ABSTRACT
Persons are limits to action, and their claims on action are absolute in the negative sense of setting up the Achtungf, and often in a positive sense of compelling action. In his lucid and incisive commentary on Kant’s Groundwork, Sir David Ross has this to say about the formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of humanity as an End-in-itself. Ross, following Kant as closely as he can, settles on good will as the end potentially in man, which transmits its absolute value to man. This certainly keeps Kant’s large philosophical, quasi-aesthetic; notion of end relatively tidy, but it has an unfortunate moral and axiological consequence. There seems to be some connection, if an obscure one, between the notions of self-existence and of a limit to possible actions by others, when these are taken as predicates of “man”. Self-existence in a plain sense, and self-existence in the less plain sense with which it gets mixed up, drops out of sight.
