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Immanuel Kant, philosopher: “Everything has either a price or a dignity”

From Clarín · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • Professor and psychologist Sven Brinkmann explains Immanuel Kant’s distinction between things with a market price and human qualities with intrinsic dignity.
  • Kant argued that rational people must respect and protect others, treating them as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end.
  • The article places the idea in Kant’s 1785 work *Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals* and briefly outlines his influence on Western philosophy.

“Everything has either a price or a dignity,” Immanuel Kant wrote. The distinction remains central to an explanation by Danish professor and psychologist Sven Brinkmann, who uses a scene from *Titanic* to illustrate what dignity can mean when people face death.

In the scene Brinkmann recalls, two elderly passengers remain in their bed as the ship sinks. They wait for death with smiles on their faces. For Brinkmann, that final act gives the scene a deeply moving humanity. It reflects a form of dignity that he says has become increasingly blurred in everyday life: the ability to act in a dignified way.

Everything has either a price or a dignity.

· Immanuel KantThe central statement from Kant’s 1785 work, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

The first humanists, rather than Aristotle, studied dignity as something intrinsic to every human being. Kant later made the concept a cornerstone of his thought, explicitly opposing instrumentalism. He wrote the phrase “Everything has either a price or a dignity” in *Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals*, published in 1785.

According to Brinkmann, necessities such as clothing, food and housing have a market price and therefore lack intrinsic value in Kant’s sense. Honesty and goodwill, by contrast, “have no price, but they do have dignity.” They possess intrinsic value. In Brinkmann’s formulation, the only things with true value are those that cannot be assigned a price.

have no price, but they do have dignity.

· Sven Brinkmann, quoting Kant’s argumentBrinkmann contrasts honesty and goodwill with goods that have a market price.

Kant held that human rationality gives people the ability to determine what is right independently of subjective desires and preferences. People therefore have duties that apply regardless of what they think or feel, above all the duty to respect and protect the dignity of other human beings. They must not exploit others for personal gain or use them as instruments. “Our duty is to treat people as people, not as things,” Brinkmann concludes.

Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804, was a Prussian philosopher and a leading figure of the Enlightenment and Western philosophy. His major works included *Critique of Pure Reason*, *Critique of Practical Reason* and *Critique of Judgment*.

Our duty is to treat people as people, not as things.

· Sven BrinkmannBrinkmann’s conclusion about Kant’s demand to treat human beings as ends in themselves.
About this summary

Originally published by Clarín in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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