An undergraduate engineering student, Ann, wants to secure a prestigious internship with company C in the summer before her senior year. Ann believes—rightly, let’s suppose—that if she secures that internship she will be hired by company C once she graduates, and she will go on to do important (and well-paid) work designing and building safe and useful objects for years to come. In her quest to get this internship, Ann comes to learn that one of company C’s current employees named Beth is a graduate of Ann’s college. A positive word from Beth can go a long way in helping a person get the coveted internship. Ann also comes to learn that Beth is a friend of a friend of hers (more precisely: an acquaintance of a friend of an acquaintance of hers) and that Beth will be at a party that Ann is going to this weekend. Intrigued, Ann looks around online for info about Beth. (For example, she checks out her LinkedIn page.) At the party, Ann goes out of her way to meet and speak with Beth, not about company C or the internship, but about general life stuff. Ann charms Beth quite successfully, which is not surprising given how much Ann knows about Beth, their shared college, the fact that they are both engineers, and so on. They exchange phone numbers and, in short order, they are hanging out regularly. Their budding friendship, if you can call it that, is initially built and sustained by Ann. Ann typically sends the first text, Ann requests to be Facebook friends with Beth, and so on. Over the course of a couple of months, it comes to be mutual and balanced. Eventually, they see each other a few times a week and talk (at least via text) almost every day. A few weeks after meeting Ann, Beth learns that Ann is applying for the internship. Ann does not make a big deal about it—and neither does Beth—but Beth wishes her luck. She also mentions how cool it would be if they could work together. Ann eventually applies for the internship and, unfortunately, does not get it. Beth even puts in a good word for Ann, as Ann really hoped she would—that’s why she tried to befriend Beth in the first place, after all—but it is not enough. Once Ann finds out that she did not get the internship, she cuts Beth off completely. She stops responding to her (many) texts, she unfriends her on Facebook, and so on. Ann is not angry at Beth. Ann just no longer sees any reason to keep talking to her, given that she did not get the internship. Why would Immanuel Kant almost certainly think that Ann acted immorally in this scenario?

One would be safe to conclude that Immanuel Kant would have disapproved of Ann’s actions. By meticulously cultivating a relationship with Beth over a period of time solely for the purpose of securing an important internship and then, upon failing to secure said internship, precipitously and rudely terminating all vestiges of that relationship, Ann violated Kant’s “categorical imperative” regarding human relations.
In his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant addresses the definition of morality and how it should, optimally, constitute the rules under which humans interact. In one of this treatise’s most frequently cited rules, the late German philosopher wrote, “Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.” Kant was, in a sense, postulating a variation of the oft-cited “Golden Rule” or “ethic of reciprocity,” which can be traced to antiquity and which commands one to love his or her neighbor as he or she loves himself or herself. The “Golden Rule’s” most well-known variation is in the New Testament, Matthew 7-12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Kant, of course, had a complicated view of religion. He believed it in direct conflict with scientific reasoning but did not discount the presence of God in his life. His philosophy of ethics, however, represented a continuation of the “Golden Rule.”
In summary, Ann has deliberately exploited another human being for her own purpose and then further betrayed that human being’s trust by cavalierly cutting off all communications between Beth and herself. There is no question that Kant would disprove of Ann’s highly-questionable sense of morality. He would probably repeat another of his more frequently cited comments: “If man makes himself a worm, he must not complain when he is trodden upon.” Ann has violated the categorical imperative and has invited some form of retribution upon herself, whatever form that retribution might take.