Immanuel Kant on Our Transactional Culture

What do we value and why?

(Source: Piqsels)

The Paramount corporation just paid Trump $16 million. It was extortion—a blood money transaction so that the US government wouldn’t stand in the way of its merger with Skydance Media.

Paramount agrees to pay Trump $16 million, clearing way for multibillion-dollar merger

In a transactional culture, one must pay to play. Another word for it is corruption, to be sure, but this extrortion/bribe speaks to a larger social ill.

Being Transactional

Humans are social animals; even I, a curmudgeonly introvert, understand that. People need to interact with other people to live and the more smoothly our interactions are with other people, the better life is for us.

Morality is about how we treat other people. Moral norms and expectations for how we conduct our interpersonal interactions will help smooth our dealings with other people. The more we share the same moral norms and expectations, the better we get along. When we are on the same page sharing the same goals, good things happen.

To interact in any way with other people is to engage in a transaction. That’s true whether one is buying and selling or exchanging opinions. However, to be transactional in one’s relations with other people is different. It means that one is focusing on outcomes rather than the other person, expecting a payback for one’s actions, only doing x on the condition of receiving y. Being transactional implies a degree of cold selfishness.

A transactional relationship is one in which one or both people are thinking predominantly in terms of what they are getting out of the relationship. Such a relationship is not about giving and sharing but about getting and dominating. Transactional relationships aren’t personal but impersonal. Some say that in human society, being transactional, interacting with other people only for one’s own gain, is increasing, including labeling a certain current president as being transactional.

Another way of putting it is that being transactional is using other people. A transactional relationship is not necessarily abusive, but it is marked by someone taking advantage of another person, thinking only of themselves and what they are getting.

It’s fair to say that, for the most part, we don’t like or approve of transactional people and relationships. We don’t like being used and we tend to not like seeing other people being used.

Kant’s Answer

Many people would consider being transactional as acting immorally. One person who thought that way was philosopher Immanuel Kant. A major plank of his moral platform was that using other people to fulfill one’s own desires was morally wrong.

Kant considered moral truths to be metaphysically real. He saw morals as objective laws that bind us in ways similar to how the laws of physics bind us. We can try to ignore the law of gravity, but there will be negative consequences. The same is true of the moral law. Kant offered several formulas to guide our moral actions that, if followed, would keep us in compliance with moral laws.

One of Kant’s formulations is that we should never act in such a way that we treat any person, either ourselves or others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. It is an absolute imperative, he said, that we don’t view or act toward other people as only being something we use to fulfill our desires.

The word “only” is important in Kant’s formulation. To interact with other people in any way is to engage in a transaction — a process of exchange or give and take. The problem is when we treat another person as a mere means to our ends — when we aren’t engaging with a person in a transaction but being transactional, using that person.

An end is something that we will to produce or bring about in the world. We choose certain actions because we believe that those actions will contribute to achieving our end. If we are buying something, we make payment to the cashier to receive the item we want to purchase. We are engaging in a transaction with someone, and that is okay. But if instead we use that person only as a means to our end, Kant would say that we are morally wrong. We must treat the cashier not as a mere means to our end but with respect.

Kant would add that the cashier’s humanity must be treated as an end in itself. We owe the cashier more than just not being rude to him or her. Part of Kant’s moral realism is that human beings are rational moral agents. Everyone capable of rationally understanding what the moral law requires must be treated as an end in themselves — people whom we honor with reverence. If we forget the humanity of the cashier, disregard him or her as a person with their own agency, we are violating that person’s integrity and the moral law. Kant reminds us that we aren’t interacting with a cashier; we are interacting with a full human being.

Not Being Transactional

People aren’t objects or vending machines to whom we owe nothing. We owe it to other people to consider them as people with individuality and free will. When we forget that people are human beings and not mere objects for our use, we are morally wrong. The opposite of being transactional with people is respecting people as the individuals they are and interacting with them accordingly.

Kant had a point. He wasn’t calling for sweetness and light; he was calling for us to acknowledge what he saw as the simple truth about the reality of humanity — we are rational moral agents who deserve to be treated with reverence. Kant’s morality is admittedly a bit cold in his appeal to rationality and objective moral laws rather than feelings of love and compassion. Nevertheless, Kant’s preference for respecting other people’s humanity over being transactional in dealing with them is valuable advice.

We all lack the time and patience to be perfect in our interactions with others. We will all fall short of perfection. Nevertheless, we do well to keep in mind that people don’t exist for our use, they are our equals. Even a president of a nation shouldn’t forget that moral fact.