Poverty, Exploitation, Mere Things and Mere Means

Abstract

I argue that, alongside the already well-established prohibition against treating persons as mere means, Kant’s Formula of Humanity requires a prohibition against treating persons as mere things. The former captures ethical violations due to someone’s (perceived) instrumental value, e.g. exploitation, the latter captures cases in which I mistreat others because they have no instrumental value to me. These are cases in which I am indifferent and complacent towards persons in need; forms of mistreatment frequently suffered by the world’s poorest. I explain why we need the category of treating others as mere things and what the prohibition against such treatment entails. Prohibitions against treating as mere means and as mere things are both essential for understanding the specific nature and extent of our duties to the world’s poorest.

Digital loneliness—changes of social recognition through AI companions

“…We suffer from loneliness because we perceive instantly what is essentially missing: a relatedness to others in which we experience ourselves as adequately socially recognized. The crucial point of Honneth's theory—therein adding something new to the standard view on loneliness as mere subjective feeling ( 51 )—is that for many loners this goes hand in hand with the suffering from being ostracized, rejected, overlooked, not taken seriously as a participant (e.g., by their families, peers, at the workplace, by authorities), which places loneliness within a broader frame of the reproduction dynamics of social recognition: One must therefore discriminate between either a lack of or expressions of false recognition, which both include (sometimes: intentional) strategies of “invisibilization”: While a lack of social recognition implies a fundamental neglect of the other [an can also include the intention to harm someone through neglect, e.g., by objectifying someone as a mere enemy , as Sticker ( 52 ) has described it], false social recognition refers to the instrumentalization of agents by others, i.e., being valued as a mere means to an end for the other, which equally can cut people off from basic social inclusion. This lack of empathy is a “deficiency” mode of social recognition.…”

Never Merely as a Means: Rethinking the Role and Relevance of Consent

“…All cases of wrongful instrumentalization will also be failures to respect persons as ends in themselves, but not all cases of failing to respect persons as ends will be cases of wrongful instrumentalization. Kant identifies indifference to others as one such case ( G , 4: 430), and Martin Sticker has recently argued that we need the category treating as a mere thing to describe ways we fail to treat others as ends in themselves through neglect, indifference and complacency (Sticker 2021). In these cases, we do not use others as means and thus cannot be said to use them merely as means, but we nonetheless act wrongly.…”