Reply to comment

Alice--
you are (as always!) such a good question asker. The first thing I thought of, reading your questions, was Kant's maxim that right conduct means "treating others as ends in themselves and not as means to an end." Others should not be instruments we put to other uses, but rather engaged with in and for themselves. In your terms, we should not "use them unthinkingly in the furtherance of our goals," but always attend to those before us, never see through them, "transparently," to some object beyond. So that "connecting" becomes, in and of itself, the goal, the "doing." (I wonder if any of us EVER actually do that? Aren't our actions--including our interactions with others, even--maybe especially!--those closest to us--always to some "other" end?)

The second question built in here is whether the rules might-or-should be different for things that are not human--and maybe defined as not human precisely by this difference? That we feel free to use them as means to our ends? But of course the current ecological movement is insisting that this has been the great wrong-turning of the human experiment on this earth: that in using the natural world as a means to our human ends, we are destroying it.

Thanks to my husband the orchardist, I've recently been getting a tutorial in "deep ecology," which emphasizes the interdependent value of human and non-human life. Its core claim is that the living environment as a whole has a right to live and flourish (though the term "environment" is avoided, because of its "anthropocentric bias"); my favorite line (from what I've heard so far) is "everything has a right to blossom."

The big thinker here seems to be the Norwegian philosopher and activist Arne Naess, who coined the phrase "deep ecology," and for whom its "depth" resides in its persistent questioning. His book The Ecology of Wisdom seems to engage in a very open-ended mode of philosophizing, one that combines and steps off from the work of Mohatma Ghandi and Rachel Carson. In which questioning is only always a means...to no particular end. Never checking out...

So, not checking out (yet), questioning further: are you calling us here to a similar "attentiveness" to the world of technology? Not using it only as means, but regarding it as an end in itself? (And again: even if we wanted to take this as a goal, would it be possible?)

Cruising around Serendip, searching for earlier conversations about possible relations between means and ends, I found these (@ least) two intriguingly different directions: an end may justify a means. But an end may also become the means. Consider:

"In science, means causally sanction the end; in religion, the end teleologically sanctifies the means, even crucifixion."

But see also Wai Chee Dimock's talk on what literature might look like outside the classroom, as means to some other object, not end in itself....

And/or a student's observation that "Anne Dalke puts the ball in my court...the paper does not have the usual purpose: a means to the ends of a grade....the means is the ends. A paper is exactly as good as the amount of worth I get out of it."