Kant's Hidden Influence

You use Kantian reasoning more often than you realize. Every time you say "what if everyone did that," you are applying the categorical imperative. Every time you object to someone being treated as disposable, you are invoking his principle of human dignity.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is essentially Kantian: every person has inherent dignity and rights, whatever they can contribute. Modern medical ethics — informed consent, patient autonomy, the ban on using people as unwilling test subjects — flows from his insistence that persons are never merely instruments.