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guilty of moral turpitude, those that couldn’t pass any type of moral test or assessment. Of course, they wouldn’t want a standard applied to them; it would shed light on their shoddy practices and profligate life. We can easily imagine Sour Kangaroo demanding not to be judged, and in disbelief inquiring who is Horton to tell her how to live her life or run the jungle. Whereas Horton wouldn’t mind so much being judged by his peers. He has nothing to fear, and nothing to be ashamed of. Tolerance is too often the easy way out of having to do the heavy lifting of ethical thinking or the hard work of ethically living. Although tolerance may be warranted in some cases, it isn’t an absolute command. And really, who should tolerate Who genocide or the plight of an abandoned child? To put it bluntly, refusing to judge is a cowardly act. Refusal to judge is not an act of neutrality but to choose for the existing evil. But if relativism is untenable, what are the alternatives?

Kant:

Respect One-Hundred Percent and No Matter How Small

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is considered one of the greatest moral philosophers of the modern era. At the same time, he is considered one of the most notoriously difficult. Thankfully, we don’t have to try to grapple with Kant alone; we can enlist the aid of Seuss’s paragon of Kantian morality, Horton the elephant. We’ll begin with Horton’s famous credo, “A person’s a person. No matter how small” (Horton). Here, Horton is promoting the view that all people matter. All people possess an inherent, inviolable value beyond any price or measure; all people possess dignity. Kant couldn’t have said it better.

According to Kant, the value of persons stems from their status as rational beings, a status that allows us to postulate freedom, and people are valuable as the possessors of freedom. Kant states: “Every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is just because of that really free in a practical respect . . . I assert that to every rational being having a will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts.”3 But freedom itself cannot be proven, for it cannot be experienced. Rather, it is through our awareness of our capacity to give ourselves a moral law to which we are bound in virtue of being rational that we are able to postulate our freedom. Our ability to give ourselves the moral law demonstrates our freedom, and our freedom makes our adherence to the moral law possible.4 Insofar as people are free they are the wellspring of value; that is, they are that which is valuable in itself. Everything else in the world is valued merely as a means to some further end. Kant declares, “Honeste vive (live honourably), i.e., truly honour what universally has worth. What necessarily has a worth for everyone possesses dignity, and he who possesses it has inner worth.”5 Likewise, “that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity . . . an unconditional, incomparable worth; and the word respect alone provides a becoming expression for the estimate of it that a rational being must give.”6 Insofar as human beings possess dignity, they are owed respect. Respect is a moral relation between all rational, free beings and it is a relation demanded by our status as dignified. “There rests . . . a duty regarding the respect that must be shown to every other human being.”7

In Kant’s ethics respect for oneself and others is shown via adherence to the categorical imperative. In two formulations we are shown how living rationally—that is, morally—we demonstrate both respect for ourselves and respect for others. We offend the dignity of others and shame ourselves when we fail to uphold the moral law.

Yet it can seem odd to claim that we are only free when bound by a law. Being bound by laws seems to be the opposite of freedom. Isn’t freedom doing whatever we want? Well, since we are not perfectly good wills but are tempted by our