Morality, id est, worthiness to be happy : Kant’s retributivism, the ‘law’ of unhappiness, and the eschatological reach of Kant’s ‘law of punishment’

TL;DRAbstract

Throughout his work, Kant regularly glosses ‘morality’ (and cognate expressions) as ‘worthiness to be happy’ (Würdigkeit glücklich zu sein). As a rule, Kant’s commentators do not find this remarkable. Correctly understood, however, Kant’s gloss on ‘morality’ is remarkable indeed. This thesis shows why. In it, I argue that whenever we encounter Kant’s gloss, we are faced with an implicit, durable cluster of unjustified commitments; that these commitments both antedate and survive his ‘critical period’; that they are fundamentally practical in nature (i.e., that they are unexamined commitments to particular practices); and that these commitments entail a number of problematic theological consequences. I argue, in particular, that Kant’s gloss is a habit that signals, obscurely and implicitly, his antecedent commitments to the practice of capital punishment, on the one hand, and to a particular set of practical attitudes towards the happiness and unhappiness of immoral agents, on the othe

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