Rachels chapter 10 Kant and Respect for Persons

The big moral rule:

“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.”

What do you think that the significance of the phrase ‘in your own person or in that of another’ has for this rule?

Two facts about people that support this judgment:

1. We should treat people as ends and not means because humans have absolute value.
1. Things have value only as a means to an end and we give them the ends that in turn give them value.
2. They only have value relative to us.
3. Rational beings have an absolute value as opposed to the things, which only have value relative to our desires.

2. Treat people as ends and not means because we must respect human rationality.
1. Human beings have intrinsic worth and dignity because they are rational agents.

i. We are free and are capable of making our own decisions and goals.

ii. We are guided by reason.

iii. There needs to be reason for there to be morality.

2. Example: getting money by a false promise to a friend. If we lie to them we are not respecting their rationality we are manipulating them. We are using that person as a means to our end; we are using them for their money. To treat your friend as an end you would explain the problem to her and perhaps she would use her rationality to decide to give you the money.
3. Has the idea of someone ‘using someone else’ ever come up in your moral assessments of other people?

Punishment:

Retributivism: punishment is a matter of justice, which demands that the offender ‘pay’ for his or her evil deed. Punishment is just a matter of getting what one deserves.

Utilitarians are opposed to retributivism because it increases suffering and decreases happiness. (Retributivists know that it increases unhappiness, but they don’t care because the bad person is the one who is made unhappy. Notice that this is a case of moral disagreement in which both parties agree on the facts, but disagree in their assessments of the morality of the situation because they hold different moral principles.)

Utilitarians on punishment: Punishment is OK only if it causes more good than evil, or if it increases the happiness in the world.

1) Punishment may serve to deter Crime

a. The Alcatraz Hilton example

2) Punishment may serve to rehabilitate the prisoner.

a. We should abandon punishment and call it treatment and in fact, we do just this, there are no prisons, just correction facilities.

Kant’s Retributivism:

Kant thought that Utilitarian theories of punishment were incompatible with Human dignity:

1. Deterrent justifications for punishment are using the criminal as a means to secure the well being of society.
2. Rehabilitation justifications for punishment are violating the persons rational integrity by manipulating their personalities.

Two principles of punishment:

1. only guilty people should be punished
2. Punishment should be proportionate to the crime.
1. in quantity.
2. in quality.

The arguments in favor of there being punishment at all:

1. It is a matter of justice

2. Punishment is a matter of treating the criminal as an end in himself.

a. Treating the criminal as a rational being.

b. He is then responsible for his own conduct.

3. Punishment is a matter of treating people with respect to the Categorical Imperative.

a. A person’s conduct determines how we treat them

b. When we act we are willing that our conduct be made into a universal law.

c. When someone treats people in a certain way they are saying in effect “this is the way that people are to be treated.”

d. So, it makes sense that we punish him by treating him similarly to the way that he treated others.