Sentence examples for a mere instrument from inspiring English sources

If every time a person is treated (or merely seen) by another, say, as an instrument (not a mere instrument) for some further purpose, we take it that the person in question is objectified, then it seems that in our daily lives we objectify nearly everyone, including ourselves.

But he is always compromised by the question that if he felt so unequivocally that remaining in the EU was a good thing, why had he risked Britain's membership by using a referendum as a mere instrument of party management?

Bad sex at that – repetitive and embarrassing to behold, one of the parties to the act hunched over unprettily in a hurry to be done, the other inert, a mere instrument of someone else's will.

Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to "see" this spiritual unknown and allowing his individual consciousness to be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument.

Therefore the history of church state relations in the East has been very different from the Western development, because the church in the East has sometimes tended toward the extreme of becoming a mere instrument of national policy while the church in the West has sometimes tended toward the extreme of attempting to dominate the state.

Shrage contests the Kantian notion that sex is morally problematic because it involves using another as a mere instrument (except in a few special contexts).

For Berniece the piano has ceased to be a mere musical instrument — she has refused to touch its keys since her mother died — and become a living if troublesome presence, a repository of the pain and hardship her forebears have endured.

The loved person loses what is special to her as a human being, her humanity, and is reduced to a thing, a mere sexual instrument.

Our discussion above readily explains why Foucault talks of a return of language: it now has an independent and essential role that it couldn't have as the mere instrument of Classical ideas.

As James Madison observed, in a democratic society "the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended... from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents".

"In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is cheifly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents".