Noah Gordon
Hume, Kant, and the 18th Century
Second Shorter Essay

	In his seminal work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant laid out what he thought of as not just the central questions of his philosophy, but the only questions of his philosophy. “All the interests of my reason,” asserts Kant, “speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?” The second of these concerns is a normative question that concerns the demands of morality. In the briefest and most general possible answer to this question, Kant summarizes his moral philosophy thusly: “This is the answer to the first of the two questions of pure reason that concern its practical interest: Do that through which though becomest worthy of being happy.”
	The notion of being worthy of being happy, therefore, plays a central role in Kant’s moral philosophy. What exactly worthiness of being happy entails for Kant however, needs more spelling out. In what follows, I will try to draw a thread through Kant’s moral philosophy and spell out his broader moral philosophy in relation to the notion of worthiness of being happy. I will then analyze a pressing objection to Kantian moral philosophy that would threaten to undermine Kant’s entire project. I will then argue that Kant has the resources already present in this thread to diffuse this objection.
	In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes more explicit his notion of worthiness. “Someone is worthy of possessing a thing or a state,” he explains “when it harmonizes with the highest good that he is in possession of it.” This begs the further question, what is the highest good for Kant? A good place to ground a Kantian notion of the highest good would be Kant’s conception of the good in general. Kant famously begins his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals with the bold claim “It is impossible to conceive of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.” By this, Kant means that a good will is the only thing that is objectively, or in and of itself, good. There are many things which can good instrumentally, or good towards some other end. For example, patience is a good train in dealing with young children, but patience is only good towards that end and not in itself. Kant summarizes by saying “A good will is not good because of what it accomplishes—because of its fitness for attaining some proposed end: it is good through its willing alone—that is, good in itself.”
	So if a good will is the only thing that is good in and of itself then the highest possible good would be a perfectly good will. This would seem to imply that, on a Kantian view, one is only worthy of being happy if one has a perfectly good will. This seems however to be too stringent a requirement on morality. In the spirit of being charitable to Kant however, I will assume that possession of a good will can “harmonize with the highest good” without the will itself being perfectly good. Thus, by drawing together the threads of worthiness of being happy and the will being good, we’ve seen how, as Kant says, “a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of our very worthiness to be happy.”
	If a good will is the necessary condition for worthiness to be happy, what constitutes a good will? To answer this question Kant takes up the concept of moral duty. Kant’s central thesis is that a good will is one that acts from the motive of duty alone. To clarify his point here, Kant contrasts actions performed merely in accordance with duty to those performed for the sake of duty. The difference here is the difference between actions which are merely acceptable with those that are morally praiseworthy. To perform an action out of self-interest that does not violate a moral duty is only acceptable. If one were to perform that same action not out of self-interest, but with the moral law in mind, then that would indicate that the will behind that action is good. Kant gives the example of a shopkeeper having the duty not to overcharge his customers. Such an action may be perfectly in line with the shopkeeper’s self-interest, for instance if the shop has nearby competitors, overcharging would cause the shopkeeper to lose customers. However, not overcharging merely because one does not want to lose customers does not indicate a good will. What would indicate a good will is to charge customers fairly because of the duty not to overcharge, irrespective of self-interest.
	The final thread to draw together in this overview of Kantian moral philosophy is to determine what our moral duties are that a good will acts from the motive of. Here Kant first makes a distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative tells you that you ought to do something to achieve some end. For example, it might be a hypothetical imperative that if you want to be warm, you ought to wear a jacket. Note that these hypothetical imperatives are never objectively binding: one can always escape the imperative by changing one’s subjective desires.