Schopenhauer's Ethics of Compassion

Schopenhauer's ethics is based on the premises that there is no such thing as pure practical reason, only instrumental or prudential reason, thus that there are no ends of reason but only ends set by feeling, and further that there is no positive happiness available to human beings, only the alleviation of pain, whether that is merely the pain of boredom or something worse; from these premises it follows that pure reason can set no moral ends for human beings, but only the feeling of compassion can motivate the alleviation of pain. Because Schopenhauer does not recognize pure practical reason, he rejects Kant's conception of the fundamental principle of morality as a principle valid for all rational beings as well as his conception of the categorical imperative as the way in which our own pure practical reason presents this principle to the other, sensible aspect of our being; he therefore also rejects Kant's specific conception of duties to oneself, which can make sense only if we have a twofold self, in which our own rational self can put our sensible self under obligation. It is because of his rejection of any pure practical reason as a source of obligation within ourselves that Schopenhauer can only make sense of Kant's ethics of obligation as a holdover of theological or divine command ethics, in which we are put under obligation by an external power, in spite of Kant's own explicit rejection of theological ethics.Footnote ⁸ But unlike David Hume, who also holds that practical reason is only instrumental reason in the service of ends set by feeling, and who if he does not go so far as thinking of happiness as consisting only in the alleviation of suffering nevertheless does think of ‘tranquillity’ as the highest goal of morality and thereby at least elevates freedom from importunate desires above any more positive goals of morality,Footnote ⁹ Schopenhauer sees the feeling of compassion as flowing directly from metaphysical insight into the underlying unity of all being, an insight that can only be assigned to pure theoretical reason. Because of its metaphysical foundation in his own version of transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion can thus hardly be considered a strictly empiricist theory. In this section, I will briefly document these general claims about Schopenhauer's ethics.

Schopenhauer's charge that there is no such thing as pure practical reason is of course deeply rooted in his entire philosophical outlook going back to The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in which he argued that practical reason is just another one of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason that we impose upon appearance, and that is never pure because it needs the material of appearance to have any determinate content. There is no room here for a thorough review of Schopenhauer's entire metaphysics. It will suffice for present purposes to show how Schopenhauer's conception of practical reason as merely instrumental, as merely reflection on how best to achieve one's ends whatever they might be, manifests itself in his critique of Kant's moral philosophy and exposition of his own. In his critique of the ‘foundation of Kantian ethics’ in §6 of the essay on the Basis of Morals, Schopenhauer argues against the idea that being moral can be equated with being rational precisely because rationality can be put to the service of the ends of an agent, whatever they may be. In contrast to Kant's equation of pure rationality and morality he argues that rationality is concerned only with ‘relations of causality’, which means that it tells us only about means to ends, and does not set ends itself. Against Kant's position he writes that

Rationality is just the methodical discovery of causal connections and the application of the resultant knowledge to the pursuit of an agent's ends; whatever the latter may be, they are not determined by reason. They must be determined by feeling, and thus the difference between a virtuous agent and one who is not is not a difference in their rationality, but a difference in their feelings, the former being determined by the feeling of compassion for others and the latter either by feelings of self-love or even outright malice towards others.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus Schopenhauer opposes Kant on the basis of a conception of reason and of the relation between reason and feeling that is identical to that of Hume. However, Schopenhauer also sees compassion as the feeling that flows from the most adequate insight into the underlying unity of all reality, and that can be considered as a foundation of morality in pure theoretical rather than practical insight in a way that has no parallel in Hume's strictly empiricist meta-ethics.

But let us leave Schopenhauer's metaphysics for later, and for the moment further explore the implications of Schopenhauer's rejection of a Kantian conception of pure practical reason. One implication is that, since in Schopenhauer's view pure practical reason's provision of the fundamental principle of morality is a sham, Kant's derivation of more particular forms of duty from this principle is also a sham, indeed that Kant's derivation of duties inescapably turns on a hidden commitment to egoism or self-love. Schopenhauer's general claim that any morality other than his own is really a form of egoism, with reason merely serving self-interest, is manifest in The World as Will and Representation, where he writes that ‘a morality that does motivate can do so only by influencing self-love’ (WWR §66, 394), and where in the appended ‘Critique of the Kantian Philosophy’ he writes that Kant's requirement to act only on universalizable maxims is still a principle founded on egoism, although on the egoism of everyone, not just one's own: ‘my goal becomes the well-being of everyone, without distinction, instead of my own well-being. But it is still a question of well-being. I then discover that everyone can be equally well off only when each person makes other people's egoism the limit of his own’ (WWR appendix, 555). But in the essay on the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer goes even further in his argument that for Kant ‘the canonical rule of human acting remains simply egoism, under the guidance of the law of motivation, i.e. the wholly empirical and egoistic motives of each occasion determining the acting of a human being in every individual case’ (BM §6, 144). Specifically, Schopenhauer analyses Kant's applications of the requirement of universalizability as turning upon our wish to avoid undesirable consequences for ourselves of the universalization of our proposed paths of actions. When we reflect upon the consequences of the universalization of our proposed maxims of making false promises or being indifferent to the needs of others, we realize that this would have untoward consequences for ourselves, that we would ‘rashly … sanction a law that is unfair to ourselves!’ In such cases ‘the maxim of self-interest would conflict with itself’, and supposed moral obligation would rest ‘upon a presupposed reciprocity, and consequently’ would be ‘thoroughly egoistic’ (BM §7, 157). A charitable interpretation of Kant's derivation of specific kinds of duties following his first formulation of the categorical imperative would rather be that we only raise the question of what would follow from the universalization of our maxims because of a purely moral motivation, our recognition of the need to act in accordance with law for its own sake, although our reflection on the consequences of the considered universalization of our maxim can then take prudential considerations into account.Footnote ¹¹ But because he rejects any conception of pure practical reason, Schopenhauer can make no sense of the idea that the demand to universalize our maxims in the first place flows from pure practical reason rather than from prudential reason, so for him the entire process, first universalizing our maxim and then seeing what follows, is merely prudential or egoistic through and through.

A second implication of Schopenhauer's rejection of any conception of pure practical reason is his view that Kant's ethics is really theological, simply the traditional ethics of divine command in fancy new dress.Footnote ¹² Schopenhauer claims that ‘Conceiving ethics in an imperative form, as doctrine of duty, and thinking of the worth or unworth of human actions as fulfilment or dereliction of duties, undeniably stems, together with the ought, solely from theological morals and in turn from the Decalogue’ (BM §4, 129), i.e. the Mosaic ten commandments. A specific piece of evidence that Schopenhauer offers for this charge is that Kant expresses imperatives in the archaic form ‘du sollt’ (‘Thou shalt’) rather than in the modern form ‘du sollst’ (‘You should’).Footnote ¹³ But the deeper reason for Schopenhauer's charge must be that, since he rejects the idea of pure practical reason, he cannot recognize any authority internal to the human being from which a command, specifically a command for the human being to override his own inclinations if necessary to comply with the demands of morality, could arise. An ethics of imperatives, Schopenhauer holds, requires an ‘authority’ from which commands can issue, but if there is no authority within a human being from which the categorical imperative can issue, it can only rest ‘on the presupposition of the human being's dependence on another will that commands him and announces reward and punishment to him, and cannot be separated from that’ (BM §4, 129). Further, Schopenhauer's charge that Kant's ethics is theological is intertwined with his charge that in spite of its appearance Kant's ethics is egoistic: the motivation to obey divine commands can only be the thoroughly egoistic motivation to avoid punishments and earn rewards. This charge is made against Kant in spite of the fact that such a conception of moral motivation had been denounced as ‘mercenary’ since Shaftesbury's Moralists in 1709, and that Kant himself thoroughly rejected such a conception of moral motivation, arguing in his lectures on ethics that

But Schopenhauer cannot accept this analysis precisely because he rejects the idea that there is any pure practical reason in the human being that could serve as such an ‘inner principle’.

For the same reason, Schopenhauer rejects the Kantian conception of duties to the self. Kant himself had made it clear that the idea of duties to oneself, of putting oneself under an obligation, would be a contradiction were it not for the difference between the human being as a ‘sensible being’ and as an ‘intelligible being’, which is in turn qualified ‘not merely as a being that has reason, since reason as a theoretical faculty could well be an attribute of a living corporeal being’, and is thus only a being with pure practical reason and the freedom to act in accordance therewith.Footnote ¹⁵ Schopenhauer accepts Kant's distinction between the sensible appearance of the human being and the reality that underlies it, but does not consider that underlying reality ‘intelligible’ or rational. Therefore he cannot make sense of the idea of that ‘intelligible’ but internal being giving commands to its own ‘sensible’ appearance. For him, Kant's duties to self can be nothing but ‘partly prudential rules, partly dietetic prescriptions, neither of which belong in morals proper’ (BM §5, 132).

Above all, Schopenhauer's rejection of Kant's conception of pure practical reason means that he has no room for the idea of such pure reason setting moral ends. This means that he can recognize no end for human beings except the pursuit of happiness. But happiness in turn he interprets as nothing but the alleviation of suffering, the remission of pain, with nothing more positive than that to be set as the goal of morality. It is thus solely to the alleviation of the pain of others that the feeling of compassion can move us. Schopenhauer expounds his view about happiness at length in The World as Will and Representation, and then presupposes it in On the Basis of Morals. His view that happiness lies only in the alleviation of suffering might look as if it is founded on a conception of pleasure, on which pleasure can consist only in the removal of an antecedent pain, not just in the obvious case in which, for example, a violent bodily pain is remitted, but in every case in which an antecedent desire is satisfied, because an unsatisfied desire is itself a pain. Thus, ‘All satisfaction, or what is generally called happiness, is actually and essentially only ever negative and absolutely never positive. It is not something primordial that comes to us from out of itself, it must always be the satisfaction of some desire’ (WWR §58, 345). However, there is more to Schopenhauer's view than this, because he holds not just that satisfaction always presupposes an antecedent pain, but that the attempt to produce positive happiness is doomed: either the antecedent pain is not successfully removed, in which case of course it just endures, or it turns out that the apparent desire that was successfully satisfied was not the real source of the pain, which persists even after what was supposed to alleviate it has been accomplished, or neither of these is the case, the desire was correctly identified and successfully satisfied, but the inevitable result of satisfying a desire is then boredom, itself another form of pain, and so pain returns. In Schopenhauer's words, ‘The nature of every desire is pain: attainment quickly gives rise to satiety: the goal was only apparent: possession takes away the stimulus: the desire, the need re-emerges in a new form: if not, then what follows is dreariness, emptiness, boredom, and the struggle against these is just as painful as the struggle against want’ (WWR §57, 340). In other words, you can't win: there is no enduring pleasure whether you succeed in satisfying any particular desire or not. This is the real reason why happiness cannot be something positive: there is no end the realization of which can produce enduring satisfaction. The best that human beings can hope for is the repeated removal of pain, or a repeated pattern of intermissions in their pain, because since satiety itself is a pain, there is nothing that can count as the permanent removal of pain – except for death, which however human beings inevitably put off as long as they can because the underlying reality of will manifests itself as will to life.

So the best that one can hope to do for others is to alleviate their suffering, where however that means to be engaged in an ongoing project of producing intermissions in their suffering, because anything that might look like a permanent end to suffering would just be another form of suffering, namely boredom. For this reason too Kant's conception of the highest good or summum bonum, for Kant ‘universal happiness’, understood as maximal realization of ends, ‘combined with and in conformity with the purest morality throughout the world’,Footnote ¹⁶ indeed the result of the purest morality under ideal conditions,Footnote ¹⁷ has to be rewritten as the negative ideal of the complete remission of pain:

But just as Kant's positively conceived highest good can never actually be realized, or at least cannot be realized within the natural lifespan of human individuals or the human species and must instead be deferred to a life that is ‘future for us’,Footnote ¹⁸ so too Schopenhauer's negatively conceived summum bonum must also remain a mere ideal: the highest good would be to alleviate all suffering, but that is not something we can accomplish within the natural life of any beings, because the complete alleviation of suffering would itself be a form of suffering.

Schopenhauer's strictly negative conception of happiness is finally what leads to his conclusion that the only possible goal for morality is the alleviation of suffering and the highest moral incentive compassion, the feeling that prompts one to attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. Thus he draws the conclusion in The World as Will and Representation:

And he continues,

We will return to Schopenhauer's charge that Kant considers compassion a weakness, which is certainly not correct, in the next section. What we must consider now is his suggestion that he opposes Kant's derivation of goodness and virtue from ‘abstract reflection’. This charge is problematic, because as the previous sentence makes clear, for Schopenhauer, compassion, although it is a feeling, also flows from cognition, here the cognition of other people's suffering. What Schopenhauer really objects to is Kant's claim that virtue emerges from ‘the concept of duty and the categorical imperative’, in other words, from pure practical reason, while his own view is in fact that compassion, although a feeling and motivating only insofar as it is a feeling, emerges from pure theoretical reason. The cognition in question is the insight that there is no difference between oneself and others, not merely no difference in kind, each being an instance of the same kind and worthy of whatever treatment every other of the same kind is worth, even oneself, but rather no difference in number, each apparently distinct individual in fact being a manifestation of one and the same underlying reality. This is the essence of Schopenhauer's version of transcendental idealism – although it in fact rests on an enormous fallacy to which Kant himself did not succumb, namely the fallacy of inferring that because our normal, spatio-temporal system of individuation does not apply to underlying reality, there is in fact just one underlying reality, rather than an indeterminate and inaccessible number of underlying reality or realities – and it is the metaphysical basis of Schopenhauer's ethics. His view is that each of us should do whatever he can to alleviate the suffering of others because there is ultimately no numerical difference between oneself and others, and the insight that this is so will produce the feeling of compassion that prompts individuals – who differ from each other only at the empirical level, at the level of appearance – to attempt to do this.

Schopenhauer appeals to this metaphysical insight as the ultimate source of the motivation to be just to others – which he interprets as inflicting no harm on them in order to alleviate one's own suffering – as well as to be virtuous or good to them – which he interprets as the attempt to alleviate the suffering they will inevitably experience, if not from one's own injustice to them then from a myriad of other sources. Thus he writes first that

Schopenhauer emphasizes that justice is based on recognition, a term that wears its cognitive import on its face. He then continues that ‘positive benevolence’ also follows from metaphysical insight, namely ‘seeing through’ the principium individuationis of spatio-temporal difference:

The person who ‘makes less of a distinction than is usually made between himself and others’, for Schopenhauer something that follows from theoretical insight into the fact that at the deepest level of reality there is no distinction between oneself and others, is someone whom the ‘principium individuationis, the form of appearance, no longer has … quite so tightly in its grip; the suffering he sees in others affects him almost as much as his own, so he tries to establish an equilibrium between the two, giving up pleasures and undertaking renunciations to alleviate other people's suffering’ (WWR §66, 398–9). Here Schopenhauer correctly infers that if the metaphysical insight on which compassion rests is that we who differ at the level of appearance are all one at the level of ultimate reality what follows is not that we should attempt to alleviate only the suffering of others, but rather that we should attempt to alleviate the suffering of all, ourselves as well as others. As Kant says in his account of the duty to promote the more positively conceived happiness of others, ‘all others with the exception of myself would not be all’.Footnote ¹⁹

In The Basis of Morals, Schopenhauer attempted to expound his ethics without direct appeal to his metaphysics, having construed the challenge of the Danish Academy of Sciences for whose competition he was (unsuccessfully) writing as that of providing an empirical basis for morals, but in two final sections he nevertheless reiterates the conception of theoretical insight into the unitary nature of all being as the basis for the feeling of compassion that he had propounded in The World as Will and Representation. He sums up the main argument of the work by saying that it is ‘from a wholly immediate sympathy with the well-being and woe of others, whose source we have recognized as compassion, that the virtues of justice and loving kindness come’ – justice consisting in self-restraint from harming others for one's own benefit, and loving kindness consisting in trying to alleviate the suffering of others. Compassion is a feeling, but it comes from a cognitive state: ‘if we go back to what is essential in such a character, we find it undeniably in his making less of a distinction than everyone else between himself and others’ (BM §22, 249). For the main purposes of the essay, Schopenhauer was content to leave this cognitive condition or achievement itself unexplained. However, making less of a distinction between self and others than everyone else does is entailed by theoretical insight into the ultimate nature of reality, because the distinction between persons is only an artefact of appearance and at the deepest level of being there is no numerical difference between persons. Schopenhauer writes:

Moreover, Schopenhauer claims, this insight is not limited to Kant or those who correctly understand Kant: it is age-old wisdom, expressed millennia before Kant in the Vedas, and again in Scotus Erigena, the Sufis, and Giordano Bruno (BM §22, 252).

As already suggested, Schopenhauer is wrong about what follows from transcendental idealism: if space and time are features of mere appearance, not of reality, it does not follow that plurality is foreign to reality, only that our ordinary way of representing and determining plurality is inapplicable to reality.Footnote ²⁰ And Kant himself never supposed that the singularity of ultimate reality followed from transcendental idealism, for he always assumed that there is a plurality of numerically distinct moral agents, at the level of both appearances and things in themselves, even if he never explained how we can know that there are multiple noumenal agents. But Schopenhauer does assume that both transcendental idealism and the wisdom of the ages imply that there is no real numerical distinction between what appear to be numerically different agents at the level of appearance, and that this insight immediately leads to the feeling of compassion.

Schopenhauer's claim is thus that the feeling of compassion follows inevitably from theoretical insight into the unitary character of reality. He does not say that only those with such theoretical insight are compassionate, though he has suggested that even at the empirical level the feeling of compassion is connected at least with a refusal to insist upon the reality of numerical difference between persons (or indeed between persons and the rest of nature). But neither does he seem to think that there are numerous compassionate persons while there are only a few with the genuine metaphysical insight from which compassion necessarily erupts. Rather, the entire structure of The World as Will and Representation, beginning with Schopenhauer's version of transcendental idealism and ending with his ethics of compassion, suggests that theoretical insight into the metaphysics that he takes himself to share with Kant, the Vedas, and other wisdom through the ages, is indeed the only path to genuine compassion.

Kant, Reason, and Sympathy

Like others before and since, as we saw, Schopenhauer takes Kant's examples of dutiful, morally worthy conduct in the first section of the Groundwork to mean that Kant recognizes no place for feelings, a fortiori for the feeling of compassion, in moral motivation, that he holds that morally worthy action must be motivated by pure practical reason instead of by compassion. As an interpretation of Kant's complete model of moral motivation, this is wrong for two reasons. First, as has often been pointed out, the examples in Groundwork I play a heuristic role: what Kant is doing is contrasting imagined agents motivated by feeling or inclination alone with agents motivated by pure practical reason alone, arguing that the latter and not the former demonstrate genuine moral worth, and from that concluding that the fundamental principle of morality must not be grounded in feeling but must instead be derived from pure practical reason.Footnote ²¹ But this does not mean that there is no place for feelings such as compassion in the complete mental state of morally motivated real agents, and Kant will ultimately show what that place is. But second, what is perhaps less often noted, in Groundwork I Kant is arguing from the point of view of common sense, and thus accepting a contrast between feeling and reason as mutually exclusive motivational alternatives that may not in fact be part of his own complete theory of motivation. In fact, Kant has not yet introduced his transcendental idealist distinction between phenomenal and noumenal in Groundwork I, and thus cannot yet introduce his own view that the determination of the will (‘elective’ will or the faculty of choice, that is, Willkür) at the noumenal level can have a variety of manifestations at the phenomenal level, not limited to the exercise of reason at the phenomenal level but also including the modification or even creation of feelings at the phenomenal level. Thus, in Kant's own eventual view reason and feeling need not be mutually exclusive alternatives: the presence or cultivation of feelings like compassion, at the phenomenal level, could itself be a manifestation of reason, operating at the noumenal level. And if this is so, then the distance between Schopenhauer and Kant might not be as great as the former assumes: for Schopenhauer, compassion is a consequence of insight into noumenal reality, while for Kant morally appropriate feelings of compassion may be the product of the noumenal determination of the will by reason. To be sure, as I have already suggested and as we will further see, differences between the two remain: Schopenhauer attributes compassion wholly to theoretical insight, and to insight into the noumenal that itself occurs at the phenomenal level, while for Kant it is pure practical reason, working at the noumenal level, that effects the feeling of sympathy; and further, Kant does not in the end claim that compassionate feeling is wholly produced by reason or the will determined by reason, but rather holds that compassionate feeling is an endowment of nature that is both cultivated and conditioned under the guidance of reason – thus, in Kant's ultimate view, feelings of sympathy are affected rather than effected by pure practical reason. This, as I will suggest in closing, may be a more realistic picture of the possibilities for human moral motivation than Schopenhauer's.

This last point, however, also suggests that the relation between the common-sense model of the relation between reason and feeling and Kant's model is complex, and indeed Kant may not always manage his own model correctly. The common-sense model is that reason and feeling are simply alternatives. Kant's model is that at the phenomenal level both reason and feeling may be the product of the noumenal determination of the will by the moral law, and so in that case there is not a necessary conflict between phenomenal reason and feeling, two products of a common, intelligible cause. However, sometimes Kant does lapse into treating reason and feeling as independent factors that can always come into conflict; he does this, for example, in the second part of section III of the Groundwork, even after he has just introduced transcendental idealism with its thesis that the whole empirical character of a human being is a product of his intelligible choice earlier in the section.Footnote ²² But in the end, I suggest, we may interpret Kant as ending up with a model on which reason and compassionate feeling, although two different factors in human nature at the phenomenal level, cooperate in the virtuous agent, at the behest of the noumenal determination of the will by pure practical reason – and although for Kant no human being is ever completely virtuous, this should not be chalked up to irremediable conflict between reason and feeling at the phenomenal level, but to incomplete commitment to the moral law at the noumenal level.Footnote ²³

In what follows, I will first say a little more about Kant's use of the examples of motivation in Groundwork I, and then sketch the course of his progress toward his model of cooperation between phenomenal reason and compassionate feeling in the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals. In particular, Schopenhauer focuses on Kant's example of the philanthropist (BM §6, 136–7), so I will do the same. The example comes in the course of Kant's analysis of the concept of duty, ‘which contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances’,Footnote ²⁴ a concept that is supposed to be a piece of common sense the analysis of which will lead to a first formulation of the categorical imperative.Footnote ²⁵ The overall argument is simply that, since duty can be fulfilled without any inclination to do so, the fundamental principle of morality can directly concern neither inclination nor any object of inclination, thus it cannot be a material principle (as Kant puts the same point in the Critique of Practical Reason),Footnote ²⁶ rather it can only be a formal principle, the only candidate for which is ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.’Footnote ²⁷ In discussing the duty of beneficence in particular, which in the confirmation of Kant's formulations of the categorical imperative in Groundwork II will function as the example of one of the four main classes of duty, namely imperfect duty to others,Footnote ²⁸ Kant asks us to imagine ‘souls so sympathetically (theilnehmend) attuned that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them and can take delight in the satisfaction of others insofar as it is their own work’. He says that the actions of such souls are to be encouraged because, after all, they do conform to duty. Nevertheless, their actions lack ‘moral worth’, because ‘their maxim lacks moral content, namely that of doing such actions not from inclination but from duty’. By contrast, the beneficent action of a philanthropist, formerly motivated by the sort of sympathetic feeling Kant has described, but now ‘overclouded by his own grief, which has extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others’, thus now unmoved by the troubles of others because of his own, who now ‘tears himself out of this deadly insensibility’ and ‘does the action without any inclination, simply from duty, … first has its genuine moral worth’.Footnote ²⁹ Schopenhauer interprets this example as saying that ‘Worth of character is to commence only when someone, without sympathy of the heart, cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others, and not properly born to be a philanthropist, nevertheless displays beneficence merely for the sake of tiresome duty’ (BM §6, 136–7). But Kant is specifically contrasting a person motivated solely by feeling, although in fact the complex feeling or complex of feelings containing both sympathy towards others and desire for self-gratification or self-congratulation, and one motivated solely by principle, or even contrasting one and the same person formerly motivated by sympathy and now motivated by principle, and saying that in this kind of case moral worth is found in the latter rather than the former case (and so the principle of morality must be one that can be acted on out of duty rather than inclination). He is simply not considering here the possibility that someone might have, or have cultivated, sympathy because of his conception of duty or his moral principle, let alone denying that possibility or its desirability as a complete model of human virtue. He is offering a thought-experiment to point us towards the character of the fundamental principle of morality, not yet describing the complete mental state of virtuous agents in real life.

Further, notice that Kant has not said that the person whose action first has moral worth when because of his conception of duty he tears himself out of the deadly insensibility to the troubles of others into which his own troubles have cast him was ‘not properly born to be a philanthropist’, as Schopenhauer has taken Kant to be saying; on the contrary, such a person was born to be a philanthropist, but, deprived of his natural tendency to beneficence, will now be able to be beneficent only if he can instead turn to the concept of and commitment to duty. Kant does continue his discussion of the motivation for beneficence by saying that ‘if nature had put little sympathy in the heart of this or that man’ – but note that now Kant is not talking about the same man, but introducing a new thought-experiment – ‘if nature had not properly fashioned such a man (who would not in truth be its worst product) for a philanthropist, would he not still find within himself a source from which to give himself a far higher worth than a mere good-natured temperament might have? By all means!’Footnote ³⁰Now Kant is considering the case of someone ‘not properly born to be a philanthropist’, and arguing that such a person could nevertheless find within himself a source of moral worth, and one ‘far higher’ than mere ‘good-natured temperament’, i.e. mere natural feeling or inclination. But he also says of such an imagined person only that he would not be the worst product of nature; he certainly does not say he would be the best. And again, he is simply not yet considering the possibility that sympathetic feelings might in some sense be effected by commitment to duty, so he can hardly be saying that an agent with no sympathetic feelings at all is better than one who has some. He is only saying that it is certainly more morally worthy to be motivated by principle than by mere feeling if those are two mutually exclusive alternatives, as they are imagined to be in his two examples, the one of the born philanthropist who has lost his feelings of sympathy and the other the one who never had such feelings. But neither of these examples is being offered as an illustration of Kant's own complete model of virtuous motivation.

That being said, let us now turn to Kant's own complete model of moral motivation and the place of feelings of sympathy or compassion in it. Kant begins to develop this model at the penultimate stage of his analysis of the concept of duty, just before he draws from his analysis his first formulation of the categorical imperative. At this step he makes the claim that since ‘an action from duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination and with it every object of the will … there is left for the will nothing that could determine it except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law’.Footnote ³¹ This statement is quite abstract, and in it ‘pure respect’ might mean nothing but the determination of the will to affirm the moral law, whatever the phenomenological character of that determination might be, if indeed it has any phenomenal character at all – for all that this statement says, such respect could be something entirely noumenal, although Kant has not yet introduced the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal into the Groundwork. However, in the footnote attached to the following paragraph, Kant explicitly calls respect a feeling, thus planting it squarely in what he will subsequently call the phenomenal realm. It is not a feeling ‘received by means of influence (Einfluß)’,Footnote ³² however, but ‘a feeling self-wrought by means of a concept of reason and therefore specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can be reduced to inclination or fear’Footnote ³³ – that is, positive feelings of attraction towards an action or negative feelings of aversion. So moral motivation does involve a feeling in some way; however, this feeling, supposed to follow from rather than preceding an exercise of reason, seems intended to differ from any feeling of sympathy, which would be a form of inclination, and certainly differs from any feeling of self-gratification at the thought of doing something beneficent for someone else, the distinctively non-moral motivation that Kant attributed to the philanthropist prior to becoming overwhelmed by his own troubles in his earlier example. So Kant does seem to allow a role for feeling in moral motivation, though not for a feeling of compassion. The character of the role he allows for the feeling of respect is also obscure, and this role may be merely epiphenomenal, not causal: Kant states that ‘respect … signifies merely consciousness of the subordination of my will to a law without the mediation of other influences on my sense’. This may suggest that the feeling of respect is the form that my awareness of the determination of my will by the moral law takes, but that this feeling plays no role in my actually performing the morally requisite action.

Kant continues to distinguish the feeling of respect from any ordinary inclination in the Critique of Practical Reason, but introduces a refinement into his account of it by granting it a causal rather than merely epiphenomenal role in the performance of morally worthy action, at least at the phenomenal level. As he had previously described respect as a feeling ‘self-wrought by means of a rational concept’, Kant now describes respect as ‘supplied’ or ‘effected’ by the ‘moral law in itself’, and he rejects ‘any other incentive (such as that of advantage)’ that might ‘so much as cooperate alongside the moral law’, but he also calls respect itself an incentive, which suggests that it does have some causal role to play in the production of action and is not merely the form that our awareness of our motivation by the moral law takes. He then describes this role: respect is a feeling that involves both pain, at the striking down of self-conceit, the elevation of self-love into a principle of action, by the moral law, as well as pleasure, at the recognition that it is our own power of reason that requires this infringement upon self-conceit.Footnote ³⁴ Further, he states that by means of this complex feeling of respect ‘the representation of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its illusion, and thereby the hindrance to pure practical reason is lessened and the representation of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of sensibility is produced and hence, by removal of the counterweight, the relative weightiness of the law (with regard to a will affected by impulses) in the judgment of reason’ is also produced.Footnote ³⁵ This suggests that the feeling of respect plays a causal role in the performance of morally worthy actions because it is what outweighs other feelings that might lead to improper actions and is to that extent the cause of proper ones. This could be reconciled with Kant's initial claim that ‘What is essential to any moral worth of action is that the moral law determine the will immediately’Footnote ³⁶ by supposing that cognizance of the moral law determines the will, or leads to the intention to perform the right action (perhaps at the noumenal level), but that such determination of the will leads to action (at the phenomenal level) precisely by producing the feeling of respect which then outweighs other feelings, which would otherwise lead to other actions. So the feeling of respect would then have a mediate but causal and not merely an epiphenomenal role in the production of morally worthy action. However, although Kant has now clearly allowed a causal role for feeling, namely the feeling of respect, in the performance of morally worthy action, this feeling continues to be distinguished from all other feelings or inclinations, and thus it seems to remain the case that there is no place for feelings of compassion in Kant's account of such action. Schopenhauer's objection still seems to be in order.

In the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals, however, Kant suggests an even more complex model of the aetiology of morally worthy action, and one that does seem to allow a distinct place for feelings of compassion.Footnote ³⁷ In the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant enumerates four ‘aesthetic preconditions of the mind's receptivity to concepts of duty’.Footnote ³⁸ Kant's term ‘aesthetic preconditions’ as well as the term translated as ‘mind’, namely Gemüth, make it clear that Kant is discussing elements in the empirical or phenomenal aetiology of virtuous action; if one wishes, this empirical theory of virtuous action can be reconciled with his transcendental idealist theory of moral motivation by regarding everything he is about to describe as the effect of the noumenal determination of the will immediately by the moral law, or that theory could now just be ignored. The four ‘aesthetic preconditions’ are ‘moral feeling’, ‘conscience’, ‘love of human beings’ and ‘respect’.Footnote ³⁹ There are two key terminological departures here from Kant's earlier usage of terms: by ‘respect’ he now means specifically ‘self-esteem’ or ‘respect for [one's] own being’,Footnote ⁴⁰ not respect for the moral law itself, while what Kant had previously called respect, namely respect for the moral law itself, is now called ‘moral feeling’, ‘the susceptibility to feel pleasure or displeasure merely from being aware that our actions are consistent with or contrary to the law of duty’.Footnote ⁴¹ It should also be noted that conscience does not seem to be a feeling, like moral feeling, love for humanity or self-esteem, but rather something more like the empirical manifestation of ‘practical reason holding the human being's duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation in every case that comes under a law’.Footnote ⁴² Conscience, in other words, is the empirical disposition to ask about a prospective action whether it is consistent or not with the moral law.Footnote ⁴³ Kant says that each of these, the three feelings of moral feeling, love for humanity and self-esteem, and the empirical disposition of conscience, are ‘natural predispositions of the mind’ to have which ‘cannot be considered a duty’ because it is rather ‘by virtue of them that’ human beings ‘can be put under obligation’.Footnote ⁴⁴ So they are natural endowments, not ‘self-wrought’ by means of a rational concept, although Kant goes on to say that ‘Consciousness of them is not of empirical origin’, but can ‘only follow from consciousness of a moral law, as the effect this has on the mind’. But more importantly, he says of each of the aesthetic preconditions that it can and must be cultivated and strengthened. In the first case of moral feeling, Kant says that it can be cultivated and strengthened ‘through wonder at its inscrutable source’,Footnote ⁴⁵ while in the other cases Kant says merely that they must be cultivated and strengthened.

I would suggest the following interpretation of these claims: all four aesthetic preconditions are natural endowments of human beings – present, to be sure, alongside other natural endowments, other inclinations such as mere self-love – which are not themselves due to pure practical reason. But through contemplation of the moral law, humans can be led to take steps to cultivate and strengthen moral feeling, the general empirical predisposition to act in accordance with the moral law, and then through cultivated and strengthened moral feeling can in turn be led to cultivate and strengthen the more specific dispositions of conscience, love of others and self-esteem. Conscience, again, would be the disposition to raise the question of whether a particular proposed action is consistent with morality, while love of others and self-esteem would be specific feelings that would prompt the performance of actions fulfilling our duties to others and self respectively, in particular the imperfect duties of virtue to others and self, when so doing has passed the test of conscience.

This model does not merely allow a place for the feeling of love of others, which certainly sounds similar to what Schopenhauer calls ‘loving kindness’, in moral motivation; it makes it an essential stage in the fulfilment of duties of virtue to others, namely the proximate cause of the performance of such actions, although the cultivated condition of this feeling is itself the effect of a complicated and by no means purely cognitive process. Finally, Kant adds to this model feelings of sympathy (Mitleid). These are mentioned in Kant's discussion of ‘duties of love’ to othersFootnote ⁴⁶ in part II of the Doctrine of Virtue, which also considers ‘duties of respect’ to others; and since Kant's original discussion of ‘love of human beings’ in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue had made only the negative point that the feeling of love may succeed rather than precede the willing of beneficent acts to others,Footnote ⁴⁷ perhaps the subsequent discussion of sympathetic feelings should count as his positive discussion of the feeling of love. After all, Schopenhauer used ‘compassion’ and ‘loving kindness’ as synonyms, so Kant may also have used ‘love of human beings’ and ‘sympathy’ (again, his word is Mitleid, the same as Schopenhauer's) as synonyms. Be that as it may, what Kant argues is that feelings of sympathy, ‘feelings of pleasure or displeasure (which are therefore to be called “aesthetic”) at another's state of joy or pain (shared feeling, sympathetic feeling)’ are feelings ‘receptivity’ to which ‘nature has already implanted in human beings’; that they are ‘means to promoting active and rational benevolence’ towards others; and that we have ‘an indirect’ ‘though only a conditional duty’ ‘to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them’.Footnote ⁴⁸ I suggest that this argument be understood the following way. First, whatever the story about the relation between the noumenal determination of our will and the phenomenal aetiology of moral action may be, at the empirical level we find in ourselves a natural susceptibility to sympathy that arises independently of reason but is amenable to being acted upon by reason in at least two ways: it can be cultivated and strengthened at the behest of reason, and it can impel us to action, serve as a means to promoting ‘active and rational benevolence’. But further, Kant's dual qualification of benevolence, that it be both active and rational, as well as his further comment that we have only a ‘conditional’ duty to use our susceptibility to sympathy as a means to action, implies that our action upon our cultivated and strengthened feelings of sympathy, although it may often or perhaps even almost always be morally appropriate, is not automatically so, and must always remain conditional upon the consistency of the proposed action with the principle of morality (that it be permissible or mandatory under that law). For it is easy to construct cases in which acting upon sympathy would lead to an impermissible action: Barbara Herman's famous example of someone prompted by sympathy to help another struggling with a heavy load when to do so would actually be to aid and abet a theftFootnote ⁴⁹ is one such case. Sympathetic feelings are needed to perform beneficent actions – they are the proximate cause of such actions, what intervenes between one's general commitment to the principle of morality, one's recognition that beneficence is a duty that flows from this general commitment, one's recognition of a situation as one in which one could help, on the one hand, and the actual performance of a beneficent action, on the other. But the promptings of these feelings must also be checked against the requirements of morality to make sure that what they would lead one to do is in fact right in the given circumstances. That is why the duty to act upon these feelings is conditional. Another way to put this point would be to say that these feelings can be acted upon only when they pass the muster of conscience – that is why Kant includes conscience along with feelings of love or sympathy (as well as self-esteem) among the ‘aesthetic preconditions’ of ‘susceptibility to concepts of duty’; conscience is what prompts us to check whether the actions to which feelings of sympathy prompt us are in fact morally correct.

Thus, for Kant, compassion has to be accompanied by conscience. We might now expound Kant's whole final model of moral motivation by saying that our general commitment to morality, which is made effective, at least at the phenomenal level, through moral feeling, the heir to his earlier feeling of respect, is what leads us to cultivate and strengthen conscience on the one hand and the particular feelings of love or sympathy for others (and self-esteem) on the other. The latter, conscience on the one hand and the feelings of sympathy (and self-esteem), must then work in cooperation, the feelings prompting us to particular actions but conscience prompting us to check whether those actions are in fact morally correct.

Let us now conclude with a comparison of Kant's view of sympathy with Schopenhauer's view of compassion. As we saw, Schopenhauer's idea is that compassion automatically flows or ‘erupts’ from theoretical insight into the unity of all being. Kant does not make the mistake of inferring from the transcendental ideality of space and time to the unity of all being, rather simply presupposing that even at the noumenal level there is a plurality of moral agents, so this supposed theoretical insight is not part of his model of human motivation at all. Instead, Kant supposes that the moral law flows from pure practical reason, a faculty that Schopenhauer in turn denied, and then that our commitment to the moral law can and should lead us to cultivate and strengthen but also control our natural disposition towards sympathy. There are two key points to Kant's model. First, sympathy, although it is something to which we have a natural susceptibility, must be cultivated and strengthened – it does not flow directly from cognition. Second, sympathy, although necessary for benevolent action, must also be controlled by reason and its recognition of the moral law – for sympathy and morality can always come apart, sympathy prompting us to a particular action which is in fact inconsistent with morality. While there can be no doubt that compassion is a fundamental virtue of human beings that may better deserve the overemphasis that Schopenhauer gives it rather than the late and passing notice that Kant gives it, Kant's view that sympathy is a natural susceptibility of human beings that we have to work to strengthen seems more realistic than Schopenhauer's view that compassion flows automatically from metaphysical insight; and Kant's view that sympathy and morality may come apart, thus that the promptings of sympathy may always need correction by conscience, seems a salutary correction to Schopenhauer's romantic idea that compassion alone is a sufficient condition for human virtue.