Act only on the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law
— Immanuel Kant
Being an idle Kantian is to have an overwhelming impulse for negative universalisation.
You think it’s likely to not end up good for everyone, so you use that to justify not doing it even if it will do some good for some.
The solution to this Idle Kantian problem is what my friend Sam calls being a Humble Experimentalist. The Humble Experimentalist tries things out to see if they work. If they work they are tried more often, or scaled up. And eventually we may reach a new equilibrium. This new equilibrium might comprise only one strategy, or both, or several mixed in varying degrees. Much like the megafauna mix of a natural habitat, it can’t be predicted easily in advance, nor are they exclusively home to only one.
The key here is the understanding that if something not being for everyone is really an indictment on it, then understanding that we need multiple approaches for everything is its counterpoint. The natural endpoint is heterogeneity.
Which means the Humble part is at least as important as the Experimentalist part. Its the understanding that new universals are not attained by proclamation, but rather by a process of accretion.
It means an acceptance that all solutions are subject to the vagaries of our circumstances, and that things work well for different reasons for different people. Bayesian updating should lead you to update away or towards solutions based on their efficacy when you see them used, but this shouldn’t be binary. It means that the task we have as critics is not to hair-trigger-pull our hunt for silver bullets, but to realise that diversity of process is a feature, not a bug.