Kant Confusion
July 10, 2014
timothywstanley@me.com
My answer is that, for Kant, to respect personhood requires us to respect or promote various more empirical features of human beings: their happiness, their choices and the natural purposes that (so Kant believes) they find within themselves. We must also act in ways that are expressive of our respect for that value of personhood, so we must not allow ourselves to behave in a supine or submissive manner and we must not demean or disparage others. Between them, I think, these different ways of respecting humanity in our persons cover Kant’s views about the different duties that we have...
Michael Rosen, "Kant Confusion," Times Literary Supplement - http://bit.ly/1zqXQeA
Rosen's suggestion, it seems to me, echoes Levinas' appropriation of Kant in that he also collapses the transcendent into the ethical imperative to treat others as ends in themselves.