Most people who feel the pull of an infinite scroll describe it as a failure of willpower, a private weakness to be managed with timers and grayscale screens. Kant would have found that description too generous to the machine and too harsh to the person. The question worth asking is not why you stayed, but whether the rule that kept you there could be made into a law. 6 min read.
The universal law formulation asks you to act only on a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant presents this as the first of three equivalent expressions of the moral law, and it is the version most often reduced to a playground slogan: what if everyone did that? Kant's own version is more exact, and more demanding, than the slogan.
Two ways a maxim can fail
Kant distinguishes contradictions in conception from contradictions in the will. In the first, the maxim cannot even be thought as a universal practice without undoing itself. His standard case is the false promise. If everyone made promises they did not intend to keep, the institution of promising would collapse, since no one would credit a promise and the act of promising would lose the very trust it trades on. The maxim cannot be universalized because its success depends on others not doing what it does.
In the second, the maxim can be thought, but a rational agent could not consistently will it, because doing so would undercut ends that agent necessarily holds. Kant's examples here concern indifference to others' needs, where one could imagine such a world but could not will it, given that one needs help oneself. The test is therefore not whether a world with the rule is imaginable. It is whether the agent, reflecting as a rational being, could adopt that world as the one in which they must also live.
The designer's maxim, stated carefully
A fair version of the engagement maxim is not "manipulate people." Product teams rarely write that. The more realistic maxim reads: present each user with variable, unpredictable rewards timed to interrupt their attention, whenever doing so raises time-on-platform, since time-on-platform drives advertising revenue. Stated this way, it is a rule about means that serves a revenue end, which is the form Kant's tests usually examine.
Does it contradict itself in conception?
Here the case gets interesting, because the engagement maxim is not like the false promise. Universalizing it does not make attention-capture impossible. Slot machines, which operate on the same variable-reward logic, persist in a world where everyone runs them. So the contradiction must be more precise than a collapse of the practice.
The precise point is this: the revenue end is relative. An advertising platform earns from attention that it captures and that rivals do not. If every feed uses the same variable-reward technique, the technique no longer distinguishes one feed from another, and the advertiser's price for attention falls toward whatever is left after saturation. The maxim's purpose, to win a larger share of attention than alternatives can, is defeated by its universal form. This is structurally close to Kant's lying case, where the maxim's aim depends on being an exception. The engagement maxim works only as a private advantage.
A rule that pays only when others refrain from using it has, in Kant's sense, already stated its own exception, and no amount of product polish can make that exception universal.
The objection from the user's side
The test also applies to the user's maxim, "I will check the feed once more before I sleep." Universalized, this describes a world in which everyone surrenders sleep to a stream they cannot exit, and the maxim's author, reflecting as a rational agent with ends such as rest and sustained thought, could scarcely will that world. Yet the user's maxim does not collapse in conception. The verdict cuts against the platform more cleanly than against the person, which is why Kant's formula may serve better as a diagnostic of design than as a verdict on individual weakness.
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A skeptic can object that the test is too blunt. Almost any commercial practice has a universalized form that undermines its advantage, because advantage is relative by definition. A bakery that bakes better bread does not refute itself when others bake better bread. The difference lies in the mechanism. The bakery's maxim produces a good that others can match. The engagement maxim produces its profit by exploiting a regular feature of human psychology, namely the reward-seeking response, which is not improved by competition but depleted by it. That asymmetry is the sharpest result the universal law test yields here, and it is why the test, properly applied, condemns the feed without requiring any theory of pleasure or utility.
Referenced Works & Texts
- Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section II, Akademie 4:421 (1785). The primary source for the universal law formulation and the false promise example.
- Korsgaard, Christine, "Kant's Formula of Universal Law," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985). A close account of the contradiction in conception and in the will.
- O'Neill, Onora, Constructions of Reason, chapters on universal law and maxims (1989). Argues for a constructivist reading of the universalizability test.
- Wu, Tim, The Attention Merchants, chapters on attention as a commodity (2016). Traces the commercial history of capturing attention for advertising.
- Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Part I (2019). Describes behavioral surplus and the economic logic of prediction.