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Treating Others Merely as Means

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2009

SAMUEL KERSTEIN
SAMUEL KERSTEIN*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Parkkerstein@umd.edu
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Abstract

In the Formula of Humanity, Kant embraces the principle that it is wrong for us to treat others merely as means. For contemporary Kantian ethicists, this Mere Means Principle plays the role of a moral constraint: it limits what we may do, even in the service of promoting the overall good. But substantive interpretations of the principle generate implausible results in relatively ordinary cases. On one interpretation, for example, you treat your opponent in a tennis tournament merely as a means and thus wrongly when you try, through defeating him, to win first place. The article aims to develop a reconstruction of the Mere Means Principle that has more plausible implications than do rival reconstructions. It sets out a sufficient condition for an agent's treating another merely as a means. This condition is intended to be Kantian, but not necessarily one that Kant endorses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 163 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. Gregor, Mary (Cambridge, 1996), p. 429CrossRefGoogle Scholar, italics omitted. I am referring to Preussische Akademie edition (vol. IV) pagination, which is included in the margins of the Gregor translation. I have substituted the more familiar ‘So act that you treat humanity’ for Gregor's ‘So act that you use humanity’.

2 This example is, I believe, a variation on one introduced by Derek Parfit.

3 See, for example, O'Neill, Onora, ‘Between Consenting Adults’, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 112–17Google Scholar, and Korsgaard, Christine, ‘The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil’, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 137–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 439.

5 Here I am following Hill, Thomas E. Jr., ‘Humanity as an End in Itself’, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 38–41Google Scholar.

6 See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 31–2Google Scholar.

7 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 429–30.

8 Wood, Allen W., Kant's Ethical Thought (Cambridge, 1999), p. 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar, italics added.

9 Hill, Thomas E. Jr. ‘Hypothetical Consent in Kantian Constructivism’, in Human Welfare and Moral Worth (Oxford, 2002), pp. 69–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Korsgaard, ‘The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil’, p. 139.

11 See Hill, Thomas E. Jr. ‘The Hypothetical Imperative’, in Dignity and Practical Reason (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 17–37Google Scholar. For discussion in the Groundwork, see pp. 413–18.

12 O'Neill suggests that in Kant's view an agent's using another merely as a means amounts to his acting on a maxim to which the other cannot consent (‘Between Consenting Adults’, p. 113). In a departure from O'Neill's presentation, the Possible Consent account does not invoke Kant's notion of a maxim. It is notoriously difficult to specify what Kant means by a maxim, and for the sake of simplicity I do not wish to invoke maxims here. So far as I can tell, this departure from strict Kantianism does not affect the substance of what follows. Korsgaard seems to join O'Neill in embracing the Possible Consent account. ‘The question whether another can assent to your way of acting’, she writes, ‘can serve as a criterion for judging whether you are treating her as a mere means’ (Korsgaard, ‘The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil’, p. 139).

13 O'Neill, ‘Between Consenting Adults’, p. 110.

14 O'Neill, ‘Between Consenting Adults’, p. 111.

15 Parfit, ‘Climbing the Mountain’, unpublished manuscript.

16 The End Sharing and Possible Consent accounts are, of course, also vulnerable to this criticism.

17 In the interest of ease of expression, I have simplified condition (b). Strictly speaking, (b) should read ‘That which, rationally speaking, prevents the other from sharing the agent's end is the following: the other is himself using (or has used or is about to use) someone in pursuing an end, and it is reasonable for the other to believe neither that this person can (or could or will be able to) consent to the other's use of him, nor share the end the other is pursuing in using him’.

18 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 428.

19 I am grateful to the University of Maryland General Research Board for financially supporting this project. I would like to thank audiences at the University of Richmond and the Universität Bielefeld for helpful discussion as well as Rüdiger Bittner, Scott James, David Lefkowitz, Thomas Pogge, Peter Schaber and David Wasserman for their generous comments on earlier drafts.