Few people would disagree with the commonplace idea that prudence dictates that we ought to better ourselves at least to some degree. A complete failure to develop any of one’s talents at all seems short-sighted and foolish, if for no other reason than that getting what one wants requires at least a minimal level of skills and capacities that are instrumental in promoting one’s own happiness or welfare. Even the Slacker, who aims for nothing more than a laidback life of leisure and loafing, needs certain skills and abilities to secure the simple pleasures in which her happiness consists. But does morality itself require us to develop our natural capacities and thereby better ourselves? Robert Johnson believes that it does. He thinks we have a moral obligation to better ourselves as persons by cultivating and developing our various natural capacities. Arguing from a broadly Kantian point of view, Johnson defends the idea that this duty of self-improvement is a distinctly moral duty, that it is an imperfect duty of wide obligation, and that it is a duty we owe not to others, but to ourselves. His central contention is not the widely accepted and uncontroversial claim that we ought to develop ourselves morally by cultivating the capacities in us that are instrumental for moral character, but that morality itself directs us to develop ourselves in non-moral ways. On the Kantian account of self-improvement Johnson develops, practical reason obligates us to set a goal of self-improvement as an end, which means that neglecting to take genuine strides to develop our natural capacities is a moral – not merely prudential – failure.

Johnson’s splendid monograph addresses a range of arguments philosophers have mobilized against the notion that we have a duty of self-improvement, including the argument that it is impossible to owe anything to oneself at all. His illuminating account of the relation between self-respect, self-concern and self-improvement is highly original and challenges a number of familiar objections to Kant’s moral theory. In emphasizing the way in which Kantian ethics accords proper value to self-development and self-cultivation in a life governed by duty, Johnson uncovers an important aspect of Kantian ethics that has not been systematically explored.

After a short introductory chapter, chapter 2 explores Kant’s own discussions of the nature and extent of the obligation to develop our natural capacities. Johnson explains that the duty of self-improvement is wide enough to allow inclination to play a role in our decisions concerning which capacities to develop. Nonetheless, this obligation to better ourselves requires us to choose within the context of rational reflection and deliberation about what sort of life we wish to lead and whether one’s endowments are up to the task, where such reflection and deliberation occur within the context of particular cultural practices and traditions. On Johnson’s reading, this Kantian obligation of self-development is a duty ‘to adopt a policy of developing at least some of a vast collection of unactualized or minimally actualized (mostly) human capacities (mental, physical, spiritual) in the direction of a “limit” of perfecting them’ (p. 38). Johnson concludes this central chapter with a lively description of five ways one might fail to improve oneself.

Chapter 3 investigates Kant’s claim in the Groundwork that the duty of self-improvement can be derived from the first formulation of the categorical imperative, the formula of universal law (FUL). As Johnson interprets it, Kant’s argument appealing to FUL fails to establish the duty to improve oneself, mainly because the argument assumes that a necessary means to our own happiness is that some other person adopts certain ends (a premise that Johnson takes to be false).

Chapter 4 investigates the familiar worry that the very notion of a duty to oneself is itself incoherent on the grounds that an agent could always release herself from an obligation that is self-imposed. Johnson defends the central Kantian claim that we have duties to ourselves and that self-legislation is possible by focusing on the status of obligatory ends. Obligatory ends are ends that we are constrained to adopt in virtue of practical reason, and hence we are not at liberty simply to abandon them based on our inclinations.

Chapter 5 turns to the second formulation of the categorical imperative (the formula of humanity) to determine whether the duty of self-improvement can be justified on the basis of our duty to respect humanity (in ourselves and in others) as an end in itself. Johnson offers some thoughtful analysis in support of the claim that valuing one’s humanity requires perfecting or furthering one’s rational capacity to set ends in general.

Chapter 6 contains Johnson’s considered account of the Kantian duty to self-improvement. According to the Rawslian-inspired convergence argument Johnson develops, the duty to self-improvement is required in order to secure genuine or full self-respect. Chapter 7 then addresses Kant’s claim that we have a duty to perfect ourselves but cannot make the perfection of others our own end. In a short final chapter, Johnson turns to the recent work of John Greco and Ruth Millikan in an effort to shed light on the very concept of an ‘ability’ and explain the sense in which abilities can be improved.

I am sympathetic with much of what Johnson says about the value of self-improvement. I can imagine, though, that his account of self-improvement will strike some readers as overly demanding and moralistic in terms of what it requires and the kind of lives it rules out (the kind of lives it deems morally impermissible).

There are two ways in which Johnson’s account of the content of the duty of self-improvement might seem to require too much. In the first place, Johnson’s full account of what it means to fulfil the duty of self-improvement seems at odds with Kant’s commitment to what we might call moral egalitarianism (the thesis that all rational agents are equally capable of satisfying what is strictly required by morality). Kant maintains that all rational agents are aware of the moral law as a fact of reason and that it is a relatively easy matter for us to determine what the moral law commands (what duties are incumbent on us as rational agents). As I read him, Kant holds that morality is epistemically easy, but executively difficult. That is, he believes that it is easy enough for us to know what actions and ends are forbidden or required, and easy enough for us to determine whether a proposed maxim of action is permissible. The sense in which morality is hard, by contrast, lies in achieving the moral strength of will to fully comply with our duties, which requires actual strength on our part to resist acting on temptations to transgress duty, and the fortitude to do our duty in spite of a strong tendency we have to subordinate the moral law to inclination. The worry here is that there is a sense in which Johnson’s picture of self-improvement appears epistemically sophisticated in a way that Kant’s own account is not. As an example, consider the following passage, in which Johnson alludes to the epistemic requirements for self-development on his view:

Here it looks as if self-improvement requires sufficient reflection and deliberation about a plan of life, self-awareness about whether one has the right skills for that way of life, knowledge about whether leading one’s desired way of life would promote some common good, a settled view about one’s own happiness, and an idea of how one’s chosen life plan prefigures in one’s conception of happiness. It seems to me that these standards of self-knowledge and consistency of beliefs and actions are not likely to be widely satisfied, which seems not to cohere with Kant’s point that the knowledge required by morality is something we all have within us in virtue of being rational agents. If we recall, in the Groundwork Kant insists that the reason we need moral theory is not because we lack the knowledge about how we ought to act or how we should live. On the contrary, we are compelled on practical grounds to engage in moral theory because, without a clear view of the way in which moral principles are grounded in reason alone, our principles remain subject to corruption due to a volitional tendency we human beings have to subordinate duty to considerations based on happiness (4: 405). More to the point, Kant insists that all that is required for a good will is that one act in accordance with duty from the motive of duty, something he thinks all rational agents are capable of achieving, even if Mother Nature has failed to bless some of us with various skills and talents (4: 394). But Kant’s view that all rational agents are equally able to conform their actions to the moral law simply in virtue of the fact that we are beings for whom reason is practical seems at odds with Johnson’s account of our moral duty to natural self-perfection, which requires a level of cognitive or epistemic skills that I would venture many of us either do not possess, or cannot realize due to circumstances beyond our control. In short, whether one succeeds or fails in fulfilling the Kantian moral obligation to develop oneself in the way that Johnson requires would seem open to luck. But moral luck does not sit well with Kant’s egalitarianism.

Second, Johnson’s account of the content of the duty of self-improvement seems somewhat moralistic. One of Johnson’s stated concerns is to present a picture of Kantian ethics that shows just how wrong Kant’s critics have been when they have charged Kant with being hostile to the importance of self-concern. Kant’s critics have complained that Kant’s ethics neglects the value and importance of self-regard and concern for oneself, and is instead an ethics of moralistic self-mortification and rational austerity (p. 2). Johnson aims to show that Kant’s critics are mistaken on this very point by showing that Kant gives proper weight to self-concern in the form of self-development.

My sense, however, is that critics who make this charge will not be satisfied to hear that Kant holds that we have a moral duty to improve ourselves. This is because it looks as if the self-concern Kant cares about falls strictly under the guise of a moral obligation (the very sort of thing to which Kant’s critics object). Indeed, the thought that Kant demands that we cultivate our natural capacities and better ourselves as persons as part of what morality requires of us would seem to reiterate, not resolve, the worries about Kantian moralism. Perhaps the central issue here is: how should we conceive of the relation between self-regard and self-concern, on the one hand, and explicitly moral considerations, on the other hand? One natural thought is that the self-concern for which a moral theory ought to allow room should not be circumscribed for the agent in such a narrow way. It is one thing to hold that what an agent does or pursues out of self-concern should be governed or regulated by moral considerations. The idea behind this more modest or minimal thesis is that duty should always function as a secondary motive for the Kantian agent to ensure that she not act out of self-regard when doing so would lead her to violate the moral law. But it looks as if Johnson’s account of self-improvement entails a much stronger thesis about the relationship between self-concern and morality, insofar as duty does not merely govern, but to a strong degree determines, the shape and content of the sphere of self-concern.

These possible reservations aside, Self-Improvement is guaranteed to stimulate valuable discussion about self-respect and what we owe ourselves in virtue of the principal Kantian duty to respect our own humanity as an end in itself. Johnson’s valuable book is full of insights about the connections between self-concern, personal standards and values and different ways of life. His central claims – that improving oneself involves adopting a way of life and its associated standards and values, and that autonomy and self-respect entail a duty to self-improvement – mark an important and novel contribution to Kantian ethics.