Negative: don’t treat people as mere means.
Positive:   do treat people as ends in themselves

Two ways of using people as mere means:
1. Deception
2. Coercion
    a. literal coercion (film clip: Fallen Angels)
    b. taking advantage of a person’s unfortunate situation
 

Treating people as ends in themselves:

“To treat one another as ends in themselves such beings have to base their action on principles that do not undermine but rather sustain and extend one another’s capacities for autonomous action.”

“…famine, great poverty and powerlessness all undercut the possibility of autonomous action…”
 

Justice to the Vulnerable

No sharp boundary between coercion and negotiation.

But some clear cases:
“taking advantage of others’ desperation to profiteer—for example, selling food at colossal prices or making loans on the security of others’ future livelihood, when these are ‘offers they can’t refuse’—constitutes coercion and so uses others as mere means and is unjust.”

“In the early days of European colonial penetration of the now underdeveloped world it was enough that some of the ways in which ‘agreements’ were made with native peoples were in fact deceptive or coercive or both.”
 

Global Scope:
“Duties of beneficence arise whenever destitution puts the possibility of autonomous action in question for the more vulnerable.  When famines were not only far way, but nothing could done to relieve them, beneficence or charity may well have begun—and stayed—at home.  In a global village, the moral significance of distance has shrunk, and we may be able to affect the capacities for autonomous action of those who are far away.”
 

Sweatshops?

--an offer you can’t refuse?

-- consistent with the article “Two Cheers for Sweatshops”?
One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy, bare-chested laborer in his late 30's named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food and, eventually, our families. Mongkol mentioned that his daughter, Darin, was 15, and his voice softened as he spoke of her. She was beautiful and smart, and her father's hopes rested on her.

"Is she in school?" we asked.

"Oh, no," Mongkol said, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "She's working in a factory in Bangkok. She's making clothing for export to America." He explained that she was paid $2 a day for a nine-hour shift, six days a week.

"It's dangerous work," Mongkol added. "Twice the needles went right through her hands. But the managers bandaged up her hands, and both times she got better again and went back to work."

"How terrible," we murmured sympathetically.

Mongkol looked up, puzzled. "It's good pay," he said. "I hope she can keep that job. There's all this talk about factories closing now, and she said there are rumors that her factory might close. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't know what she would do then."

He was not, of course, indifferent to his daughter's suffering; he simply had a different perspective from ours -- not only when it came to food but also when it came to what constituted desirable work.
 

 
“By focusing on these issues, by working closely with organizations and news media in foreign countries, sweatshops can be improved. But refusing to buy sweatshop products risks making Americans feel good while harming those we are trying to help.”

“For all the misery they can engender, sweatshops at least offer a precarious escape from the poverty that is the developing world's greatest problem.”
 

Don’t confuse:

1. The moral question:  Is this practice morally right or just?

With either:
2.  The practical question: What is the best response to this unjust practice?

Or:
3.  The different moral question: What is the morally appropriate response to this unjust practice?
 

On Kantian grounds:
1.  Sweatshops are clearly unjust because they are essentially coercive.

The above quotations are consistent with this position.

 
Kantian vs. Utilitarian Deliberation:

• Less sensitive to gaps in our causal knowledge
• Less determinate (no definitive best course of action)
• Beneficence is defined in terms of one's prospects for human autonomy, not quantity of happiness

“Kantian patterns of reasoning are likely to endorse less global and less autonomy-overriding aid and development projects; they are not likely to endorse neglect or abandoning of those who are most vulnerable and lacking in autonomy.  If the aim of beneficence is to keep or put others in a position to act for themselves, then emphasis must be placed on ‘bottom-up’ projects, which from the start draw on, foster, and establish indigenous capacities and practices of self-help and local action.”