The Inner Worth of the World

Treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means: the one sentence from Immanuel Kant everybody knows. But what is humanity? Paul Guyer thinks two of the most distinguished readers of the Groundwork get it wrong, and his answer reaches the bottom of Kant's whole moral philosophy, the thing he called the inner worth of the world. Then the will itself splits in two, with a little help from the Holy Roman Empire, and there is a translation Guyer has decided to fight. A house painter, a slave owner, and a piano lesson carry the argument. The last word is a translator's confession.