Catherine Smith

Kant held that human beings are competitive and not very good at living together in harmony. He also held that the principle of one’s own happiness is the central opponent of the principle of morality. According to Allen Wood, these claims are related: the competitive tendencies Kant attributes to human nature reveal, according to Wood, that the very shape of our human idea of happiness is derived from a deep-seated arrogance, incompatible with morality. I argue, by contrast, that although Kant’s discussion of human nature reveals that human happiness is complicated by interpersonal comparisons and tensions, these are not immoral and require no claims of innate human arrogance for their explanation. Consequently, these aspects of human nature are not themselves the reason that Kant considers our desire for happiness to be in conflict with our morality.

I argue that we have good textual reason to read Kant’s notion of “self-conceit,” and his theory of immorality more generally as being founded on the claim that we have the tendency to think that our ability to achieve happiness is our most valuable feature. I explain how this is not the same as the claim that we are arrogant or think we are better than others. Self-conceit (and the standard of assessment it implies) can lead to the opinion that one is worth more than others, when life is going well. When life goes badly, however, it leads to the opinion that one is worth less. I explain how this reading of self-conceit also amounts to a better theory of immorality, since we ought not to hold that interpersonal arrogance is at the heart of all immorality.