Act only on a rule you could will everyone to follow, and treat people as ends rather than merely as means.
Kant's 1785 test. The second formulation — treating people as ends — does more practical work than the universalisability test, which most maxims can be written to pass.
In practice
- A manager considering a small deception asks whether a workplace where everyone did this could function, and finds it could not.
- A landlord who treats a tenant purely as a payment stream, and not as a person with a claim on being told about the boiler, fails the second formulation without breaking any rule.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought