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Picture Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century German philosopher, sitting on a couch in Königsberg with a bowl of popcorn. On the screen, twenty five women in evening gowns are competing for roses from a man named Brad who works in pharmaceutical sales. One of them is crying in a limousine. Another is calling herself the villain. A third has just announced she is here for the right reasons, which is the universal reality TV signal that she is absolutely not here for the right reasons.
Kant would not finish the bowl. He would probably not finish the episode. And if you handed him the remote, he would not just turn it off. He would write a four hundred page treatise explaining why the entire genre represents a moral catastrophe dressed up as light entertainment.
That sounds dramatic. It is supposed to. But once you understand what Kant actually believed about how humans should treat each other, you start to see why a show built on manufactured romance, strategic crying, and producer engineered humiliation would have struck him as something close to a philosophical horror film.
The One Rule That Ruins Everything
Kant has a famous idea called the categorical imperative. It sounds intimidating, but the core of it is something your grandmother probably told you. Treat people as ends in themselves, never merely as means to an end.
In plain language, this means you are not allowed to use people as tools. A person is not a stepping stone, a prop, a content opportunity, or a vehicle for your own goals. Every human being has what Kant called dignity, and dignity is not the kind of thing you can put a price tag on or trade for ratings.
Now consider what reality television actually does for a living. It takes people, often young people, often people who do not fully understand what they are signing up for, and it uses them. It uses their loneliness. It uses their insecurities. It uses their willingness to drink on camera. It uses their breakups and their breakdowns and their desperate hope that fame might fix something inside them.
The contestants are not the customers of reality TV. They are the product. And the moment you turn a person into a product, you have done exactly what Kant said you must never do.
The Bachelor as a Case Study in Manipulation
“The Bachelor” is a particularly clean example because the entire structure of the show depends on treating people as means rather than ends.
Think about how the show actually functions. Producers select contestants partly for compatibility, but mostly for what makes good television. The woman who cries easily gets cast because tears equal screen time. The woman with the abrasive personality gets cast because conflict equals drama. The earnest one gets cast because earnestness is funny when you cut it next to chaos.
Then producers shape the experience. They isolate contestants from their phones, their friends, and the outside world. They control how much sleep people get, how much alcohol is available, and which conversations get filmed. They conduct interviews designed to extract emotional confessions, then edit those confessions into narratives the contestants never intended to tell.
The show is not capturing love. It is engineering content. The contestants are inputs in a production process whose output is advertising revenue.
Kant would point out something simple here. Even if every contestant signed a contract, even if everyone consented in writing, consent does not actually solve the moral problem. You cannot consent your way out of being treated as an object, because the wrongness of being treated as an object is not just about your feelings. It is about what kind of relationship the show has with your humanity. And the show’s relationship with your humanity is, fundamentally, extractive.
The Lying Problem
Kant had famously strict views about honesty. He thought lying was wrong almost always, and he meant it more seriously than most people are comfortable with. He once argued you should not lie to a murderer at your door asking where your friend is hiding. Most philosophers think he went too far on that one.
But his underlying point is worth taking seriously. Lying treats the person being lied to as a thing to be steered rather than a mind to be respected. When you deceive someone, you are not engaging with them as a fellow rational being. You are manipulating their beliefs to get a result you want.
Reality TV is built on a foundation of structured deception. Not just the obvious kind, where producers tell contestants that another contestant said something she did not say. The deeper deception is the framing of the entire enterprise. The show presents itself to viewers as a window into authentic human behavior. It is not. It is a construction. Conversations are spliced together from different days. Reaction shots are filmed separately and inserted to imply emotions that were never felt in that moment.
The audience thinks they are watching people. They are watching characters built out of people. The viewers are being deceived, the contestants are being deceived, and the only entities not being deceived are the producers and the network executives counting the money.
Kant would call this a system of mutual disrespect, where everyone involved is being treated as something less than a full rational agent.
The Counterintuitive Part
Here is where it gets interesting. You might expect Kant to object mainly to the steamy parts of “The Bachelor.” The hot tub scenes, the fantasy suites, the eyebrow raising amount of touching that happens during group dates. Modern audiences often assume old philosophers were mostly worried about sex.
Kant was not particularly fixated on this. His concern was not that people on the show are too physical. His concern was that people on the show are not free.
Freedom for Kant did not mean doing whatever you feel like. It meant acting according to reasons you have actually thought through, in a situation where you have the information and the space to think clearly. A contestant who has been awake for nineteen hours, separated from her support system, plied with champagne, and told that this might be her one shot at love is not in a condition to make free choices. She is in a condition to make whatever choice the environment has been engineered to produce.
Kant would care less about what she does in the hot tub and more about whether she had any real ability to decide otherwise. A person who is being managed into her decisions is not exercising her humanity. She is being used by it.
What About the Viewers?
So far this has all been about the contestants. But Kant would have something uncomfortable to say about the audience too, which is most of us, because reality TV is enormously popular and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
When you watch reality TV, what exactly are you doing? You are deriving entertainment from watching real human beings, with real feelings, get manipulated into embarrassing themselves on camera. You are laughing at the woman who got the producer edit. You are rooting against the villain whose villainy was largely manufactured in the editing room. You are consuming someone’s worst week of her life as casual evening relaxation.
Kant would point out that you cannot treat someone as a means to your own pleasure without participating in the moral problem. The viewer is not innocent just because the viewer is not on set. The whole economic model of the show only works because audiences keep showing up. If nobody watched, the show would not exist, and the contestants would not be put through what they are put through.
This sounds harsh. It is supposed to sound a little harsh. But Kant was not interested in letting people feel comfortable about ethics. He thought morality was demanding precisely because being human is demanding.
That said, before you throw out your television, there is some nuance here. Watching a show is not the same as producing it. The viewer’s moral situation is meaningfully different from the producer’s. But the viewer is also not a neutral spectator. The viewer is part of the system, and Kant would want her to be honest with herself about that.
What About Reality TV Where Nobody Gets Hurt?
You might object that not all reality TV is “The Bachelor.” What about the gentle baking show where nice people make nice cakes and the worst that happens is someone forgets the salt? What about the home renovation show where a couple gets a new kitchen?
Kant would probably allow that not all reality TV has the same moral weight. A show that treats its participants with genuine respect, that does not engineer humiliation for entertainment, that gives people real agency over how they are presented, is a different kind of object. The Great British Baking Show is closer to a celebration of human craft than a manipulation of human vulnerability. Kant might still find it strange, but he would not write a treatise about it.
The problem is not the format. The problem is the extraction. When a show is built around the principle of getting more out of its participants than it gives them, when the relationship between producer and participant is fundamentally unequal and exploitative, that is when the Kantian alarm bells start ringing.
Why This Matters Outside the TV
You might read all this and think, fine, but it is just television. People sign up. People know what they are getting into. Why should anyone care about what an eighteenth century philosopher would think about it?
Here is why. The structure of reality TV is no longer confined to reality TV. The same logic, the manufactured authenticity, the strategic deception, the use of human vulnerability as raw material for content, has become the operating system of a much larger part of modern life. Social media platforms run on it. Influencer culture runs on it. Political campaigns increasingly run on it. Even some workplaces have started to feel like reality TV sets, complete with confessional interviews and manufactured drama.
When we get used to watching people be used, we get used to using people. When we get used to seeing manipulation passed off as entertainment, we get worse at noticing manipulation in our own lives. The show is not just a show. It is a training ground for a particular way of seeing other human beings, and that way of seeing has consequences.
Kant’s whole project was to insist that other people are not scenery in your story. They are the protagonists of their own stories, with their own dignity, their own reasons, their own claims on respect. The reason he would have hated “The Bachelor” is the same reason he would have warned us about a thousand other things we now consider normal. Once you start using people, it becomes very hard to stop.
A Final Thought
You do not have to become a Kantian to take any of this seriously. You can keep watching your shows. You can keep enjoying the drama. You can even keep rooting for your favorite contestant.
But it is worth pausing every now and then, somewhere between the rose ceremony and the limousine of tears, to remember that the woman on the screen is a real person who will go home after this. She will have a life. She will have a Tuesday morning where she has to get groceries and answer emails and explain to her cousin why she said that thing on national television.
Kant would not ask you to switch off the TV. He would just ask you to remember she is there. The whole point of his philosophy, in the end, is that the people we are tempted to forget about are exactly the people we are obligated to remember.
That is a small thing to ask. It is also, somehow, the entire ballgame.
