Human Dignity and Bioethics

Kant’s Concept of Human Dignity | 335
fungibility of human goods. If something has intrinsic worth, or dignity,
then not all values are homogenous. Hobbes had infamously insisted
that “a man’s worth” is the same as his “price,” or the “amount
that would be paid for the use of his power.” 3 Kant’s concept of human
dignity is a direct rejoinder to that claim.
The ultimate basis of that rejoinder is what Kant calls the categorical
imperative—the implicit moral command to which the voice
of conscience, in his view, testifies. According to the first and most
basic version of that imperative, one should act “only according to
those maxims [or rules of action] that one could at the same time
will to be a universal law.” This version of the imperative is often
criticized—first and most famously by Hegel—for its empty formalism,
and I will not pause here to consider it. Instead, it will be more
fruitful to move to a second version, which commands: So act that
you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any
other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. 4 Kant
derives this second version from the fact that willing requires an end,
and in the case of moral willing, an absolute end, or end in itself.
Unlike ends that are “to be acquired by our action,” and are thus
“conditional” in value—either on our desires or on the contingencies
of nature—an end in itself has objective value, or “dignity.” Kant had
earlier claimed that the only thing “good without limitation” that is
possible to think is a good will. But a good will must have some objective
end if it is not to be utterly empty. If morality is to be possible
at all—if a “good will” is to have an objective end—then good will
itself, or the rationality that makes it possible, is the only candidate
that can fill the bill.
Such are the considerations behind the following exclamation on
Kant’s part:
Now I say that the human being and in general every rational
being exists not merely as a means to be used by this or
that will at its discretion; instead he must in all his actions…
always be regarded at the same time as an end. 5
The idea of humanity as an “objective end” refers not to a goal to be
achieved by our action (as in the usual meaning of an “end”) but to
an absolute limit that restricts our other ends and maxims, and the