Within Reason

As I’ve pointed out before in this series, Kant does not believe that human beings’ purpose is to be happy. The presence of reason suggests we are here for much more. Furthermore, and I think Kant is right about this, giving ourselves the goal of being happy in even a moderately complicated life (where happiness is the satisfaction of all our inclinations) would lead straight to frustration. Thus we can either eschew the complicated life or participate in it with the idea that perhaps it has its own form of satisfaction. All this makes Kant sound pretty down on the notion of happiness. That’s not entirely true, though. Kant can make use of happiness in two different ways.

First, it’s not that happiness is not part of a good life. Rather, I think that Kant believes happiness (as a goal) is not part of the moral part of a good life in and of itself. There’s a lot more to a human life than one’s moral life. But second, Kant also believes, and states at G 399 (Groundwork, I’m switching reference modes), that we in fact have a duty to secure ourselves some kind of happiness. The reason Kant gives for this is that if we deprive ourselves of too much, it will become impossible to do our duty. It’s this thought, that I want to examine in this post.

Kant’s idea seems to suggest he believes in a principle something like this one:

Easing the Way: If one is unlikely to be motivated by duty unless one has X, then one also has a duty to get/do X.

I like this because it suggests that it’s not only nice to get a good night’s sleep, but I can claim it’s my duty!

Two things, though, jump out at me about this twist in Kant’s ethics. First, it subtly makes the argument that you need to prepare yourself to fulfill your duties when they come about. When a tough ethical decision comes along, many people aren’t ready for it. But that’s not an excuse for Kant, since you have a duty to keep morally “fit”, so to speak. To the extent that one has abrogated one’s duties to prepare oneself to do one’s duty, perhaps one is even incapable of doing one’s duty. But that doesn’t get you off the hook. This might seem like a violation of “ought implies can”, but it really suggests there’s an important temporal aspect to “ought implies can”. That principle is not “ought implies can right now”.

Also, it shows how the rest of life in the non-moral realm integrates with life in the moral realm for Kant. It is much the way one keeps physically fit. By doing the things that are required for being likely to do our duty, we end up with a life that most reasonable people would enjoy. So the complicated life that responds to moral duties does have a deeply satisfying feel. We can’t, of course, have this feel as the goal according to Kant, but much as Plato before him, we see that reason ruling over our inclinations isn’t pounding them into submission so much as arranging them in the right way.

It even lends itself nicely to a slogan:

Kantian morality: You get the good life for free.