star next to your name; otherwise you aren’t truly being honest.
Kant summed up these unconditional acts with one simple principle: you
must treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end itself.^37
But what does this look like in day-to-day life? Here’s a simple example:
Let’s pretend that I’m hungry and I want a burrito. I get in my car and
drive to Chipotle and order my usual double-meat monster that makes me oh
so happy. In this situation, eating the burrito is my “end” goal. It’s ultimately
why I’m doing everything else: getting in the car, driving, buying gas, and so
on. All these things I do to get the burrito are the “means,” i.e., the things I
must do in order to achieve my “end.”
Means are things that we do conditionally. They are what we bargain with.
I don’t want to get in my car and drive, and I don’t want to pay for gas, but I
do want a burrito. Therefore, I must do these other things to get that burrito.
An end is something that is desired for its own sake. It is the defining
motivating factor of our decisions and behaviors. If I wanted to eat a burrito
only because my wife wanted a burrito and I wanted to make her happy, then
the burrito is no longer my end; it is now a means to an even greater end:
making my wife happy. And if I only wanted to make my wife happy so I
could get laid tonight, now my wife’s happiness is a means to a greater end,
which in this case is sex.
Likely that last example made you squirm a little bit, made you feel that
I’m kind of a dirtbag.^38 That’s exactly what Kant is talking about. His
Formula of Humanity states that treating any human being (or any
consciousness) as a means to some other end is the basis of all wrong
behavior. So, treating a burrito as a means to my wife’s end is fine. It’s good
to make your spouse happy sometimes! But if I treat my wife as a means to
the end of sex, then I am now treating her merely as a means, and as Kant
would argue, that is some shade of wrong.
Similarly, lying is wrong because you are misleading another person’s
conscious behavior in order to achieve your own goal. You are treating that
person as a means to your own end. Cheating is unethical for a similar reason.
You are violating the expectations of other rational and sentient beings for
your own personal aims. You are treating everyone else who is taking the
same test or following the same rules as a means to your own personal end.
Violence, same deal: you are treating another person as a means to some
greater political or personal end. Bad, reader. Bad!
Kant’s Formula of Humanity doesn’t only describe our moral intuition
into what’s wrong; it also explains the adult virtues, those actions and