The Self of Self-Love

This chapter offers an account of the incentive of self-love in Kant’s practical philosophy. Kant has come under intense criticism for claiming that all action contrary to the moral law is driven by a commitment to hedonistic pleasure or what Kant calls “self-love.” The worry is that in arguing that all evil arises from self-love or a concern for one’s own happiness or pleasure, Kant commits himself to a crude, simplistic, and implausible account of human behavior and motivation. Here, it is argued that we can develop a more sophisticated version of Kant’s nonmoral psychology, one markedly different from Andrews Reath’s influential attempt to rehabilitate Kant on this score. Whereas Reath strips out much of the hedonism that seems to run throughout Kant’s account of nonmoral motivation, it is proposed that Kant’s readers attend to the role and demands of the self that seeks pleasures or that self-loves in Kantianism.