Kantian rationales with utilitarian results

Number can still matter, however, as long as nobody in the process is being used merely as means to ends. I recall, for example, an instance during the scheduling of tutorials for a class. A system was adopted whereby the least number of people would be inconvenienced by the times chosen for a particular tutorial. Under the circumstances, this seemed like entirely the appropriate thing to do, because under the circumstances, it was impossible to schedule the tutorial without inconveniencing at least some people. If one could not help inconveniencing some people, then one was hardly using them merely as means to an end of scheduling by inconveniencing them. But one thing that one could still help, however, was how many people were being inconvenienced in the process. The greater the number of people being inconvenienced, it seemed, the worse the scheduling would be. Therefore, given the fact that inconveniencing people was not merely using them as a means to an end in this instance, one should minimise the number of people inconvenienced by the schedules to optimise the resulting scheduling.

In the process of minimising the number of people being inconvenienced, furthermore, one would easily will this to be a universal law. It was a law that could easily be followed by any of the students who were in the class. It would not necessarily work out in any one student's favour at any one time, but because this could not be helped, that student would still not end up being used merely as a means to an end of scheduling. Instead, each student would at least know that her chances of getting a convenient tutorial time had been maximised by following that maxim. In other words, the scheduling system obeyed both the first and the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative. Therefore, one can employ a Kantian theory--sometimes at least--to derive a straightforwardly utilitarian result.