"Repugnant conclusions" following from Kant's imperative to never use humans only as means to an end?

Question

Many formulations of utilitarian consequentialism famously lead to a range of "repugnant conclusions", such as:

• it would be moral to execute an innocent person if this act could deter at least two future murders
• the Mere Addition paradox, that a world containing the largest number of people whose lives were just marginally better than insufferable has a high amount of total utility
• the Utility Monster

etc. There is a famous "repugnant conclusion" following from Kant's well-known categorical imperative in the following form:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

From this follows that if the Gestapo shows up at one's door, one should not lie when they ask if one is hiding a wanted Jew.

Kant proposed other formulations of the categorical imperative, such as the Humanity Formulation:

The practical imperative, therefore, is the following: Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.

Now to Kant, these were seemingly interchangeable, and the categorical rejection of lying could be derived from this second form. But at first glance, it doesn't seem that e.g. the imperative to never only treat a person as a means to and end, but always as an end in themselves would automatically lead one to give up a fugitive just so one doesn't have to lie, particularly when considering side effects (see e.g. this).

What are the canonical counterexamples brought forward against Kant's Categorical Imperative in the form of the Humanity Formulation, that one should always treat people as ends in themselves, never merely as means to an end?

Answer 1

The objections Isaacson lists are important, but the canonical counterexamples are sacrifical dilemmas: Essentialy these scenarios present a situation in which killing a small amount of people can save a great amount of people from death. An examples for these scenarios are trolley-cases.

Every Kantian has to deal with these kinds of problems and other than Isaacson suggests, most of them bite the bullet. E.g. in Germany, whose constitution is highly influenced by Kant, the suppreme court ruled that it is illeagal to shoot down a passenger plane captured by terrorists, even if it would be clear that they want to destroy skyscrapers/ a stadium/ a nuclear power plant.

Answer 2

Most canonical criticisms of Kant attack the first formulation - Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Since Kant claims directly that all formulations are essentially rephrasings of one single rule, criticisms of one can be taken to be criticisms of the others.

Hegel's argument touched on the humanity formulation only in that if we all shared the same ends it could lead to conclusion which would be repugnant given that this is not the state of affairs which currently exists. For example, that there should be no private property is not immediately a problem if all people consider this a reasonable circumstance. No-one would take the items you were making use of because you would simply take them back, the situation would continue ad infinitum. Because some people do believe in private property, however, and would defend it with violence if necessary, we must all defend private property in order to maintain our dignity.

Schopenhauer criticises the formulation as reducing only to egoism. His argument is that if we deny the feelings (one of which is empathy), then all we are left with as means of judging the ends of others is our own egoistic ends (Schopenhauer, as I mentioned above, actually phrases this in the context of the universalisation formulation, I've put it in terms of the humanistic formulation to best answer your question). Essentially for Schopenhauer, Kant does not do an adequate job of describing what constitutes permissible ends without requiring further formulations which end up utilitarian.

The most compelling criticism comes from Mill who argues (from a different perspective to Schopenhauer), that Kant's ethics ends up utilitarian in any case. In order to answer the question of whether the maxim could be universalised, we are asking ourselves what the consequences of it would be. If we are capable of determining , with some accuracy, the consequences of global adoption of some behaviour then Kant's objection to consequentialist ethics (that consequences are difficult to judge accurately) either become irrelevant, or undermines his own method.

The efforts of neo-Kantians (and Kant himself) to show how certain scenarios could be worked out using Kantian ethics even though they at first seem to be counterexamples is in fact a demonstration of Schopenhaur's and Mill's criticisms. If a theory does not lead us to counter-intuitive conclusions then is is useless (other than in a descriptive capacity), we obviously already know right actions from wrong ones, we know that letting the Nazi in and telling them where the Jewish family is hiding is wrong. If we know this already such that we need to write caveats and re-interpretations of Kant's ethics in order to make the conclusions fit, then the system is just utilitarianism or evolutionary ethics with the added inconvenience of having to post hoc describe how one use the categorical imperative correctly to arrive at the action one knew was right in the first place.

Answer 3

First the example you give is false: the only two options are not to lie or to give up the fugitive.

There are a range of other options. One among them is to refuse to comply with the process by not answering and blocking attempts at unwarranted searches, whether or not you are hiding someone.

It can be universalized: if people in general refused to allow unwarranted searches, the Gestapo would still not know who was hiding people.

The second form leads to this -- you should resist being a means, without reducing those asking you to mere means. If you think of them as people, not as means in use by others, then you would not bother lying to them.

Kant wrote a very explicit paper about the objections that his position against lying had these kinds of political effects. One interpretation of his position is that open non-compliance is always more moral than covert non-compliance in any such situation, and choosing the latter is a form of cowardice which ends up sacrificing your more principled allies as mere means.

The primary weakness pointed out in the means-ends formulation is that it says nothing in the face of two individuals whose 'ends-ness' must be chosen between. (But that is why he carefully laid out the other equivalent formulations. The idea is that one or the other might be a better starting point, but that they are all, in fact logically identical in implication. If they appear to conflict, your maxim is malformed.)

To my mind, he is particularly evasive on the issue of war. He comes down clearly as anti-war (over and over again) but still avoids stating that declaring war itself is inherently immoral.

The two populations whose ends-ness are at odds, in the issue of war, are never the two fighting sides, but the civilian and military populations.

It is true that soldiers can accept their position and can adopt an honorable stance toward one another that would let them accept death at the hands of a rival faction when their dedication to their own principles are very strong, and no other resolution seems possible. So they can be more than mere means, and there theoretically could be a just war.

Historically they just never have been so. No officer can actually abide the dictum: all but a very few soldiers under his command are playing their part as mere means, the existence of a minority who can see the situation clearly and accept it notwithstanding. Unfortunately, to my mind, the ethics itself is too abstract and too evenhanded to capture this kind of intrinsic inequality of composition.

The construction does not allow for something to be immoral simply because of the real limitations of most human beings. If 90% of us are dupes, still not all of us are dupes. The duped soldiers' willingness to be there, and to make the promises they have made, is theoretically their own business; questioning it betrays their autonomy.

The formulation prevents him from being clear here, and stating the ethical position that clearly represents his own political position.