Rethinking Kant’s Concept of Happiness in Light of the Worthiness of Happiness

Rethinking Kant’s Concept of Happiness in Light of the Worthiness of Happiness

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct Immanuel Kant’s concept of happiness, which plays an ambivalent role across his moral philosophy, political philosophy, and anthropology. While Kant excludes happiness as a foundation for moral duty and warns that making it a political aim leads to“paternalistic government,”he simultaneously identifies it as a necessary component of the highest good and as an aim of the duties of virtue. The key to resolving this ambivalence lies in the worthiness thesis: the principle that morality is the condition of a person’s worthiness to be happy.
To reconstruct Kant’s value theory, we examine and critique Christian Korsgaard’s“value-conferring theory,”which suggests that a good will confers objective value upon the ends an agent chooses, potentially leading to the conclusion that the happiness of a virtuous person possesses intrinsic, that is, unconditional goodness. In contrast, we argue that the worthiness of happiness is an objective yet conditional value attributed to the person by reason, while the material components of happiness themselves remain subjective and individualistic.
By reconstructing Kant’s value system, the paper concludes that promoting happiness is objectively good not because the objects of desire are inherently valuable, but because it is appropriate to the objective value status of a person who possesses a good will. Within this framework, the pursuit of happiness is justified as“permitted”when it is consistent with moral worthiness, thereby providing a coherent account of how happiness functions within the Kantian system of the highest good.