The first category of violence is not really a category at all, because its perpetrators have no destructive motive like hate or anger. They simply take the shortest path to something they want, and a living thing happens to be in the way. At best it is a category by exclusion: the absence of any inhibiting factor like sympathy or moral concern. When Immanuel Kant stated the second formulation of his Categorical Imperative—that an act is moral if it treats a person as an end in itself and not as a means to an end—he was in effect defining morality as the avoidance of this kind of violence.
