The Trouble with Kant′s Humanity Formula.doc

The Trouble with Kant’s Humanity Formula Andrew Johnson It is probably safe to say that, of Kant’s various formulations of the Categorical Imperative, none has been more well-received than the Humanity Formula. “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” (G?4:429). As against Utilitarianism, the Humanity Formula seems, more clearly than Kant’s Universal-Law Formula, to uphold the widely accepted view that persons have certain inviolable rights. Persons may not be enslaved or raped, they may not be punished without having committed a crime, no matter how much happiness such actions might yield others. Prominent Kantian moral philosophers, such as Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Alan Donagan, have defended the Humanity Formula as a basic moral principle of theoretical ethics. Moreover, it has frequently provided inspiration for arguments in applied ethics. Examples include Denis Arnold’s and Norman Bowie’s critique of sweatshops, Onora O’Neill’s argument for famine relief, and Barbara Herman’s analysis of sexual objectification. According to Kant, the Categorical Imperative is “the supreme principle of morality” (G?4:392), and it is a principle that is supposed to give us guidance regarding, among other things, the morality of actions. For a principle to qualify as the supreme principle of the morality of actions, it must, I take it, satisfy three conditions. Firstly, it must be fundamental, in the sense that it is not derivable from a still more basic principle of moral action. Secondly, it must be complete, in that it is neither limited to certain spheres of action nor in need of supplementation by additional moral principles. Finally, it must be plausible, not yielding implications that even most proponents of the principle would regard as false. In what follows, I focus on these last two conditions, which I call “the completeness condition” and “the plau