 Sometimes it is morally wrong to treat persons as means. When a person says that someone is treating him merely as a means, for example, he often implies that she is failing to abide by a moral norm. Ethically disapproving judgments that a person is “just using” or sometimes simply “using” another are common in everyday discourse (e.g., Goldman &amp; Schmidt 2018). Authors appeal to the idea that research on human subjects (Levine 2007: 140; Van der Graaf and Van Delden 2012), management of employees (Haywood 1918: 217), and criminal punishment (Duff 1986: 178–179) is wrong if it involves treating persons merely as means. The notion that treating people in that way is morally problematic has appeared in debate regarding terrorism (Card 2010: 131), pornography (Baird &amp; Rosenbaum 1998: 103, 106), and surrogate motherhood (Macklin 1994: 64). However, treating others as means or, equivalently, using them is frequently morally permissible. Waiters use customers to get tips; customers treat waiters as means to cuisine; professors use students to test their ideas; students use professors to gain expertise, and so forth. Under what conditions is using another wrong? Philosophers since Kant have tried to answer this question, at least in part, by offering accounts of when a person uses another and does or does not just use the other, or, equivalently, treat him merely as a means. These accounts tend to be controversial. Precise sets of conditions for treating (or not treating) persons merely as means seem to have implications that to some extent clash with everyday understanding of doing so. Moreover, for Kantians, the prohibition on treating persons merely as a means is a moral constraint: it limits what we may do, even in the service of promoting the overall good. If a surgeon extracting vital organs from an unwilling “donor” would maximize the good, say, by preserving the lives of five people desperate for transplants, she would be treating the donor merely as a means and thereby acting wrongly, Kantians would say. Kant himself suggests that this constraint is absolute. The principle Kant deems to be the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, deems morally wrong all actions that treat persons merely as means. But is it plausible to hold that all such actions are wrong? Upon reflection, is it even plausible to hold that to treat persons merely as means is, typically, to act wrongly, rather than just to have an ethically inappropriate attitude towards them?