Question A lecturer I met a few weeks ago said to me (among other things) that up to this point no-one has managed to disprove Kant's famous claim that 'we should always treat others as ends in themselves and never as mere means'. While I agree that this is a noble maxim by which to live our lives, is it true that it has not been disproved? It seems slightly hasty to claim this about anything.

Accepted:
March 21, 2013

Comments

I think there are two different issues here, so let me start with the simpler one. Suppose the lecturer said: "To the best of my knowledge—and I've read a great deal on the matter—no one has disproved Kant's claim. That seems the sort of thing one might reasonably be able to say, and might well be what the speaker meant. If so, no problem.

If the speaker is claiming more or less a priori that no one has a disproof, this would be harder to swallow, but there's a way to understand it that makes it not just mere arrogance. Suppose I said: no one has disproved that 3+4 = 7. I might well mean not just that no one happens to have done this, but that no one could do it. And in fact, I'm quite sure that's right: no one could disprove it.

So the speaker might have meant that Kant's claim had a status rather like "3+4=7": necessarily true, hence not disprovable. If so, I'm not sure he's right, but also not sure he's wrong. However, there's yet another possibility. To see it, ask what would count as a disproof of Kant's claim. A proof that it's incoherent would do, but it's hard to believe that it's incoherent even if it's not inconsistent to reject it.

Another sort of disproof would be a counterexample: a case where it was acceptable to violate the maxim. What might that be like?

It's easy to imagine cases where a utilitarian might say we could or even should violate Kant's maxim. The trouble is not that the utilitarian is clearly wrong, but that the counterexample will almost inevitably be controversial, hence not clearly a disproof.

This isn't to say that Kant is right and his opponent wrong; rather it's to suggest that an outright disproof would be very hard to come by. And so I'm inclined to think the speaker might be right.