4. When Kant speaks of respect for the value of persons, he is simply implying that there is a moral content whenever the rational faculty, which is exclusively the province of human beings, is at all at issue. To state that purely (seemingly) mechanistic pursuits such as architecture or engineering are objective rather than subjective, or that hiking in nature is less ethical than team play, that solitary or mechanistic pursuits lack obvious moral content and are therefore ethically inferior to service or social pursuits is to focus on the accidentals rather than the experience or process of the pursuit. Where there is process there is a thinkable experience. Where something is thinkable, there is reason, and where there is reason, there must be human beings; where this is true, there must be a moral content to the process. To put it another way, the very fact that mechanistic or solitary human experience is human or mechanistic implies that rational, hence moral and value-laden, faculties will or can come into play.
Consider the solitary experience of nature, which could be moral for two reasons: because of the transcendental nature of the human experience of nature, or because nature itself exercises some claim on the moral (i.e., reasoning) faculties of the human being. This is true to the degree all human experience contains the potentiality for projection of the individual's experience into the social environment. The beautiful landscape in nature inspires great poetry, drama, or song, and this aesthetic sensibility, once projected onto the work of art perforce has a moral meaning within Kant's description. The same landscape--this time perceived majestically--is projected into monumental architecture. Is engineering a mechanistic problem? Explain that to the Romans, who applied engineering to the problem of transportation and public facilities and so projected their austere yet grandly ambitious character into history and aes...