Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology

Appalled by Kant’s views on race, some Kantians suggest that these views are unrelated to his central moral teaching that every human being “exists as an end in itself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” But Kant developed his racial views because of his teleological view that we regard the history of the human species as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to establish an externally perfect state constitution as the necessary means to the end of developing all human predispositions. To evade the difficulty, Kantians may claim that Kant’s teleology and moral theory are not essentially related, but Kant thought that they were and close textual analysis supports their connection.