Immanuel Kant: What Is The Principle Of Humanity

Today I was challenged with the duty of living my life through the Kantian perspective. In people’s lives, people use each other as a ends daily. However, Immanuel Kant expands on to this thought through the principle of humanity. The principle of humanity states treating human beings to be treated as an ends but never a mere mean. Where mere means stands for using a person as if they were a disposable object (Restrepo, “What Is the Principle of Humanity”). In addition, Immanuel Kant believes a moral action is dependent on intentions and good will. Good will is our ability for steady commitment to doing our duty for its own sake and ability to know our duty (Restrepo, “What Is the Principle of Humanity”). To deem an action to be moral is to …show more content…
One of the reasons I had for attending was to get something to eat. I would be using the chief and the server at the restaurant as a means for me to get food. Now, I have two choices; to use the server as a mere means or a means. Although I would never act like this, if I were to use the server as a mere means I could’ve annoyingly snapping my fingers at them and be completely rude by belittling them just to get food. I could’ve even tried to get bad service so I could complain to the manger in hopes of getting my meal compensated. However, this violates the principle of humanity. Instead, I was very polite with the waiter and treated them with respect and said thank you after my meal arrived. In addition, I had good will to be courteous with the waiter. My intentions of being polite towards to waiter is because he is also a human being who deserves respect. I was not being nice to him so he won’t spit in my food which is not a good intention to …show more content…
For the categorical imperative, we follow this duty of paying the bill because it is an absolute command and it is a law. For the test of universalizability, one maxim is that people can leave restaurants without leaving tip. If there was a world where everyone left without tipping the waiter, then they would be very rude and not do a good job. More so, majority of them would have very low wages in total and would very likely not want to work anymore since they don’t have enough money to support their livelihood. As a result, the restaurants would have no servers and most likely the restaurant would have to shut down because no one is willing to deliver the food or take orders. Now, can the “goal” of my friend’s action be achieved in this type of world? It would be extremely hard to get food if there were no servers or even without a