Apology for Final Causation: An Empirical Criterion for Re-localising Entelecheia in the Moral Subject

This working paper argues that Aristotelian final causation (entelecheia), rendered explanatorily redundant across almost all of biology by the modern synthesis (Monod 1970), deserves to be restored to full ontological dignity within the domain of moral agency. A moral subject is defined as an agent capable of metacognition, evaluative judgement, and choice against biological interest. Five behavioural markers are arranged along a spectrum of increasing resistance to selectionist explanation, from the cult of the visible in chimpanzees (fully explained) to the documented case of the Italian partisan Guglielmo Jervis (1944), where selectionist explanation — including group selection in the Sober and Wilson (1998) formulation via Simpson's paradox — is argued to require more unverified assumptions than the postulation of genuine final causation. Following Leibniz and Kant, the paper acknowledges that neither explanation is demonstrable, and frames its conclusion as a comparison of parsimony: final causation is the more economical postulate. This document is deposited to establish intellectual priority. A peer-reviewed manuscript targeting Biology and Philosophy (Springer) is in preparation.