Instrumentalization means treating a person as a mere means — as a tool for some purpose, rather than honouring them as a someone possessing a worth of their own. It is the paradigmatic violation of the personalist norm, which demands: The human person is to be affirmed and loved for their own sake.
Instrumentalization as practical oblivion of the person
Instrumentalization is a form of practical oblivion of the person: it shows itself not in a false theory about the human being, but in the concrete way persons are treated. Whoever instrumentalizes a human being treats them as a commodity, as a functionary, or as a means for attaining one’s own ends — and thereby fails to recognize that the person is an ens per se, a self-subsistent being possessing an inalienable dignity.
Instrumentalization may be overt — as in torture or human trafficking. But it may also take subtle forms: when an enterprise defines employees exclusively in terms of their usefulness, when human beings are reduced to their social role, or when conscience is silenced so as not to jeopardize efficiency.
Examples from the ontology
Concrete forms of instrumentalization captured in personal ontology:
- Surrogacy: The gestating woman is degraded in her bodiliness into a means of production, and the child is made the object of a contract and thereby a commodity. This fractures the bodily-personal unity of motherhood.
- Surrogacy contract: A contract that makes the person (the child) the object of a legal transaction. Such a contract is morally void, because the person can never be the subject matter of a contract.
Disclosure through conscience
The ontology also captures the opposite pole: conscience can disclose instrumentalization. Where a person recognizes that other human beings are being treated as mere means, there arises the moral duty to object — up to and including whistleblowing.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Kant, Immanuel (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Academy Edition vol. IV, p. 429 (formula of the end in itself: act so that you never treat humanity merely as a means).
- Wojtyła, Karol: Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (personalist norm: the person is to be affirmed for their own sake).