In the pages that are to follow I shall try to discuss the validity and the sufficiency of a celebrated moral principle of Kant's "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, always as an end, never merely as a means." In doing so, I shall say quite a lot about Kant, because his statement of the principle has had great influence, because he gave his genius to its elaboration, because he illustrated and defended it in ways that deserve a close examination. On the other hand, my principal purpose is not to supply a piece of Kantian exegesis interspersed with sundry criticisms. In the main I want to discuss the principle, as people say, "on its merits." In so far as I discuss Kant himself, I am doing so with the object of eliciting these merits.
Kant's ethics was a very original system, and he believed that all other moralists had strayed from the way. Nevertheless, he set out to be an interpreter rather than an innovator, to state and defend what he believed to be the plain man's conviction in ethical matters, to describe that conviction in an accurate philosophical analysis, and to justify it metaphysically in so far as a metaphysics of moral freedom was possible to speculative man. Such innovations as he made were intended, indeed, to distil the wisdom of the past as well as to correct oversights. It is therefore to be presumed that the principle we are now examining was not intended to be a brand new invention in morals. It is the principle of intrinsic human dignity, familiar in some form or other to every Stoic and to every Christian, to say nothing of other moralists. Its inclusion in Kant's system was a desideratum that might have been foreseen, and strengthened the motives, and even the popular motives, to credence in the system.
(John Laird, "The Ethics of Dignity," Philosophy 15 [April 1940]: 131-46, at 131)
