“So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes the formula as the demand to treat rational nature, in oneself and in others, as an end that limits how one may use people, not as a ban on every cooperation in which someone is useful. The word merely carries that distinction. A rival reading hears a prohibition on employment, medicine, or any relation in which one person serves another's purpose, which would make ordinary life impossible and is not the claim. It is the second formula of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork, offered as equivalent to the formula of universal law.

Did Immanuel Kant really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Mary Gregor's translation of the Groundwork, Academy edition 4:429, the formula of humanity. Merely is essential: using someone's labour is not yet the wrong. Using them only as a tool is. This wording is a translation.

Where it comes from

Groundwork, Ak. 4:429

Approximate date: 1785.

How to use it

A zero-hours rota in a warehouse near Daventry uses people as means to a delivery, which Kant does not by itself forbid, and it may also use them merely as means if the terms deny them any standing as authors of their own lives. The distinction is practical. Ask whether the person could share the end, or only undergo it; The formula will not write the contract; It will rule out a contract whose point requires that one party not count.

A mindset reading

Merely is the word campaigns drop when they want the sentence to condemn every market. He thinks a rational being can be a means as well as an end, in any joint work that still respects the capacity to set ends. A rival, softer reading treats as an end as a style of politeness, a kind tone on top of a use that is still mere; Tone is not the test; The standing of the person is.

Understand the philosophy

The key term is humanity, the rational nature in persons that can set ends, which must never be used only as an instrument. Academy page 429 states the formula after the discussion of universal law. Gregor’s translation is the English followed here. Kant takes this formula to be equivalent to the others, a claim commentators still dispute; Duties to oneself are included, which is why the sentence names one's own person and not only other people.

Related

• “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related fallacy. Ad hominem. An ad hominem answers a claim by attacking the person who made it, instead of the reasons. A fact about the speaker is relevant only when it actually bears on the evidence, such as a shown conflict of interest or a record of false reports on this subject.

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