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The Ethics of Dignity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

John Laird
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Extract

In the pages that are to follow I shall try to discuss the validity and the sufficiency of a celebrated moral principle of Kant's “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, always as an end, never merely as a means.” In doing so, I shall say quite a lot about Kant, because his statement of the principle has had great influence, because he gave his genius to its elaboration, because he illustrated and defended it in ways that deserve a close examination. On the other hand, my principal purpose is not to supply a piece of Kantian exegesis interspersed with sundry criticisms. In the main I want to discuss the principle, as people say, “on its merits.” In so far as I discuss Kant himself, I am doing so with the object of eliciting these merits.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 58 , April 1940 , pp. 131 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1940

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References

1 La Philosophie pratique de Kant, pp. 116 f. See references to Hartenstein, vol. viii, 624, and others.

2 The Theory of Good and Evil, i, 131.

3 Analytic, chap. ii.

1 E.g. Werke (Berlin, ed.), vi, 443.Google Scholar

1 I, 333.