It's not a lack of dignity that makes it wrong to treat persons as ends to a means, it's that it's not in our best interest.

Kant was wrong, treating people only as a means to an end and never an end in itself isn't wrong because it violates some sort of inherent value in them. It's only wrong because if you do it too much other people will have less interest in working with you, and you'll be sabotaging your own interests in the process.<br><br>There are plenty of examples of treating others as an end to a means that don't necessarily harm a person. Treating a doctor that performs a life saving operation as a means to an end is obviously not bad. If you're desperate but not too poor to pay, you might treat someone as only a means to an end if you pay them a king's ransom to do something. But both examples aren't cases of using coercion, you can't just force someone to do something just because you need their help.<br><br>Even if it were possible to treat someone in a coercive way and for them to still be treated with dignity and respect, treating coercively would just make the rest of society wary of you. If you were able to coerce people to do things for you all the time, people would be afraid of you, and people would be more likely to stay away from you. This is what makes it wrong: not that it's undignified, but that it's in no one's best interest to gain a reputation for being coercive or exploitative in order to get what they want.<br><br>If Kant were right, it should be wrong for someone to treat themselves solely as a means to an end. If I want to learn some language or art, I do hard work and sacrifice a lot of my free time to do it. I give myself orders, I punish myself for my failures, I am stricter with myself than I would ever be with someone else. If I were a slave owner treating my slave the way I treat myself, you could probably get me charged with a crime.<br><br>I'm just glad I got to use a bunch of big words in the first paragraph.