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Kant Downplays Happiness In Relation To Reason And Human Purpose

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In our earlier study of Kant, the text points out that Kant downplays happiness in relation to reason and human purpose. If our purpose were to be happy, then our distinction as human beings from animals would not be reason but one of the many other qualities and devices that are more efficient for procuring happiness. * If what separates us as humans from animals is rational activity, and our purpose in life is what separates us from animals, then rational activity is indeed our purpose. Since reason is not a great source of pleasure, this also makes pleasure, while not inherently immoral, relatively unimportant compared to reason. Kant believes that therefore our purpose as humans in life is distinct from happiness and pleasures, because other tools and activities are far more conducive to achieving those ends. …show more content…

** In, On God and Morality, from the text, we are given an opposing view from the same author-- …”Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world…But the moral law commands as a law of freedom through motives wholly independent of nature and of its harmony with our faculty of desire…” seeming to say that ration necessarily brings on happiness. These two statements are mutually exclusive. Reason cannot be above and distinct from happiness and yet inseparable from it. Even the second sentence there seems self-contradictory. The moral law (which in Kant’s morality can only be found through reason) cannot be both independent of and dependent on happiness, or

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