Monday, November 07, 2005

Respect - Kant's Imperative

"Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave respect a moral weighting, defining it as treating people as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end" - Deborah Hope, 'Rude Awakening' in The Australian November 5-6 2005, p. 27.

This populist reduction of Kant's ethic seems demeaning ... It's almost as if the gravity of the Groundwork has been trivialised to the point of cliché.

1 comment:

MH said...

I think that you'll find that it is actually the pratical imperative, rather than the categorical.