Harper and Omar Khadr read Kant: A Tweet

Now, I say, man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.  In all his actions, whether they are directed toward himself or toward other rational beings, he must always be regarded at the same time as an end.[1]

Kant was the quintessential expression of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the faith in man’s reason, the right to dignity, and the subsequent notion of self-determination, national or otherwise.  In his work on ethics, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he declares that man “is not a thing.”[2]  Published in 1785, four years before the start of the French Revolution, Kant’s thinking demonstrates how far the Canadian government under Harper – especially in its treatment of Omar Khadr - has drifted away from Enlightenment values.

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[1] Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2^nd ed. Revised. Tr. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall), p. 45.

[2] Ibid., p. 46.