Malala Yousafzai Analysis

Immanuel Kant is most notably known as the man whose ideas on morality have greatly shaped the landscape of Ethics. Perhaps most important is his concept of rational humans having inherent dignity, but is this philosophy still true today and if so is it still relevant in a society that has so many more facets in a world far more complex than the time he lived. By introducing and explaining Kant’s concept of inherent dignity and showing how some people or groups of people have been at the both a place where the demand for dignity is shouted across the world, taken and never given back from others and how one man’s denial of dignity through deception proves that Kant’s concepts are still valid today and perhaps more important than ever.
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Perhaps without even realizing it Malala is a supporter of the Kantian idea of Dignity in that she was fighting for the education of all young people ("Malala Yousafzai Biography"). This struggle for education would be the groundwork for allowing the youth of Pakistan becoming people capable of rational thought and thus the beginnings of allowing for the people that surround her to develop their knowledge base which would further allow them to make “rational” choices in an environment that seeks to suppress people’s, especially women and children, ability to make those choices by being informed. Although in the western world Malala’s inherent dignity is apparent by the acknowledgment of her ability to make an informed, rational decision; despite the attempted coercion, voluntarily, in her home country The Taliban and the fundamentalist Muslim movement her attainment of dignity would be close to impossible as is proven by the assassination attempt. Malala further shows that Kant’s definition of dignity by the simple fact that she is irreplaceable and thus fulfills Kant’s rules for having inherent …show more content…
Madoff is an interesting example because on the surface, for years everything looked as though he was a man who treated people as if they did indeed have inherent dignity but in truth he never afforded that dignity to people from whom he stole millions of dollars leaving many people without anything. Madoff was so into how he was covering up this violation “To fool his investors and any regulators who happened to come sniffing around, Madoff built a Potemkin-­like investment operation complete with traders at fake terminals pretending to buy and sell stocks and a bogus paper trail of transactions and accounting reports.” (Ahamed) The abuse against these people’s dignity rests in the way Madoff perpetrated his crime. People invested money with Madoff thinking that they had all the relevant and pertinent information and facts about their investment but Madoff never gave the true information to these people (Ahamed). This misinformation kept people from fully understanding what was really happening to their investment, thus they could not have made a truly knowledgeable about their decision about whether or not to invest their savings with Madoff. Although the people that were duped by Madoff they made their decision to invest with him voluntarily and that they more than likely rational when considering how to invest their money these two criteria for having inherent dignity are