The most prominent figure of the deontological tradition is eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant was deeply critical of teleological approaches to ethics. For him, morality had nothing to do with promoting benefit to people. In fact, Kant thought that focusing on the promoting of benefit will only corrupt people’s judgment and character. Instead, according to Kant, morality binds us to act in ways that have nothing to do with benefit to people. For Kant, the key feature of persons that makes us worthy of moral consideration is rationality. The fact that people are rational means that they have to be treated in certain ways, in particular, ways that respect and acknowledge their capacity to be and act rationally.
Kant’s fundamental guiding principle is the Categorical Imperative, which has two versions:
The Principle of Universalizability (let’s call this one PU), and
The Principle of Humanity (we’ll call this one PH)
PU requires that you “(a)ct only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Basically, Kant is saying that we can identify an action as unethical if we can’t make it universal. Specifically, we can identify an action as unethical when it would be self-defeating if prescribed a universal norm of conduct. Kant’s classic example is that of false promising. If I ask you for money, but I know that you’ll only give it to me if I promise to pay you back, then I’m going to have to make a promise. However, I also know that I have no intention of paying you back. Kant’s point is that if you ask yourself whether making a promise that you know you’re not going to keep could become a universal law that everyone follows, you’ll see that it is immediately self-defeating. If you made false-promising universal then no one would believe you when you made a false promise. In fact, the whole practice of promise-making would collapse, since it depends on the assumption that people speak honestly. Notice, the only reason you can make a false promise or deceive someone in any way is because people assume you’re speaking truthfully whenever you talk to them. Without that assumption, you could never deceive anyone. Patients can be deceived only because they assume you’re speaking truthfully to them. If you undercut the assumption of truthfulness, then they couldn’t be deceived because they would trust anything you said. Hence, for Kant, any action that would become self-defeating if it were made a universal law is unethical. So, PU functions like a test, a test to determine whether or not a given action is morally permissible.
For our purposes, the more relatable of the two versions of the categorical imperative is PH , which sates that you must “act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always as an end.” As mentioned above, for Kant, people are deserving of respect because they are rational and therefore have an intrinsic dignity. It is through our rationality that we are able to exercise control over our lives. Nonrational beings are simply at the mercy of external forces (this includes inclinations and desires too). Hence, Kant says that you must treat people as ends-in-themselves, not like things that you use for your own personal purposes. The point is, don’t (merely) use people. To treat someone like and end-in-himself is to treat that person in such a way that he controls his own life through his own rational choices. When we withhold information from someone or try to manipulate or coerce him into doing what we want, that’s treating him like a means to our personal end, not like an end-in-himself.
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