> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://philocrux.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What Did Kant Mean by Treating People as Mere Means, and Does Attention-Harvesting Violate It? - URL: https://philocrux.com/answers/kant-humanity-formula-attention-economy-mere-means/ - Published: 2026-11-06T23:17:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-06T23:17:28.000Z - Description: Kant's Humanity formulation forbids treating a rational being solely as an instrument for another's ends, in a way that bypasses the agency the person could rationally endorse. Attention-harvesting violates this when it works by getting around a user's reasoning rather than engaging it, th - Author: Philosopheasy - Tags: Answers Most people now meet the word "manipulation" as a feeling rather than a concept: forty minutes gone from a feed that promised two, a notification that arrived precisely when the mind was thinnest. Kant's sentence about persons and means was written for a world of merchants and monarchs, yet it still describes that feeling with unusual precision. 4 min read. Kant's Humanity formulation forbids treating a rational being solely as an instrument for another's ends, in a way that bypasses the agency the person could rationally endorse. Attention-harvesting violates this only when it works by getting around a user's reasoning instead of engaging it. Whether a particular platform does so is a separate empirical question that the formula cannot answer by itself. Consider two cases. A shopkeeper sells you a watch by claiming it is made of gold. You leave poorer and angrier, and you know exactly who wronged you. Now consider a feed that keeps you scrolling by exploiting a variable reward schedule. You leave poorer in time, angrier at yourself, and nobody appears to have lied. Kant would have little trouble with the first case. The second is harder, and the difficulty is the reason the formula is worth applying here. ## What the Word "Mere" Carries The formula in the Groundwork reads: "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" (Ak. 4:429). The weight falls on "merely." Kant does not forbid using people as means, since every exchange does that. The shopkeeper uses you to earn a living, and you use him to get a watch. What is forbidden is using a person in a way that leaves out the rational agency by which he could have agreed to the arrangement. That is why deception is the paradigm case. A lie does not merely use your judgment; it corrupts the premises on which your judgment operates, so that your assent is not really yours. > The engagement engineer rarely needs a false premise. It is enough to know which true facts about your nervous system will make the next click feel inevitable, and then to arrange the screen so those facts do their work unseen. ## Where the Instrument Hides The shopkeeper case and the platform case differ on several axes at once: | Feature | Deception at the counter | Engagement design | | ---------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | Mechanism of influence | A false claim about the goods | True facts about attention, arranged for effect | | Awareness of the aim | Concealed by the lie | Usually disclosed in general terms, rarely in particular | | Whose ends are served | The seller's, at the buyer's expense | The platform's, which may or may not overlap with the user's | | Test of consent | Fails: no buyer would agree to be lied to | Contested: many users would endorse some of it | The last row is where the argument gets serious. The shopkeeper case fails the consent test outright. The platform case does not fail it so cleanly, because the relevant question is not whether a user clicked "accept" but whether the user, reasoning clearly about what the design is doing, would endorse the arrangement. A person who wants to read the news in the evening and is pulled into a loop until midnight has been served a purpose she did not choose. Whether that counts as using her merely as a means depends on whether the loop is a failure of her agency or a mere satisfaction of a desire she already had. ## The Consent Problem Kant's own test for the maxim is that it must be one a rational agent could will as universal law. Here a platform's maxim might be stated as: "Hold attention wherever it can be held, whatever the holder's considered wishes." That maxim is difficult to will universally without contradiction, since its success depends on people not anticipating it. Yet this shows only that the design is self-undermining in a suspicious way, not that every engaging interface is wrongful. A novel that keeps you up at night is not thereby using you as a mere means. The distinction Kant would want is between engaging your reasoning and going around it. A thriller engages your expectations and lets you enjoy being surprised. A design that exploits a compulsion you would disavow on reflection goes around your reasoning, and that is the form of the wrong. --- If you found this valuable, consider supporting our work. ## Join PhiloCrux community. Unlock high-density masterclasses and investigations into ideas surviving outside the algorithmic consensus. Support independent thought and get full access to our digital library. [Join Now](#/portal/signup) ## Where the Argument Frays The formula gives us a clear verdict on deception and a conditional verdict on exploitation. It cannot tell us how often a given feed crosses from the second into the first, because that requires evidence about what users would reflectively endorse. Kant supplies the standard; the facts must come from elsewhere. Anyone who claims the formula settles the matter has mistaken a principle for a measurement. #### Referenced Works & Texts 1. Kant, Immanuel, *Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals*, Second Section (1785). Source of the Humanity formula (Ak. 4:429) and the test of universalizability. 2. Korsgaard, Christine M., *Creating the Kingdom of Ends*, essays on the Formula of Humanity (1996). Reads the formula as a constraint on the sources of value and of consent. 3. O'Neill, Onora, *Constructions of Reason*, chapters on consent and Kantian constructivism (1989). Analyzes when agreement counts as genuinely rational assent. 4. Wood, Allen W., *Kantian Ethics*, chapter on the Humanity formula (2008). Clarifies the difference between using someone as a means and using them merely as one. 5. Simon, Herbert A., "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," in *Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest* (1971). Origin of the claim that information abundance produces scarcity of attention. 6. Wu, Tim, *The Attention Merchants*, chapters on the history of attention capture (2016). Traces the commercial logic behind captured attention.