104 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
subsequent treatment that the worker receives. Moreover, such objections are
not only to be found within the radical tradition of Marxism; concerns with
the treatment of workers under capitalism were also part and parcel of various
amelioration projects which were designed to take the ‘claws out of capitalism’.
Most famously, the Quakers of Cadbury attempted to develop model factories
in which workers were not treated as mere resources but as fellow members of
a cooperative enterprise (Child 1964: 293–315).
Perhaps, the clearest expression of this concern with the relationship
between market and moral attitude originates with the writings of Immanuel
Kant. Although Kant was not concerned with markets as we now understand
them, and it would be odd to think of Kant as having a fully developed account
of the market, his work on the evacuation of value by money has been tremen-
dously influential in our understanding of how the commercial realm might
generate inappropriate modes of regard. In theGroundwork of the Metaphysics
of Moralsthe distinction between price and dignity appears amidst Kant’s
discussion of the radical difference between ‘things’ and ‘persons’ (Kant 1956:
98). According to Kant, ‘things’ have onlyrelativevalue; they are valuable in
so far as someone happens to desire them, in so far as they are useful for some
other ends. Persons, on the other hand, are ends-in-themselves and possess
a worthiness or dignity: to treat a person with dignity is synonymous with
treating him or her as an end. For Kant, the value of a person, unlike that of a
thing, is unconditional (in that its value is not dependent on other ends and
has priority over contingent goals), incomparable (in that its value is absolute
and not to be compared with other beings or things) and incalculable. Accord-
ing to Kant, persons cannot have a price—that is, a value in exchange—for
things with a price aresubstitutable. Thus, price violates the incomparability
of persons since price admits of equivalence.
Kant’s apparent antagonism towards some market exchanges is certainly
not an idiosyncratic feature of theGroundwork.IntheMetaphysics of Morals
he suggests that selling a tooth to be transplanted into another mouth or
having oneself castrated in order to get an easier livelihood as a singer are
ways of potentially murdering oneself (Kant 1996: 177). He does not rule out
the amputation of a dead or diseased organ when that organ endangers the
amputee’s life nor is he concerned with cutting offparts of oneself, such as
one’s hair, that are not organs, although he notes that cutting one’s hair in
order to sell it is ‘not entirely free from blame’ (Kant 1991: 177). In hisLectures
on Ethics, Kant (1963) also condemns the sale of organs (in this case fingers
and teeth), a discussion in which his concern lies not with murdering oneself,
but with the wrongful nature of disposing of things that have a free will.
We can view Kant’s price–dignity dictum as a version of the more general
‘Value Evacuation Thesis’ (Walsh 2001: 528). The Value Evacuation Thesis
consists of the claim that incorporating a thing into the market evacuates its
non-instrumental value. According to the strong version of it (the Entailment