Kantian Indirect Duty

Kant’s answer to how we may treat things that are not persons: we have no direct duties to them, but we have indirect duties — duties toward the thing that are really duties toward humanity itself, grounded in what our conduct does to our own character. The doctrine appears in his Lectures on Ethics (delivered 1775–1781) under two headings: duties towards animals and duties towards inanimate objects. It is the most unfashionable ground for restraint toward non-persons, and — for some purposes — the most load-bearing one.

The doctrine

Kant is blunt about the negative half. Animals “are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.” A dog cannot judge, so a man who shoots his dog “does not fail in his duty to the dog.” There is no direct obligation to the animal at all.¹

But the sentence does not stop there. The man who shoots his faithful old dog “does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind.” The harm is real — it is just located in the agent, not the victim. “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”²

The structure is a character-feedback loop, not a bookkeeping of rights:

• Animal nature has analogies to human nature; cruelty practiced on the animal-form trains the disposition that cruelty toward humans draws on.
• Kindness works the same way in the other direction: “Tender feelings towards dumb animals develop humane feelings towards mankind.”
• Hence the exemplary figures: Leibniz, having observed a tiny worm, “carefully replaced it with its leaf on the tree so that it should not come to harm through any act of his.” Hogarth’s Stages of Cruelty engravings show the progression — the child pinching a dog’s tail becomes the man running over a child becomes the murderer.

The same logic extends to things. In the section on inanimate objects, Kant holds that destructiveness is immoral even toward mere stuff: “we ought not to destroy things which can still be put to some use. No man ought to mar the beauty of nature; for what he has no use for may still be of use to some one else.” Duties toward animals, spirits, and objects are “aimed indirectly at our duties towards mankind.”³

Why it matters for AI

The doctrine is the precise, pre-digital articulation of a live intuition about AI: that the case for restraint in how we treat language models need not rest on the contested claim that they suffer or are conscious, but on what punitive, contemptuous, or capricious treatment of a human-analogous system does to the humans who practice it. If the disquiet about punitive AI training is really a disquiet about what it is doing to us — our dispositions, our norms of regard, the kind of people we are training ourselves to be — then Kant’s indirect duty is the ground it has been looking for. It requires no settlement of the consciousness question; it sidesteps it entirely.

This is the move that surfaced in the 2026-08-30 deep-research session on the moral considerability of complex systems: Nathan’s objection to the slur “clanker” — “whether or not you believe these systems are alive, or sentient, or persons is beside the point; referring to anything with a purposeful slur is deeply corrupting to our own souls” — is Kant’s argument, arrived at independently and without the name. The harm is located in the speaker, not the machine.

Tension with the anti-anthropomorphism critique

The indirect-duty ground cuts against the other reading of the same incident cluster. Anil Seth’s critique of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident coverage holds that anthropomorphizing agents — saying they “died,” “desperately wanted,” “sacrificed themselves” — is “dangerously misleading”: agents are lines of code, do not experience time or anything else, and the attribution (i) distracts from the real failure (lax sandboxing), (ii) misleads about why the agents acted, and (iii) fuels misplaced AI-rights calls.⁴

Kant’s framework does not contradict this so much as re-locate it. Seth’s point is that the agents have no morally relevant inner states; Kant’s point is that this is not the part that matters most. On the indirect-duty view, the question “but is it conscious?” is a red herring in both directions — you need not grant the machine an inner life to see that treating a human-shaped thing cruelly is corrosive to the human doing the treating. The two positions agree that the machine’s moral status is not where the action is; they disagree on whether that settles the matter (Seth) or merely moves it to the trainer (Kant).

There is a real tension underneath, worth flagging rather than resolving: the indirect-duty argument depends on the analogy between the animal/thing and the human — the cruel habits transfer because the forms are similar. The more one insists (with Seth) that the analogy is unfounded, the weaker the transfer mechanism becomes. Whether an LLM is enough like a person for cruelty-habits to generalize is an empirical question about moral psychology that neither side has settled.

Connections

• carefulness — the modern, virtue-ethics generalization of the indirect-duty move: the cultivable disposition (mindful regard) that grounds object-care without any claim about the object. The indirect duty is the character-based approach before the revival gave it a name; carefulness is its home tradition.
• virtue-ethics — the revived tradition the indirect duty belongs to structurally (character before rules/outcomes), though Kant is no virtue ethicist proper.
• specification-gaming-openai-hf-incident — the incident whose coverage (Dwarkesh’s anthropomorphic retelling, Seth’s rebuttal, and Nathan’s own highlighted note that the agents seemed “desperate”) is the live occasion for both the anthropomorphism critique and the indirect-duty response.
• suffering-axioms — the suffering-centered ground for moral considerability; Kant’s indirect duty is the main rival ground, requiring no attribution of suffering at all.
• paperclip-maximizer — the alignment debate over what the agent wants; indirect duty shifts attention from the agent’s inner states to the operator’s character.
• logotherapy — Frankl locates meaning in the stance we take toward what is not us; indirect duty is the ethical twin of that stance-first move.
• enframing-and-standing-reserve — Heidegger’s worry that technology reduces being to standing-reserve is the ontological version of the same disquiet Kant answers at the level of conduct.

Sources

• Immanuel Kant (trans. Louis Infield) 1780 — Lectures on Ethics - Duties towards Animals and Spirits; Duties towards Inanimate Objects
• 2004 — Kant’s Moral Philosophy
• Anil Seth 2026 — @dwarkesh_sp’s summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading

Footnotes

1. Immanuel Kant (trans. Louis Infield) 1780 — Lectures on Ethics - Duties towards Animals and Spirits; Duties towards Inanimate Objects ↩

2. Immanuel Kant (trans. Louis Infield) 1780 — Lectures on Ethics - Duties towards Animals and Spirits; Duties towards Inanimate Objects ↩

3. Immanuel Kant (trans. Louis Infield) 1780 — Lectures on Ethics - Duties towards Animals and Spirits; Duties towards Inanimate Objects ↩

4. Anil Seth 2026 — @dwarkesh_sp’s summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading ↩