Is It Always Wrong to Treat Someone as a Means?

We rely on other people to achieve purposes every day: taking a taxi to the airport, asking a doctor for a diagnosis, or hiring a carpenter to repair a door. If treating someone as a means were wrong in itself, ordinary cooperation would be nearly impossible. Kant’s claim in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is more precise: we must treat humanity, in ourselves and others, always as an end and never merely as a means.

The crucial word is “merely”. A passenger does use a driver’s service to reach the airport, but the driver knows the terms, can accept or refuse them, and pursues their own purpose through the payment. Neither party thereby loses their standing as an agent. By contrast, a passenger who knows they cannot pay but conceals this prevents the driver from deciding on the real terms. The deception bypasses the other person’s capacity to choose.

Kant’s argument does not imply that consent makes every act right. Consent may be coerced, misinformed or shaped by unfair conditions, and respecting a person involves more than simply leaving them alone. My view is that the word “means” invites confusion: the problem is not that people are useful to one another, but that one party sees only the use and refuses to recognise the other’s reasons, choices and ends. Cooperation can involve mutual means; respect requires that neither person be merely that.

Kant, Immanuel: Metaphysics