The Adjustment That Didn’t Happen: The Duty to Promote the Happiness of Others in Kant’s System of Ethics

Labouring upon the groundwork of “critical” ethics, Kant opposed its principle, the categorical imperative, to the principles of naturalistic morals, and, among others, to the principle of personal happiness. But in the system of concrete ethics in the Metaphysics of Morals the “happiness of others” emerged in the basis of this system, as one of the two objectively practical “ends-duties”. In this regard, historians of thought often claim that in his old age Kant made eudaimonistic “adjustments” to his ethics. Our paper aims to find out, by means of an analysis of the concept of happiness in Kant’s practical philosophy as well as of Kant’s arguments against the moral theory of Eudaimonism, whether there really is a contradiction between the principles of moral philosophy as laid down in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the principle of promoting the happiness of another / others, as one of the basic ethical principles in the “Metaphysics of Morals”. Such a contradiction turns out to be in fact nonexistent: The Groundwork considers promoting the well-being of others as a typical case of a specific class of ethical norms; the Critique of Practical Reason, the reflections of which complete the justification of Kant’s ethical doctrine, recognizes that the principle of happiness can become an objective practical law, if it is complemented by the happiness of others. At the same time, however, it remained unclarified how it is possible to affirm and justify the ethical principle of promoting the happiness of others in the context of a doctrine that invariably rejects the naturalistic grounding of morality on the feeling of pleasure from the reality of the object of the will. Although our examination of Kant’s texts shows that the principle of promoting the good of one’s fellowman was already formulated in his ethical groundworks as legitimate within the system of practical philosophy, the question of possible ways to justify it within this system remains nevertheless open. Our hypothesis in this regard is that, the extension of the principle of happiness indicated by Kant, the ground of determination in the maxim of the person obeying to it is not the concept of an empirically determined object of one’s demand, but the concept of another human being in need, or humanity in the person of the other human being. The principle remains the same, but its basis, which was in individualistic eudaemonism empirical, becomes transcendental.