Duties to Oneself in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
Kant’s treatment of perfect and imperfect duties to ourselves and how they relate to the promotion of our happiness. Submitted for PHIL 3103 on May 1, 2020.
Moral philosophy, if not as the motivating reason then at least as a peripheral effect, has the potential to guide students of the subject to become more virtuous, or, colloquially speaking, become better people. In accordance with Kant’s moral philosophy, it is essential for us to abide by our ethical duties if we are to lead a virtuous life worthy of our personhood. However, often neglected in Kantian scholarship, as it appears, is the consideration of the duties to oneself, for it seems more intuitive to applaud acts of an ostensibly unselfish nature. In what follows, I will first outline Kant’s treatment of a human being’s perfect and imperfect duties to oneself as both an embodied creature with impulses of animality and a being endowed with a rational nature as presented in Metaphysics of Morals. Building on that, I will then highlight the occasions when Kant identifies an imperfect, or positive, duty to ourselves to promote our own happiness by examining his treatments of the limits of our duties to others.
In Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s account of vices in opposition to the preservation of ourselves in our animal nature are murdering oneself, unnatural use of sexual inclination, and excessive consumption of food and drink (422-428). While it is readily understood that when one commits suicide they violate their duties to others, Kant argues that these violations do not, in themselves, warrant a duty to oneself against suicide, because a duty to oneself considers only what is required of that person based on the “virtue of his quality as a person” alone, not by that person’s relations to others (422). As opposed to the stoics, who advocates for the freedom to will and commit suicide, Kant believes suicide is unjustifiable because human beings are subjects of duties. That is, we as human beings cannot simply “withdraw from all obligation” at our own discretion by committing suicide (422). Committing suicide is against our self-preservation as a natural being and altogether eradicates the “existence of morality itself,” which is “an end in itself” that we ought to respect (423). Although Kant defines maiming oneself for financial rewards as “partially murdering oneself,” he recognizes that necessary amputations performed to preserve one’s life is not a morally condemnable crime (423).
While Kant believes that sexual love prescribed by nature to preserve the human species is a natural end, he deems a sexual desire unnatural—and is thus in violation of a duty to oneself—if it originates from one’s mere imagination as opposed to a “real object” (425). This misuse of “one’s sexual attribute,” in Kant’s view, is even more unnatural and abhorrent than the murdering of oneself (425). This is because killing oneself involves “courage” and still enjoys the possibility to engender respect, whereas the perpetrator of unnatural lust demonstrates a complete surrender of oneself to animal inclination, which makes that person a “loathsome object” deserving not even the possibility of respect (425).
In Kant’s view, drunkenness and gluttony cannot be identified as a direct duty to oneself based on the negative health implications they induce, as they promote one’s comfort, not their humanity (427). Instead, Kant asserts that drunkenness violates a duty to oneself because in such a state one becomes a mere servant to the “animal enjoyment of the senses” (427). Kant insists that gluttony is more reproachable than drunkenness, for the excess of food does not beget even the illusion of an active engagement of the senses—gluttony simply puts a human being into a passive stupor, making one, at least temporarily, unable to act deftly and reasonably (427).
In addition to the duty to preserve our natural being, we also have a perfect duty to ourselves as a moral being alone—that is, a duty derived without considering our animality—which is to oppose “the vices of lying, avarice, and false humility” (429). Kant contends that this duty maintains the consistency between our will and the dignity of our humanity, so that we do not become playthings of “mere inclinations” (420).
Lying, Kant avows, is the “greatest violation of a human being’s duty to himself” as a moral being (429). Harmfulness is not necessarily the reason to morally oppose lying, as some lies are frivolous or even good natured (430). Rather, it is because lies are unreal and contrary to one’s “natural purposiveness … to communicate his thoughts,” which thereby “annihilate” one’s dignity and worth as a human being, “renunciates” their personality, and makes them a mere “deceptive appearance” of a human being that is not in fact a human being (429). To address the ostensible contradiction that it seems impossible to form an “inner lie,” that is, for one to willingly deceive their own self, Kant separates the human being into a moral being (homo noumenon) and natural being (homo phaenomenon), each possessing their own “inner end,” and neither can use the other as a mere means to its own end (430). Hence, with two potentially opposing forces in play, Kant argues that an inner lie is indeed conceivable (430).
In his discussion of a duty to oneself as a moral being, Kant refers to avarice not as an “excess of one’s true needs,” which violates that person’s duty to others, but as a “miserly avarice” —characterized by one’s possession of “means for all sorts of ends,” but “with no intention of enjoyment”—which violates a duty to oneself (432). Kant censures the indulgence in miserly avarice because it makes one a slave to “the goods that contribute to happiness,” in such a way that they forfeit the “liberality of mind,” when that person ought to be their master (434).
According to Kant, false humility is the total waiver of one’s moral worth as a means to acquire “the favor of another, whoever it may be” (435). False humility contradicts a duty to oneself as it “degrades one’s personality” and obliterates one’s “consciousness of his sublime moral predisposition,” which is a dignity in his person (homo noumenon) that has an absolute inner worth (435).
Additionally, Kant believes one also has a duty to “His Own Innate Judge,” namely, to deliver a verdict of conscience only after a fair trial in one’s internal court (437). In other words, the “internal imputation of a deed,” or the judgment of an action’s morality, cannot be settled “amicably” (438, 440). That is, it is a duty that the prosecutor, being one’s moral being (homo noumenon), and the defense counsel, being one’s sensible being endowed with practical reason (specie diversus), fight vigorously for condemnation or acquittal in one’s internal court of morality (438*, 440).
On an episodic note at the end of his consideration of the perfect duties to oneself, Kant avers that although our duties are only directed to human beings—ourselves and others—it is nonetheless in opposition to a duty to oneself to destroy “what is beautiful in animate nature” or to treat animals cruelly, because these actions gradually erode our “natural predisposition that is … serviceable to morality” (443). Furthermore, Kant remarks that we have “a duty with regard to … the idea of God,” not a duty to God, because His reality has not been “shown (disclosed) through reality” (444). However, it is a practical duty to oneself to “have religion,” because religion is “of the greatest moral fruitfulness” (444).
Moreover, Kant’s examination elucidates two imperfect duties to oneself. The first is to increase one’s natural perfection; and the second is to increase one’s moral perfection. When one fails to cultivate their natural powers of “spirit, mind, and body” (which can be, respectively, broadly compared to logical acumen, memory and imagination, and bodily health), one is effectively taking an unduly refuge in their “gifts” endowed by nature, which are at most merely “satisfactory” for a human being’s “pragmatic purpose” and destined to rust away if left idle (387, 444-445). Such idleness hinders one’s capacities to achieve “all sorts of possible ends,” among whom humanity, which is an end in itself that we ought to always respect and promote, is ever present (444-446). Consequently, because being “a useful member of the world … belongs to the worth of humanity in his own person,” a human being owes it to oneself to increase their natural perfection by cultivating their natural predispositions and leading a productive life, so that they may be “worthy of the humanity that dwells within him” (387, 446).
The imperfect duty to oneself to increase their moral perfection—that is, to cultivate their “moral feeling” so that the moral law “becomes also the incentive to his action”—commands one to “be holy,” which is to act in conformity with duty and also from duty, and to “be perfect,” which is to strive for virtue and praise, if there be any (387, 446). The duty to increase one’s natural perfection is imperfect because it does not prescribe “the kind and extent of actions” one ought to take to achieve that end; that is, it is wide in its quality and degree. On the other hand, the duty to increase one’s moral perfection is imperfect because it is wide in its “degree,” albeit being narrow and perfect in its “quality” (446). Kant concedes that, ultimately, one cannot know with absolute certainty whether they have acted from morality or inclination for every single instance, for “[t]he depths of the human heart are unfathomable” (447). Nonetheless, one may assess their own moral track record and see whether their actions are legal (a morally permissible deed), regardless of whether they are moral (a morally permissible deed executed from the right disposition), and conclude a general appraisal of one’s worth (392-393). Although, admittedly, this evaluation is inevitably beset by uncertainty.
At large, Kant claims that it is our positive, or wide, duty to promote others’ happiness, but we are “never without self contradiction … under obligation to promote [our] own happiness,” for we as human beings are already naturally inclined to do so; and an inclination, which one adopts willingly, cannot be regarded as a duty, which one is put under “constraint” to adopt, and thus does so reluctantly (386). However, even though Kant states that it is a duty to “sacrifice a part of my welfare to others without the hope of return,” Kant is not authorizing us to promote the happiness of others at the expense of our humanity altogether (393). Kant denotes a notable amount of exceptions where one may—because “it is impossible to assign determinate limits to the extent of this sacrifice”—have a positive duty to promote their own happiness (393). In cases where the usual inclination to promote one’s own happiness is subdued or absent either due to self-repression or a systematically imposed social oppression, it becomes our positive duty to promote our own happiness. For instance, when others demand us to promote their happiness in a way that we see as contradictory to their happiness, we have the choice to refuse such a demand, for this very freedom to choose is integral to our humanity (388). In the section of casuistical questions addressing the vice of unnatural lust, Kant also thinks it is pedantic to ascribe the limitation of a wide duty to “purism” (426). Curiously, in the following paragraph, Kant acknowledges the sexual inclination of “love” as a “unique kind of pleasure” that closely approximates to the “moral love properly speaking,” which seems to leave room for the possibility that it is permissible to engage in intercourse without taking human beings’ natural end of procreation into consideration under certain limitations, such as within marriage (426). In addition, Kant deems it a duty to oneself to possess and utilize adequate resources and comforts necessary for one to “enjoy life,” a point that Kant makes clear by condemning miserly avarice, which professes an excessive obsession about one’s welfare in the future so that they intentionally and willfully disregard their current capacity to enjoy life as it is (432-433).
Furthermore, from the perspective of the Formula of Universal Law, Kant highlights that “a maxim of promoting others’ happiness at the sacrifice of one’s own happiness” poses a contradiction, for such maxim of benevolence towards all human beings, which is to “love your neighbor as yourself” would be altogether meaningless without including the self (393, 450). In other words, the maxim of beneficence cannot possibly be a universal law if we are not “permitted … to be benevolent to [ourselves] on the condition of [us] being benevolent to every other as well,” because “lawgiving reason” reveals the humanity in others just as equally as it does in me (451). One should note, however, that this permission to be benevolent to oneself is different from an “obligation” love oneself, because an obligation, or duty, cannot be something that already “happens unavoidably” due to our natural inclination (451). That is, it is only in the absence or suppression of our inclination to promote our own happiness that we now have a duty to promote it. Kant’s examination of the duties to oneself in Metaphysics of Morals has, if not succeeded, at least advanced the argument that duties to oneself deserve as much weight in our ethical considerations and merit still further dialogue.