individual — and properly pursue the individual purpose only while prioritizing the whole purpose. Kant collapsed purpose to individual purpose, then denigrated purpose, leaving moral law with ‘an ambiguous criterion.’
Third, Kant’s postulated God is a hypothetical God, not the existing God. In the Critique of Pure Reason he excluded God and soul from cognizable reality (no sense content); in the Critique of Practical Reason he postulated them to make morality work. The result is ‘a God we cannot believe in and rely on.’
The summary verdict: duty and behavioral norms cannot be ends in themselves because ‘the purpose of our action is ultimately to realize true love’; duty is merely the means. This is a substantive engagement — not just a dismissal — and surfaces Lee’s core methodological commitment: ethics must be teleological (purpose-of-creation grounded), consequence-sensitive, and pointed at love rather than at law-abidance. Worth a thread once a counter atomic from a deontologist exists.
See also. analytic-philosophy-wrong-to-separate-fact-from-value, bentham-restoration-of-environment-providential-reading, pragmatism-inverts-the-purpose-life-relation