I am referring to the German philosopher Gerold Prauss, who, in my opinion, not only greatly improved Kant's ethics and made it plausible, but also put together the most convincing ethics ever.

Prauss wants to give us an ethical standard which should become a guide for the common cultural history of all people, i.e. a cross-cultural standard for the present and distant future.

The development of such a standard begins in the history of philosophy with Kant. Before Kant, one might say, there was no proper, or rather convincing, secular and at the same time objective ethics. With the famous thought, however, that man must not be treated merely as a means, but must always be treated as an end in itself, Kant succeeded in making a great impact on the secular movement of the European Enlightenment.

Now Kant does not explain, Prauss argues, why human beings are identified with ends in themselves. According to Prauss, we should stop dealing only with the perspective of the agent in the realm of morality and law, as Kant does. The notion of an end in itself or self-end becomes much more understandable for morality and law when the objective perspective of an action is taken into account as well, namely, the perspective of the person being dealt with. Accordingly, morality and law are not "solipsistic" matters. They each occur fundamentally as a particular interpersonal relationship.

Kant thinks that the moral consists in treating someone as both an end and a means, while evil involves only the latter. But why not explain moral good in the intuitively more obvious way that it means treating someone only as an end without any trace of treating as a means?

Here is a quote that summarizes Prauss in this regard:

"The categorical imperative, in the formula of humanity as end in itself, demands to use every person always at the same time as end, never merely as a means. According to Gerold Prauss, Kant should have distinguished more carefully between ‘not merely as a means, but at the same time as end’ and ‘not as means at all, but only as end’. Whereas the first formula describes a legal relationship between two self-determining subjects who mutually recognize one another, the second formula applies to situations in which I face a rational being that depends on my help. For Prauss, only in the second case the ethical duty deserves to be called moral." (
https://www.herder.de/thph/hefte/archiv/85-2010/2-2010/gerold-prauss-ueber-moral-und-recht-im-staat-nach-kant-und-hegel/)

According to Prauss - and this is the philosophically new thing - we can deal with people in three ways: only as a means, which would be the epitome of evil (e.g. in the case of lying, fraud, bodily harm, grave insult, theft, robbery and murder); both as a means and as an end in itself, which should characterize normal and legal dealings between people (in trade, shopping, at the hairdresser's etc. ), and finally only as an end in itself, which would come into question when a person is no longer able to help herself in an encounter - for example, due to an accident. One cannot then simply walk past this person in need of help completely indifferently and unconcernedly. For this person has the ability to understand herself as a free creator of goals, which in turn leads to the fact that she can make herself (knowingly) an end in herself and therefore automatically also an end in herself for all other persons. An end in itself simply is an end in itself, I can't ignore that. And only the capacity for self-knowledge makes something an end in itself.

A demand is made by the injured person to the person present, who can no longer evade this demand without moving to the moral sidelines. The demand does not have to be articulated. It only has to be accepted as a possibility or potential. The person present is thus de facto morally obligated to help. And this rendering of help is then the morally good (and required) action in that particular situation. Prauss thinks here of the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible as a, or rather the, model example of a morally good act.

Thus, if we fail to help someone in need, we not only prove ourselves to be lacking in merit, but we commit an evil. The duties of virtue, then, are not to be regarded as a kind of moral luxury that we might neglect.

Prauss manages to establish self-knowledge (the ability to conceive of oneself as an end in itself and thus to make oneself an end in itself) and interpersonality as cornerstones of ethics.

Therefore, there can be no moral or legal relationship with a stone or a fly. Neither the stone nor the fly are ends in themselves, they cannot make themselves an end, which only a reflective consciousness can make possible.

We usually have no problem at all swatting a fly to death. Why is that? Prauss makes an answer understandable. If the still living fly would magically obtain self-knowledge and a reflective consciousness and thereby it would become a conscious and knowing purpose for itself, then we as humans would have a problem and reservations to kill this particular fly. For the fly would have the potential to somehow signal to humans that it does not want to die.

Morality, according to Prauss, is not something that exists fixed and predetermined in some ontological third realm, but arises spontaneously in encounters between rational beings as a relation.

Each one of us humans is a potential knowing/conscious will or a knowing/conscious end in itself. And because everyone knows this about herself/himself as well as about everyone else, she/he is then also a knowing/conscious demanding, a knowing/conscious claim against everyone else, for whom this must, therefore, become an obligation. For everyone who in this sense is a conscious end in itself wants to be treated as such by everyone else: at least also as an end in itself or even only as an end in itself, depending on whether she/he is capable or incapable of self-help. That is, in a nutshell, rational agents (can) issue imperatives all the time. But only in certain interpersonal contexts do these imperatives give rise to objectively binding moral obligations. The ability to help oneself is the decisive moral criterion.

Prauss also gives a plausible derivation of the practical ought.

You can derive a practical ought only from a will, to put it more precisely, from another will, a will different from one's own. The foreign will is to be understood as a (potential) request, claim, requirement, demand or command, all of which only another (rational) person can do. Since Prauss is German, his reasoning comes from the logic and semantics of the German verb "sollen", which translates to ought or should (shall) in English. Almost all grammars of German explain "sollen" by saying that there must be another personal agent who wants something from you (who insists that you do something). I think the German language is in this case more precise and clearer in meaning than the English. So, if A ought to do X, this implies that someone wants A to do X. For example: I go to the doctor and he tells me to take two pills twice a day. Then I later tell my wife I ought to take two pills twice a day.

The ethical question that now arises is, how can I distinguish a morally binding ought from a morally non-binding ought? Because not everything that people ask me to do is really binding.

As Prauss says, I can recognize the morally obligatory ought by the criterion of whether the other is still capable of helping him or herself. You have to commit to cases where it's a matter of life and death. Thus, the moral ought always becomes binding when the other person will surely soon die without immediate assistance from others. And the injured person's claim cannot go beyond their own injury.

How does this logic of action look more precise in an idealized fashion? The first step would be something like this: A person, for example, demands help from me by turning to me and saying, "Help me, please" which means "I want you to help me". Of course, I immediately understand that I should help her. So we have gone from a will/demand of another person to a should or ought which is inside of me. I have to translate a will of another as an ought to for myself.

Without the additional presence of a "rational being facing me", there simply is no ought possible, let alone a moral one. A possible deliberate demand of another person is, in fact, the essential condition for the realization of an ought in my mind.

So there is a possibility of deriving an ought, namely from the self recognized will of someone else (it is also clear that the human will is always conscious, but not always self-aware). And I think it’s the only possibility to get an ought.

This is how Prauss sums it up, as I translated with a web translator:

"And it is obvious that such an “ought” is therefore nothing but the synthetic result of the encounter of subjects, each of whom, as a conscious end in itself, is a conscious willing in relation to the other, and thus also a conscious demanding." (Gerold Prauss - Moral und Recht im Staat nach Kant und Hegel, Morality and Law in the State after Kant and Hegel)

There is also another normativity from which a pressure to act emanates, which presupposes one's own personal will. I'll give an example: I want to be home at ten o'clock in the evening, so I must (normative must or have to) take the bus at half past nine.

So, if you want y to happen, then you "must" do x, provided you really want to. There must be a strong interest in what is wanted or willed and not just a desire or wish. But this must is not moral.

There is as according to Prauss (1) legal and moral normativity, which comes about through another person, and (2) a purely logical normativity, which I have towards myself. That is, according to Prauss, there is contra Kant no (direct) moral self-duty or moral duty against oneself.

As a further aid to understanding:

Pavlos Kontos sums up Prauss in a review (Kant-Studien 2009). I hope the passages are somewhat understandable:

"The author draws inspiration from an extremely challenging idea, according to which we should abandon the Kantian triple distinction between actions ‘from duty’, ‘contrary to duty’, and ‘according to duty’, and substitute for it another triple schema which, whilst formulated in Kantian terms, has not been acknowledged as such by Kant, namely the schema: ‘only as a means’, ‘not “only” as a means but “also” as an end in itself’, and ‘not only “also” as an end in itself, but “only” as an end in itself’. Needless to say, the brilliance of this original reconstruction is principally owed to the introduction of this third pure alternative that Kant, and even the whole Kantian literature, has neglected."

"As a matter of fact, it is more or less eagerly conceded that the Kantian distinction between actions ‘from duty’, ‘contrary to duty’, and ‘according to duty’ is a puzzling one. However, Prauss’ analysis is much more elegant and resolute (699ff.). The terms ‘from’, ‘according to’ and ‘contrary to’ are disapproved of to the extent that they are formally-logically dependent upon what follows them, that is, upon the notion of duty; furthermore, they are not mutually exclusive since, for example, an action which is not contrary to duty might be either ‘according to’ or ‘from’ duty. The apogee of these perplexities is that the categorical imperative of humanity will equate morality and right, by grounding both of these realms on the obligation to “use humanity […] always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (Groundwork, 4: 429). Consequently, Prauss is entitled to state: “to confuse morality for right is a catastrophe” (707)!"

"The very case of an action that handles another person ‘only as an end in himself’ is [...] meant to exclusively define what morality is about; by contrast, the order of right emerges once we encounter other persons at the same time as means and as ends in themselves. These two real practical alternatives describe the difference between moral good and right (morally and rightly good), whence the negative alternative of handling someone ‘only as a means’ mirrors what is morally and rightly evil.

Prauss proceeds by dealing with the exclusively moral alternative, that is, with an action that handles other persons only as ends in themselves. It proves to be the case that this action, and hence the order of morality in general, is conditioned by a very peculiar situation: a claim to morality is grounded only “when the person handled is precisely not in a position to help himself and as long as he remains in this position” (711). “This self-help represents then the decisive criterion” in order for the realms of right and morality to be distinguished from one another and, consequently, this very distinction depends upon the emergence of such a particular case (711f., note). The rationale of the argument suggests that whoever cannot assure his own life cannot therefore represent a means for our subjective purposes (1117f.).

[...]

1. Morality emerges as a relation between an actor (able to help himself and others) and a
person in need or, according to the Samaritan example, a “verwundetes [wounded, injured] Subjekt” (1111f.).


Thus, Prauss is obliged to subscribe to two further claims: in addition to the claim that there is no morality possible between persons who are not in need, there is no morality possible between persons in need, since they have nothing to offer or, in the terms that the author will later introduce, they can give no life (not even to themselves). Hence, morality is conditioned by situations that are exclusively restricted to interpersonal relations between non-injured and injured persons.

[...]

[…] Prauss reconstructs the notion of ends in a long argument that we might reformulate as follows: Human will is not auto-referential but by essence directed to the success (and not to the failure) of the actions in which it is implicated. Due to this intentionality, good and evil are attributes we ascribe to actions, insofar as they respect the normativity (whatever its kind might be) that the agent has adopted and thereby freely ‘incorporated’ as his actual incentive (759). Every kind of normativity presupposes a claim raised by the Behandelte [patient, being treated, being acted upon] (that is, stemming from the objective side of action) and a kind of Befolgung [observance] (that is, the readiness of the agent to act according to the principles he has subscribed to).

[...]

Freedom bears practical relevance only insofar as it represents the object of conscience: normativity presupposes the knowledge of freedom, not just freedom itself (799). However, this factual knowledge is not sufficient to explain why human beings are regarded as ends in themselves. Thus, a second level of self-recognition is required, namely a level grounded upon a further fact: upon the fact that human beings, bestowed as they are with Vernunft [reason] and not simply with Verstand [understanding], achieve a thematization of their conscience of freedom (840). Hence, Vernunft makes possible a self-knowledge, i.e. a self-recognition, of human beings as free creators of ends, namely, as self-creators (817). It follows that the first kind of causality recognized by a human being bestowed with Vernunft is free causality as the vehicle of his selfrealization. It is only afterwards that a human being recognizes that other beings might also operate as causes, either as natural causes or even as free animals and human subjects. Prauss’ conclusion thus leaves no mystery: “free causality constitutes from the outset the necessary precondition of natural causality” (865). The synthesis of freedom (self-realizing will) and necessity (the claims raised by others), conditioned as it is by this mutual dependence of the two aforementioned facts upon one another, admits of three modalities: ‘to be only as a means’, ‘to be not only as a means but also as an end in itself’, and ‘to be not only also as an end, but only as an end in itself’. If one replaces being with will-to-live, he easily concludes that this synthesis allows for three modalities of action: “only life-to-take”, “not only life-to-take but also life-to-give”, and “only life-to-give” (1099). And if one further substitutes time for life (by which Prauss means Geistesleben), he will realize why these three modalities are not susceptible to any quantitative approach, since life-time can neither be augmented nor be re-gained and exchanged in any possible way, assuming that time is adequately apprehended as life-time [...]. Precisely because lifetime resists any quantitative approach, good and evil are categories proper to morality and right; that is to say, they are independent of any reference to goals evaluated according to the categories of utility. Hence, to ground morality and right on mere facts by emphasizing their formal (transcendental) implications is tantamount to resisting utilitarianism. Within transcendental philosophy, self-realization and inter-personality (although they represent mere facts and, qua facts, they resist any eventual reduction to further grounds) constitute both the ontological ground and the “Sinn of morality and right” (1089).

[...]

Morality and right [...] represent a game that we are factually obliged to play, given the facts of self-knowledge and interpersonality; good and evil are attributes assigned to actions that directly or indirectly concern other human beings and are evaluated in light of their impact upon the lifetime of these human beings and, hence, morality and right do not dwell within our internal maxims or intentions."