Criticism of Kant's moral formalism and universalism is often motivated by the allegedly counter-intuitive implications of applying the categorical imperative to certain ‘puzzle maxims’. A good example is that of dining at a friend's place on Monday nights. A maxim along the lines of ‘I want to dine at a friend's place at 7.00 pm on Mondays’ cannot be universalised if we assume that the particular friend in question must be present, for example to discharge his or her responsibilities as the host of the party. But, surely, there is nothing wrong with dining at a friend's place on Monday nights? We have all done it. Our conscience was silent. Yet the universalisation test of the categorical imperative would seem to rule it out.

One possible way of dealing with this difficulty consists in demoting the said maxim to the level of a mere intention (Absicht). According to this reconstruction of Kant's theory of action, maxims are ‘life rules’ (Lebensregeln) that render a life meaningful as a whole and are as such characterised by a certain generality. If so, dining with friends on Mondays is too particular and narrow a rule to qualify as a maxim – but if it is not a maxim it does not, so the argument goes, have to pass the universalisation test of the categorical imperative. This analysis contains a grain of truth, but the importance of maxims cannot be grounded in an ad hoc re-classification.