2. Kant’s pessimism about our prospects for happiness

Kant defines happiness (Glückseligkeit) in a variety of ways—as pleasure, enjoyment, contentment with one’s condition, the satisfaction of inclination, well-being, even overall or complete life satisfaction. The possible differences between these terms seem not to have concerned him. Indeed, at times he treats them interchangeably, as when he writes that happiness amounts to “continuous well-being, enjoyment of life, complete satisfaction with one’s condition” (MS 6:480). Despite characterizing happiness in distinct ways, leaving readers to wonder whether he has a settled notion of it, on balance, Kant thinks of happiness as the satisfaction of inclination (desire). That is, happiness, on his view, is best understood as an idea in which “all inclinations unite in one sum” (GMS 4:399) or, most simply, the “sum of all inclinations” (GMS 4:394).Footnote ¹ Although more could be said about the various ways in which he defines happiness and how these terms are related, this much is evident: For Kant, happiness is a state of (sensible or empirical) contentment consisting in the maximal satisfaction of inclination along with the prospect of its indefinite continuation. Such satisfaction with one’s condition brings the agent who enjoys it pleasure (agreeableness) and is identified with her well-being (Wohl or Wohlbefinden).Footnote ²

With this basic account of Kant’s desire-satisfaction view of happiness in mind, I turn to the central problems he thinks we face in pursuing such contentment in life. Here, I focus on six issues with which Kant is especially concerned.

First, living a morally good life governed by duty will inevitably require a conscientious person to abandon the concerns of happiness, at least on certain occasions (problem #1). This has to do with the fact that happiness, as Kant conceives of it, is an inherently non-moral end consisting in the sum satisfaction of (empirical) desire. That is, happiness involves getting what one wants in life by fulfilling the objects or ends of inclination in a way that brings pleasure and contentment with one’s state or condition (GMS 4:393). Accordingly, happiness itself (its content, what it means to be happy) has nothing directly to do with our highest priority, namely, morality or virtue.Footnote ³

Kant emphasizes that our two fundamental human aims of seeking personal happiness, on the one hand, and cultivating a good will or virtue, on the other hand, are wholly independent goals by insisting that morality teaches us how to become worthy of happiness, but not how to be happy (GMS 4:393, 442, 450; TP 8:278, 284, 288; KpV 5:111-112, 130). It is not merely that the supreme principle of morality and the principle of self-love and concern for one’s own happiness are heterogenous principles, representing distinct evaluative standpoints about what is good (morally versus naturally or prudentially valuable) (KpV 5:59-60, 112). Kant insists on the further thought that what we want for happiness can always conflict with what we are morally commanded to do. To register this further point that the means for happiness and duty can always clash, he warns that maxims of virtue and maxims of happiness are “so far from coinciding that they greatly restrict and infringe upon each other in the same subject” (KpV 5:112; cf. TP 8:282).

At times, Kant stresses that individual actions opposed to duty might advance one’s happiness while abiding by duty can detract from one’s enjoyment of life (GMS 4:402, 421-423; KpV 5:35-36, 53, 88; TP 8:286-288). Other times, he takes up the perspective of a person’s overall or complete life, lamenting that a morally good person might end up unhappy while a vicious person might prosper and be content in life (GMS 4:442, 493; V-Mo/Mron II 29:623). The first point here about why happiness is not always possible for us is that, as Kant sees it, there will inevitably be times in a moral life when we are required to sacrifice the immediate concerns of happiness for the sake of duty. As finite rational agents bound by categorical moral demands that always outweigh or override competing non-moral concerns of happiness, we cannot always (permissibly) get what we want.Footnote ⁴

A second feature of happiness that makes it elusive is that getting what one wants in life depends in no small part on luck (problem #2). Although Kant’s German term Glückseligkeit is standardly translated as “happiness” in English translations of his works, it is worth bearing in mind that Glückseligkeit is an antiquated term connoting something akin to “blessedness” or “felicity.” The association between being happy and being blessed is often reflected in Kant’s discussions of happiness and how it is achieved. Happiness is not (fully) within our power, for it involves “satisfaction with what nature bestows, and so with what one enjoys as a gift from without” (MS 6:387; cf. TP 8:285n). In response to his teacher’s question about whether a person can be assured of getting the happiness he deserves based on the goodness of his will, the imaginary student in Kant’s fragment on moral catechism in the Doctrine of Virtue reports:

Here, Kant stresses that success in achieving the satisfaction of one’s desires depends on the cooperation of external circumstances. Indeed, what we would need for complete happiness is for nature to harmonize with our material ends taken as a whole (KpV 5:124–125). Yet, as the student in Kant’s catechism understands, nature is at best indifferent to the realization of our human ends (cf. GMS 4:438-439). Of course, we can and should aim to cultivate prudence, a pragmatic skill that helps us to harmonize our inclinations, by uniting our inclinations into a tolerable system, and to identify the means to achieve the various ends of our inclinations.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, Kant is adamant that no amount of human effort or skill can ensure that any of us will ever find the happiness we seek (and might even deserve) because happiness is ultimately tied to circumstances outside our control (conditions not fully under the direction of the will).Footnote ⁶ For Kant, then, finding contentment in life depends at least in part on fortune—when we fare poorly or things go badly for us, we will not be happy.

A third obstacle we face in striving for happiness (problem #3) is that happiness is entirely indeterminate, or a notion that Kant likens to a wavering ideal of the imagination, as opposed to a determinate ideal of reason (GMS 4:399, 417-418). In the Groundwork, Kant proclaims that happiness is so indefinite that it would be impossible for even one person to say “determinately and consistently” what would make her happy (GMS 4:418). The reason it would be impossible for any human being to identify a definite idea of what would make her happy is that none of us can know with any degree of certainty all the various things we truly want out of life (GMS 4:418). Given that happiness is supposed to be inclusive, encompassing “an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in [one’s] present condition and in every future condition,” the task of formulating a settled conception of happiness would surpass a human being’s epistemic limitations, requiring her to know too much (GMS 4:418). Kant thus notes that even the most insightful and powerful finite being cannot frame for herself a determinate idea of what would genuinely make her happy, for such a task requires omniscience, which we humans obviously do not possess (GMS 4:418).

In the same Groundwork passage, Kant explains that the reason we can never form a precise notion of what it would take to be happy is that happiness is a wholly empirical concept, all the elements of which are based on experience (GMS 4:418-419; KpV 5:35-36; TP 8:286-287). In other words, there are no fixed or certain (universal) principles of reason that we can rely on to tell us definitively what happiness (as a whole) would involve or the specific means to achieve it. On the contrary, we can only discover what would make us happy through the trial and error of experience. Kant cites as an example a person who wishes for wealth, superior cognition and insight, and a long life, only to find that wealth makes her the subject of envy, insight makes her aware of the evils of the world, and a long life turns out to be full of misery (GMS 4:418; cf. TP 8:286-287). On Kant’s perspective, happiness (the satisfaction of the sum-total of all of one’s desires) always remains an opaque goal, one that cannot be defined with any precision or pursued systematically, for “what brings true lasting advantage, if this is to extend to the whole of one’s existence, is always veiled in impenetrable obscurity” (KpV 5:36).

The indeterminate nature of happiness points to a fourth, closely related complication (problem #4), which is that reason gives us poor insight in our quest for happiness (GMS 4:395–396). Although all finite rational beings universally desire their own happiness by nature, happiness is not the natural purpose of a rational will in general. On the contrary, Kant insists that reason was given to us for the purpose of cultivating a good will. In his Groundwork discussion of the function of reason, Kant conjectures that if, counterfactually, reason had been given to us to make us happy, nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement, for happiness is attained much more surely by instinct (GMS 4:395). In other words, reason, which gives us clear directives about what we are morally obligated to do, provides comparatively weak guidance about what we ought to do to secure our natural end of happiness (TP 8:283, 286-287). Indeed, Kant suggests that reason more likely leads to frustration than satisfaction in the pursuit of happiness (GMS 4:395-396). Reason is ill-suited as a means for happiness because we do not know what we really want, what we want changes over time, it is always uncertain which actions lead to happiness, and, often enough, success in realizing the objects of our desires does not ultimately leave us satisfied.

Moreover, Kant sometimes expresses the further thought that the cultivation of reason can, and often does, inhibit happiness. In a notable passage reflecting Rousseau’s influence about the corrosive effects of reason on human beings, he writes:

Here, Kant suggests that that the more we rely on reason to make us happy, the worse off we are with respect to achieving the satisfaction of the sum of our inclinations. Reason creates new problems in the way it transforms and proliferates our desires. This is a theme Kant touches on in the Groundwork and explores in more depth in the essays “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim” and “Conjectural beginning of human history,” where he discusses the progress our species makes due to reason as well as the downsides of being endowed with reason. Reason is a “faculty of extending the rules and aims of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct, and it knows no boundaries to its projects” (IaG 8:18-19). Precisely because we are endowed with reason, we generate new and artificial desires, which are more difficult to satisfy than our natural desires, and come to “need” luxuries beyond our necessary needs to feel satisfied and content in life (MAM8:111).

Apart from these issues that seem to be internal to the concept of happiness itself, Kant thinks that our human nature and psychology further diminish our chances of being satisfied in life. A key source of the problem (problem #5) has to do with our inclinations. Our inclinations are fickle, inconstant, and fluctuating, which means that any subjective version of happiness we form for ourselves will likely change over time (KpV 5:25; TP 8:298). Happiness is thus more life a shifting target rather than a settled rational goal.Footnote ⁷ In addition, we can want inconsistent and incompatible things. As we have already seen (problem #1), our desires can conflict duty, but they can also conflict with one another. For example, Hannah might be inclined to keep the deposit to which she has no legal claim even though she cognizes that doing so would be contrary to duty, but it is also possible for her to be both inclined to keep the deposit for the wealth she might gain as well as inclined to return the money to its rightful owner for the good reputation that option would presumably afford. The fact that our inclinations can conflict with one another poses a genuine practical challenge, given that happiness involves a maximum possible satisfaction of our inclinations taken together.

Furthermore, a single inclination whose satisfaction might provide immediate gratification can conflict with an agent’s overall happiness, as in Kant’s Groundwork example of the gout sufferer, whose occurrent desire for rich foods at the banquet table would bring momentary pleasure if indulged, but would likely detract from the longer-term happiness that supposedly lies in health (GMS 4:399). The conflicting and variable nature of our inclinations explains why Kant warns of the “changing illusion” in which we place our happiness (TP 8:298).

Finally (problem # 6), Kant holds that there is a key social dimension to happiness in that how happy we are will depend on the people around us, the kind of society we inhabit, and, more generally, our social nature. As social creatures, we tend to measure our happiness in relation others, often feeling happier in the face of others’ misery and less happy when we see that they are prospering. In the essay “Conjectural Beginning,” Kant states that our dissatisfaction is directly tied to others’ opinions of us and our relative social standing (MAM 8:113). In Religion, he goes as far as insisting that “only in comparison with others does one judge oneself to be happy or unhappy (RGV 6:27). In his lectures from the 1770’s, he illustrates this point about the comparative nature of happiness and the way in which social comparison can affect (and often detract from) our own sense of well-being by observing:

As Kant sees it, human beings in the social condition have strong tendencies to competitiveness, self-conceit, and self-deception. Our social nature thus has a significant impact not merely on how we evaluate our own happiness compared to others but whether our attachment to happiness ultimately has a corrosive effect on our moral character, even lending itself to vice. The Cynic element of Kant’s ethics is his endorsement of Rousseau’s idea that human misery (and moral corruption) are largely products of our social condition, giving rise not only to competitiveness and hostility between people but also to destructive social passions and tyranny, greed, and ambition.Footnote ⁸

3. Some of Kant’s worries about our human search for happiness are less pressing than others

In Section 4, I try to show that several of the central challenges Kant identifies with happiness diminish when we think about the ways in which Kantian virtue transforms and governs a moral agent’s pursuit of happiness. But before considering how the requirements of Kantian virtue help mitigate some key obstacles to approximating happiness in life, I suggest that some of Kant’s reservations about our overall prospects for finding happiness are not grounds for serious despair.

First (problem #1), sacrifice is surely part of a moral life. Although we human beings want to be happy and prefer to have our desires fulfilled instead of thwarted, we tend to agree that happiness is outweighed or overridden by moral requirements. This common human consensus about what has supreme value appears to remain robust, even on those occasions when we succumb to temptation, heeding the call of desire over duty. It is not merely that it is a given (to be expected, perfectly understandable) that imperfect human beings sometimes want things we should not want from a moral perspective, in which case abiding by duty requires setting aside the immediate concerns of happiness. Sometimes there are conflicts that arise between the demands of morality and considerations of happiness that would otherwise be perfectly permissible to choose—in life generally, but especially under non-ideal social and political circumstances where compliance with the most trivial moral requirements can make moral agents vulnerable to violence or manipulation by others.Footnote ⁹

This central theme that morality and happiness can conflict and that, accordingly, a moral life will at times require forgoing the pursuit of desire is a deep-seated and ineliminable feature of Kant’s view. It is why morality is a discipline of virtue and not a doctrine of happiness. It lies behind his observation that the satisfaction of the sum of a human being’s needs and inclinations is felt as a “counterweight” to duty (GMS 4:405). More importantly, the conviction that sometimes we must refrain from pursuing our own pleasure and happiness for the sake of morality is a common, perhaps dominant (contemporary) view about the relationship between personal happiness and morality. To deny that morality has a cost is effectively to hold an implausible Stoic-type view that nothing apart from virtue is genuinely valuable. To embrace it is to accept a fact about what it means to live an ethical human life governed by a commitment to a priority of values (morality or virtue is supremely good) that strikes me at least as uncontroversial and worth upholding. That we are sometimes called to sacrifice happiness for weightier moral demands is not typically considered a grave threat to our overall chances for happiness in general, even if it means we ought to abstract from considerations of happiness in circumstances where happiness is not permissible to choose.

As for luck (problem #2), this seems to be an obvious fact about success in finding happiness on any desire theory. We have desires for all sorts of objects, events, projects, ends, goals, outcomes, where our desires are aimed at bringing about or realizing certain states of affairs in the world. Striving to realize the objects of our desires is up to us and a matter of what we can will, but success in satisfying our desires is always tied to external circumstances and thus not fully within our control. Sometimes our best-laid plans go awry, and we do not get what we want. Over the course of a life, there might be times when our worst-case scenario materializes, and we suffer for it. As Kant is aware, there are myriad ways in which life can narrow one’s choices along with one’s prospects for happiness. Even Aristotle (not a desire theorist!) recognizes this important point about fortune when he insists that eudaimonia is largely but not completely within our control because it requires external goods. In reminding us that happiness depends at least in part on luck, Kant is registering a common theme about the role fortune plays in our lives, and yet this idea seems to have little impact on our motivation in striving for happiness, nonetheless.

Next, while Kant characterizes it as a “misfortune” that we can never form a definite idea of what would make us happy, the indeterminacy of happiness seems to follow if we think, as Kant does, of happiness as effectively a placeholder for the satisfaction of the sum total of all our subjective desires and ends taken together. For Kant, happiness amount to an imagining of all that it would take to feel content and satisfied in life.Footnote ¹⁰ For any human being, the challenge of articulating with any degree of confidence or accuracy all the many and various things one wants, now and in the future, is a challenge most of us would fail to meet. Given Kant’s view’s that happiness is all-encompassing, seemingly inclusive not just of one’s considered or informed desires but all of them, over time, it is no wonder we cannot form a determinate conception of what our happiness (in toto) would include.Footnote ¹¹

So, it might be that some of Kant’s concerns about the practical issues we face in aiming for happiness are less pressing than others. More importantly, several of them are made more manageable if we consider the ways in which virtue diminishes some key sources of unhappiness.

4. How Kantian virtue alleviates some of the main sources of human unhappiness

Kant thinks of virtue as moral courage or fortitude, understood as a firm disposition to do one’s duty from the motive of duty and the strength to withstand temptations to transgress the moral law (MS 6:394, 396-397, 405, 524-525, 526-527, 533-534; V-Mo-Collins 27:465; V-Mo/Mron II 29:603-604; V-MS/Vigil 27:492). He appeals to the notion of “autocracy of practical reason” in characterizing virtue as a form of moral self-rule or self-governance involving “consciousness of the capacity to master one’s inclinations when they rebel against the law” (MS 6:383).Footnote ¹² The Kantian autocratic agent is one in whom practical reason has not merely legislative but also executive authority. That is, she possesses the freedom to give herself moral laws in virtue of her recognition of their authority for all rational beings (based on autonomy), but she also demonstrates a broad power to rule over her sensible nature and to execute those laws in a way that demonstrates moral self-command (Selbstbeherrschung) (based on autocracy).

Finite rational (human) beings need autocracy for virtue because we have inclinations that pose a powerful obstacle to abiding by moral demands (MS 6:384, 394, 397). More importantly, we have what Kant sees as a universal human tendency to act on our inclinations even when our inclinations conflict with duty, or a tendency to prioritize self-love and personal happiness over the moral law. Given that virtue entails such a formidable (internal) opponent to combat, the very concept of virtue signifies a moral disposition in conflict (KpV 5:84), and its ideal expression takes the form of self-constraint or self-mastery in accordance with pure practical reason over sensibility, and not a harmony of the two.

As Kant makes clear, the self-command central to virtue is not innate or easy, but rather a hard-won moral strength of will that takes time and effort to acquire. It is achieved through a process of moral discipline through which an agent works to strengthen and cultivate moral feeling and to weaken sensibility (V-Mo/Collins 27:361). Having disciplined herself, the autocratic agent rules herself in accordance with reason and is portrayed as having subjected her powers, condition, and sensibility to the authority of reason (V-Mo/Collins 27:360-368).

Unsurprisingly, virtue, on Kant’s account, can make a person downcast, for “virtue not only has to muster all its forces to overcome the obstacles it must contend with; it also involves sacrificing many of the joys of life, the loss of which can sometimes make one’s mind gloomy and sullen” (MS 6:484; cf. MS 6:379-380). At the same time, Kant notes that virtue brings with it its own significant rewards in the form of inner freedom, tranquility, and moral contentment (KpV 5:117-119, 160-164; MS 6:377, 387-388, 391).

In his lectures from 1784-1785, Kant depicts the inner freedom associated with virtue in terms of independence and freedom from the “rabble” of natural inclinations:

He praises autocracy as good self-government precisely because it keeps peace within one’s soul so that one is not at war with oneself (V-Mo/Collins 27:368-369). In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant claims that the inner freedom of virtue entails being one’s own master and ruling over oneself, by subduing one’s affects and governing one’s passions (MS 6:407-409). Similarly, in the second Critique, he characterizes the inner freedom of virtue in terms of “independence from the inclinations, at least as motives determining (even if not as affecting) our desire” and notes that consciousness of such freedom is a source of “unchangeable” moral contentment (KpV 5:117). Such contentment that follows from consciousness of one’s own virtue is distinguished from happiness (desire-satisfaction) in that it is a uniquely moral feeling of self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit) concerning one’s own inner worth, or an intellectual contentment of heart achieved through good conduct (MS 6:388; V-MS/Vil 27:647; KpV 5:117-118).Footnote ¹³

In his account of virtue (the supreme good), Kant’s primary focus is that virtue is the ideal state of moral character for human beings and crucial for living an ethical life governed by the requirements of practical reason. Yet, it seems clear that the self-mastery or self-rule distinctive of Kantian virtue will significantly impact the virtuous agent’s pursuit of happiness as well. In other words, while self-mastery is key for Kantian moral agency, it has broader implications for a moral agent’s prospects for personal happiness in the way it helps minimize some of the main obstacles to finding happiness in life. This connection between virtue and its indirect benefits for our natural end of happiness seems most obvious with respect to Kant’s problems #1, 5, 6, and 2, which I return to here.Footnote ¹⁴

As noted earlier, Kant’s view that virtue at times requires sacrifice entails that there can always be conflict between what we are morally obligated to do and what we desire for happiness. (This was problem #1). At the same time, the degree of conflict one is likely to experience between the demands of morality and happiness over the course of a life will be attenuated if one has acquired virtue. It stands to reason to think that the virtuous person will be less prone to the kind of inner conflict that comes from having strong desires actively resistant to duty and moral concerns, and less prone to feel disappointment about having to set aside the immediate concerns of happiness when duty demands it. The reason the virtuous person is less likely to want things she should not want (morally) is because she has worked to master and govern her inclinations, by weakening and uprooting feelings and desires opposed to moral reasoning, and by cultivating feelings and desires that are conducive to the fulfillment of duty and the realization of moral ends. As Kant envisions it, true self-mastery is a form of sovereignty in which morality “holds a categorical sway over sensibility,” whereby we give morality supreme power over ourselves so that practical reason rules over sensibility (V-Mo Collins 27:361). From his perspective, the self-rule or self-command constitutive of virtue involves the fortitude to resist temptations to duty and the ability to govern one’s feelings and desires so that one’s sensible nature better accords with the demands of practical reason. This is not to suggest that the Kantian virtuous agent’s desires fully harmonize with the demands of practical reason, but her desires have nevertheless been shaped and cultivated by reason in a way that secures their subordination and promotes a state of inner freedom and peace of soul. Moreover, in situations where the virtuous agent wants something that she recognizes would be (morally) wrong to pursue and knows she must abstract from the immediate concerns of happiness for the sake of morality, the cost of virtue will not matter as much to her. Perhaps this is because the fully virtuous Kantian agent does not see a (genuine) reason to act in a way that contravenes duty. But even if she does see a reason to act otherwise than virtuously, she understands that the self-approbation she would feel in acting contrary to duty would diminish any pleasure or satisfaction to be gained from choosing happiness over morality. As Kant captures this thought that, for the virtuous person, happiness obtained impermissibly does not amount to happiness one could enjoy:

Next, Kant’s worries about the nature of inclinations and the trouble they can pose in the search for happiness (problem #5) likewise seem to diminish when we think about the psychology of the virtuous agent. To be sure, it is part of our human nature to be affected by inclinations, which is why virtue is always in progress and can never settle down once and for all (MS 6:409). At the same time, the inner freedom of virtue involves bringing one’s capacities and inclinations under reason’s control, which Kant depicts as going beyond forbidding oneself to be governed by feelings and inclinations by having reason hold “the reins of government” firmly in hand (MS 6:408). This tells us that while virtue does not make a person completely immune to the features of inclinations that tend to make happiness difficult, it does promote some measure of peace of soul, emotional regulation, and reliable control over inclinations. As a result, the virtuous person’s inclinations are likely to be more stable and less fickle, and she is less likely to want inconsistent and incompatible things. The virtuous agent enjoys a state of (moral) health signifying a tranquil mind and freedom from disturbance by unruly inclinations (MS 6:409). The vicious person, by comparison, is dependent on, and effectively a hostage to, her inclinations. As Kant expresses this point in his lectures from 1784–1785, “The state of vice is one of enslavement under the power of inclination. The more a man is virtuous, the more he is free” (V-Mo/Collins 27:464).

Furthermore, given that virtue for Kant involves a duty to perfect oneself, both morally and naturally, presumably the skills the virtuous agent will have developed and strengthened in connection with her duty to develop herself will help minimize some of the complications in seeking the satisfaction of inclinations. For instance, prudence as a skill in the means for happiness should go some way in enabling her to distinguish between desires that are more central for her happiness and those that are trivial, as well as desires that are best renounced or abandoned for the sake of long-term happiness. Moreover, prudence and wisdom should give her insight about the importance of second-order desires for her overall happiness.Footnote ¹⁵

With respect to problem #6, it makes sense to think that the virtuous agent will also be less susceptible to the feelings of social competitiveness and social vices that Kant views a key source of human unhappiness. Part of the reason for this is that she rules herself in a way that prevents her feelings and desires from becoming affects and passions.Footnote ¹⁶ In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant explains that two things are required for the inner freedom associated with virtue: “being one’s own master in a given case (animus sui compos) and ruling oneself (imperium in semetipsum), that is subduing one’s affects and governing one’s passions” (MS 6:407). Affects, like anger, are sudden, rash feelings that obscure a person’s judgment and prevent reflection. Kant characterizes such strong emotions as weak and childish, and claims that affects signal a lack of virtue even though they can coexist with the best will (MS 6:408). In relation to affects, reason, through the concept of virtue, commands that one get hold of oneself (MS 6:407-408).

In contrast to affects, passions, like hatred, are not just blind but more narrowly focused on some intense desire at hand. Passions tend to be more deeply rooted than affects and do not easily subside (MS 6:408). When passions strike upon something contrary the moral law, they can lead the agent in their grip to brood and can even end up becoming vices (MS 6:409). Importantly, Kant thinks passions interfere with both moral and prudential reasoning in the way they prevent a person from making the kind of overall comparison with her other desires that is necessary to achieve happiness (the satisfaction of the sum of desires). In other words, Kant views passions as destructive for morality as well as happiness for the agent who has given herself over to them. But, given that virtue presupposes moral apathy (Affektlosigkeit) regarded as strength in relation to affects and passions, the virtuous person is much less likely to be moved by the types of problematic feelings and desires that can otherwise be a source of both moral temptation and unhappiness (MS 6:409).

Finally, although it is more of a stretch, it is plausible that happiness for the genuinely virtuous Kantian agent will be more insulated from the vagaries of fortune in so far as virtue involves a level of self-sufficiency that provides some measure of freedom from unhappiness. In our earlier discussion of problem #2, we saw that Kant thinks of happiness as heavily tied to external conditions that are outside of our control. Such external conditions can easily affect one’s internal state and preclude the satisfaction of desire. Yet, the degree to which happiness is subject to fortune and luck will itself depend in part on what one wants and how much one needs to be content in life. Kant registers this point in suggesting that a type of independence in the form of self-sufficiency minimizes or at least reduces one common source of unhappiness. In his words:

Here, Kant endorses a kind of “moderate Cynicism” he finds in Rousseau, according to which our chances for approximating happiness in life are enhanced if we are willing to do without luxuries we have come to see as necessary (through social corruption), and to reduce our dependency on external factors for happiness, including the opinions of others.Footnote ¹⁷ Modest living of this sort is by no means a guarantee for being happy, but Kant appears to consider it a valuable (or perhaps sensible) way of safeguarding against unhappiness in the way it reduces the role luck can play in achieving the satisfaction of one’s desires.