Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from the 1700’s. He wrote a famous idea of how to treat other people. He called it the “Categorical Imperative,” or “the thing you should always try to do, no matter what your circumstances are.”
His idea of the way to treat people was written, in its initial language, this way:
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
Of course, the older language makes it harder for us to relate to in the era of 140-character tweets. Let’s try paraphrasing it.
Never treat a person as a means. Always treat every person as an end in themselves.
Here the word “means” is used to mean “something you use” and the words “an end in themselves” means “the goal.”
And so a further paraphrase might read, “never use people to achieve your own goals. Always treat people in a way that works toward their own goals.”
It’s a fairly workable definition of love, frankly. If we accept it as a good way to treat people, it poses a good question for modern American politics:
What does all this say about a system that forces one person to buy health insurance in order to achieve the goal of making it affordable for someone else?