KANT’S EMPIRICAL

HEDONISM
by

ANDREW B. JOHNSON

Abstract: According to the long orthodox interpretation of Kant’s theory

of motivation, Kant recognized only two fundamental types of motives:
moral motives and egoistic, hedonistic motives. Seeking to defend Kant
against the ensuing charges of psychological simplism, Andrews Reath
formulated a forceful and seminal repudiation of this interpretation in his
1989 essay “Hedonism, Heteronomy and Kant’s Principle of Happiness.”
The current paper aims to show that Reath’s popular exegetical alternative
is untenable. His arguments against the traditional view miss the mark,
and his revisionist interpretation of Kant’s theory of motivation cannot
bear the considerable weight of the countervailing evidence.

1. Introduction
Not so long ago it was an orthodox interpretation of Kant to see him as
both an “empirical hedonist” and an “empirical egoist”: that is, to suppose
that he held all “empirical” or “sensuous” motives for action, all, “inclina-
tions,” or, in short, all motives other than respect for the moral law to be
hedonistic, and moreover thoroughly egoistic.1 For brevity, and in con-
formity with the usage in the secondary literature, we may call this view
empirical hedonism. According to this understanding of Kant, all sensuous
motives are seen to be, at bottom, desires for the subject’s own pleasure.
Understandably, this interpretation has not sat well with Kantian
ethicists. In the first place, it rests on what appears by modern lights
an implausibly facile conception of human agency. Surely human beings
can act, for example, out of love or sympathy, which is not identical with
acting out of respect for the moral law, without thereby seeking their own
pleasure. The empirical-hedonism interpretation thus appears to saddle
Kant’s theory of motivation with a false dichotomy: every motive is either
moral or else hedonistically selfish.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2005) 50–63

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 51
Moreover, Kantian ethicists have been less than thrilled about the
implications Kant’s alleged empirical hedonism has for the much-discussed
“role of the emotions in the moral life.” For on that interpretation, emo-
tions, being features of our empirical selves, are essentially self-interested,
and that precludes their serving any essential purpose in a nonegoistic
ethic like Kant’s, whereas the emerging consensus in contemporary moral
philosophy regards certain emotions and/or affective sensibilities as morally
indispensable. In light of these embarrassing blemishes for Kant’s ethics
on a hedonistic, egoistic understanding of inclinations, it is not surprising
that Kantian ethicists have sought over the last decade to displace it.
The seminal contribution to this revisionist effort was Andrews Reath’s
article “Hedonism, Heteronomy and Kant’s Principle of Happiness,” which
appeared in these pages in 1989.2 Reath’s interpretive strategies have in
the meantime garnered the assent of a number of other prominent Kant-
sympathizers, including Henry Allison, Christine Korsgaard, and Marcia
Baron.3 This impressive lineup of endorsements prompts the question: Has
the empirical-hedonism view of Kant’s ethics been refuted conclusively?
In this paper I argue that it has not. Because Reath’s defense of Kant
against the accusation of empirical hedonism in the aforementioned
article stands out for its thoroughness, I utilize it as my dialectical opponent.
In what follows, I lay out Reath’s interpretation and the textual grounds
he adduces for it. Not only, I contend, do these texts not require Reath’s
interpretation, but there are important texts left out of account by Reath
that alone the empirical-hedonism interpretation can make sense of.

2. Reath’s interpretive strategy and its failure

Reath identifies the two primary sources of the empirical-hedonism
interpretation as (i) Kant’s discussion of the link between pleasure and
inclinations and (ii) his deployment of the “principle of happiness” in the
Analytic of the second Critique.4 According to the empirical-hedonism
interpretation, all inclinations aim at the agent’s own pleasure, and the
principle of happiness, the claim that “[a]ll material practical principles . . .
come under the general principle of self-love or one’s own happiness”
(CPrR 22),5 implies simply that all nonmoral principles of action (that
human beings sometimes act on) set one’s own happiness, conceived as
the promotion of one’s own pleasure, as the sole (final) end of action. Reath
argues that both of these exegetical theses are fundamentally erroneous.

2.1 PLEASURE AND THE INCLINATIONS

With regard to the supposed link between pleasure and the inclinations,
Reath agrees that there is a connection. He urges, however, that the nature

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52 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

of the connection be reconceived. It isn’t, he claims, that all inclinations

aim for pleasure, but that they all have pleasure as a causal antecedent or
origin. We acquire an inclination toward an object only because we found
it pleasant in the past. Yet this doesn’t mean that in acting on the inclina-
tion in the future we must be striving for a repeat experience of the pleas-
ure. Attainment of the objects of our inclinations may be accompanied by
pleasure; this is in fact the usual result of the fulfillment of a desire. But
we must eschew the fallacious inference, often underlying psychological
hedonism, that the pleasant result of an action is necessarily its aim.
Reath claims to find support for this understanding of the connection
between inclinations and pleasure in the section of the introduction to the
Metaphysics of Morals entitled “On the Relation of the Faculties of the
Human Mind to Moral Laws” (MM 211–214). He notes that for Kant
pleasure in the object of a desire may be either the cause or the effect of
the desire (MM 211) and cites Kant’s remark that “[a]s for practical
pleasure, the act of the appetitive power which must be preceded by this
pleasure as cause is called desire in the narrow sense, while habitual desire
is called inclination” (MM 212).6 In these passages, according to Reath,
“[t]he feature that Kant singles out is that inclinations presuppose some
previously experienced satisfactions; in this sense they are ‘preceded by
this pleasure as cause.’”7
Reath introduces the example of an attachment to baseball as a model
for what he has in mind:

Perhaps your interest is initially sparked when you find playing or watching the sport
exciting, or engaging, and these enjoyable experiences motivate you to continue playing or
watching, etc. . . . Over time you form an attachment to the game. You come to appreciate
the subtleties of a game; you become committed to a team, take an interest in the develop-
ment of its players, share in their successes and failures; and may develop a sense of com-
munity with others who care about the sport. . . . Here feelings of satisfaction experienced
in a variety of contexts are responsible for the growth of your attachment, but the objects
of your attachment are different aspects of the game of baseball, and not these experiences
of satisfaction.8

Thus a desire to watch one’s favorite team on television may have the end
not of pleasure but simply of satisfying this desire. Despite their common
causal origins in pleasurable experience, Kantian inclinations, like an
attachment to baseball, can on Reath’s view also have ends other than
pleasurable experience.
Unfortunately for Reath’s interpretation, it is not mandated by the
passages he cites (and we will see below that it is precluded by other
passages). For there is another way that a pleasure can precede and cause
a desire: as a pleasure of anticipation. The very thought of eating the choc-
olate cake pictured on the menu is pleasing to me; I find the anticipation
of eating it pleasant. This produces a desire in me to have a piece of the

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 53
chocolate cake as a means to a gustatory pleasure. Now it may be true
that I would not now desire a piece of the cake had I not had a pleasurable
experience of eating chocolate cake in the past. But my past pleasures in
eating chocolate cake are distinct from my present pleasure of anticipa-
tion, and for all Reath has shown Kant could just as well be talking about
pleasures of anticipation.
The passage on which Reath leans is Kant’s claim that “[a]s for prac-
tical pleasure, the act of the appetitive power which must be preceded by
this pleasure as cause is called desire in the narrow sense, while habitual
desire is called inclination” (MM 212).9 However, in this sentence taken
by itself, it isn’t clear whether “this pleasure” that must precede and cause
the desire is a prior pleasure in the object of the desire or a pleasure of
anticipation in the representation of the object of desire. “[T]his pleasure”
refers back to “practical pleasure,” which Kant defines at the beginning
of the paragraph from which the quotation is taken as “[t]hat pleasure
which is necessarily connected with desire (for an object whose represen-
tation affects feeling in this way) . . . , whether it is the cause or the effect
of the desire” (MM 212). Here Kant makes it clear that pleasure in the
representation of an object is potentially connected to desire. Pace Reath,
there is no reference here to a prior experience of pleasure in the object of
desire; instead, Kant’s concern is with the pleasure caused by a represen-
tation of the object. (Earlier in the same section Kant defines ‘feeling’ as
the “susceptibility to . . . pleasure or displeasure” [MM 211], so it seems
all but certain that “this way” in which feeling is affected at MM 212 is
the inducement of pleasure.) Sometimes the pleasure in the representation
of the object, one kind of practical pleasure, causes the desire, as when my
pleasurable representation of a slice of chocolate cake causes me to desire
it; this sounds exactly like a pleasure of anticipation. Sometimes, as Kant
points out, practical pleasure takes the form of pleasure consequent upon
the fulfillment of desire, as in the pleasure I receive from eating a slice of
chocolate cake. So we have positive textual evidence that Kant recognizes
the causal connection of pleasures of anticipation to desires, whereas
Reath’s interpretation enjoys no support from the texts he cites beyond
merely not being contradicted by them.
The interpretation I’m advocating in this connection is corroborated by
other texts in which Kant deals with the relationship between pleasure
and desire – texts unnoticed by Reath and other revisionist exegetes. Kant
sets forth his understanding of the causal nexus among representations,
pleasure, desire, and objects in his Lectures on Philosophical Theology:

Among all beings there are only some that have the power of representation. Insofar as these
representations can become the cause of the objects of representation or of the reality of
the same, they [the beings] are called living beings. Thus the faculty of desire is the causal-
ity of the power of representation in regard to the reality of its objects. . . . [P]leasure itself

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54 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

does not consist in the relation of my representations to the object, but rather in the rela-
tion of the representations to the subject, insofar as these representations can determine
the subject to the realization of the object. To the extent that the representation is the cause
of the reality of the object, it is called the faculty of desire; but to the extent that it first
causes the subject himself to have a desire, it is called pleasure. One thus sees clearly that
pleasure precedes desire. [LPT 117–118; italics added]10

Although Kant does not make the qualification explicit, charity demands
we read him here not as characterizing pleasure as such but pleasure
that attends representations; surely he recognizes that objects (outside the
mind) can themselves be pleasant, and not just representations of them.
Kant asserts that the kind of pleasure that must precede desire for an
object is pleasure in the representation of it; and this is just what I have
called a pleasure of anticipation. This pleasure of anticipation, Kant tells
us, causes a desire for the anticipated object. He apparently endorsed this
feature of a philosophy of action well before the Critique of Pure Reason’s
inauguration of the Critical period, as his Investigation into the Clarity of
the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals of 1764, the so-called “Prize
Essay,” reveals:

Even if I have never explained what a desire is, I would nonetheless be able to say with
certainty that every desire presupposes a representation of the desired; that this representa-
tion is a foreseeing of the future; that the feeling of pleasure is connected with it; and so
on. [ICP 284]11

In this passage Kant doesn’t state explicitly that the pleasure in the
representation causes the desire, but it is hard to see how “every desire
presupposes a representation of the desired,” with which “the feeling of
pleasure is connected,” unless this is the case.
Out of the foregoing passages – supplemented by some background
Kantian psychology – crystallizes the following rudimentary theory of
action: The (proximate) genesis of an action begins with the representa-
tion of the action’s end; the agent finds the representation of this end
pleasant (or attractive because it entails the avoidance of pain); this pleas-
ure (or attractive prospect of pain-avoidance) gives rise to a desire for the
end; and the agent freely chooses to act on the desire.
It is striking that Reath does not so much as mention this alternative
understanding of the connection between pleasure and desire or inclina-
tion. But it is all that the empirical-hedonism interpretation of Kant’s
view of empirical motivation needs. If the desire-causing pleasures that
Kant is referring to are pleasures of anticipation, then it is natural to
suppose that the desires and actions they give rise to aim at pleasure. If I
desire something, say, chocolate cake, because I find the anticipation of it
pleasant, my ultimate aim in pursuing the object of my desire may well be
to gain pleasure from it. (Why not aim merely for the pleasure of anticipation?

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 55
This anticipation typically just “whets one’s appetite” for the anticipated
pleasure, which is imagined to be of a superior kind of quality.) So Reath’s
analysis of Kant’s discussion of “the relation of the faculties of the
human mind to moral laws” leaves the empirical-hedonism interpretation
in at least as strong a position as his own anti-hedonistic interpretation.
When we turn to Kant’s treatment of the principle of happiness, however,
we encounter texts that only the empirical-hedonism interpretation can
comfortably accommodate.

2.2 THE PRINCIPLE OF HAPPINESS

Kant’s “principle of happiness” tells us that “[a]ll material practical prin-

ciples as such are, without exception, of one and the same kind and come
under the general principle of self-love or one’s own happiness” (CPrR
22). The empirical-hedonism interpretation takes this claim to mean that
all nonmoral practical principles – all practical principles which do not
make the moral law the determining ground of the will – conceive of the
agent’s own pleasure as the ultimate end of his action.
Reath, however, argues that the principle of happiness, rather than
delimiting a class of practical principles according to their ends,

is a principle of choice that leads to a specific model of deliberating about actions and
ends. It should be understood as the rather unproblematic notion of acting from one’s
strongest desires on balance (doing what one desires most strongly), or acting so as to max-
imize individual satisfaction.12

Acting on one’s strongest desires, as Reath sees it, is not tantamount to

acting so as to maximize one’s own pleasure. “Within this framework, we
may correctly speak about a diversity among the objects of our desires,
the aims of our actions, and the kinds of substantive considerations that
we recognize as reasons.”13 Thus, “acting so as to maximize individual
satisfaction” is not to be understood in terms of maximizing feelings of
satisfaction but in terms of satisfying one’s strongest desires, which may be
other-regarding and which in general may aim at states of affairs other
than the enhancement of one’s own pleasure.14 In the end, “the principle
of happiness is a kind of decision procedure, and is as much a ‘formal
principle’ as the moral law.”15 What textual grounds does Reath have for
favoring this interpretation over the view that Kant was an empirical
hedonist?
The undoing of the empirical-hedonist interpretation, Reath believes,
lies in Kant’s use of the notion of “the determining ground of choice” in
“Theorem II” of the second Critique. Kant characterizes material prac-
tical principles as those “which place the determining ground of choice in
the pleasure or displeasure to be felt in the reality of some object” (CPrR

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56 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

22). This is perfectly consistent with the empirical-hedonism interpreta-

tion if “the determining ground of choice” here can be taken to be the
end at which the action aims. But according to Reath “the determining
ground of choice is not the object of an action, or the end at which it is
directed; rather, it is the principle from which the agent acts.”16 In short,
“the ‘ground of choice’ must be a maxim of some kind.”17
What connection, then, does Kant forge between pleasure and acting
on material practical principles? Kant simply means, Reath says, that in
so acting,

one takes the fact that an action will produce satisfaction as a reason that supports its per-
formance; one is motivated by the judgment that it will produce satisfaction and by one’s
taking that to be a good reason for acting. This means that expected satisfaction becomes
the feature that is relevant in assessing the value of an action, and that one chooses by
judging what one will find most satisfying – or what seems equivalent, what one desires
most strongly.18

Its failure to recognize determining grounds as maxims leads the

empirical-hedonism interpretation to the further error, Reath avers, of
supposing that the desire for pleasure “is the proximate cause of the
relevant actions (or that some determination thereof leads directly to
the action).”19 For Kant, human action is never caused directly by a desire;
instead, the causal history of an action always includes the intervention
of the will, or faculty of choice (Willkür), which determines whether the
end proposed by a desire is to be pursued or not.20 Thus the will is always
a more proximate cause of action for Kant than any desire.
What are we to make of Reath’s exegetical proposals here? On the
whole, they don’t work, and his critique of the empirical-hedonism inter-
pretation is unfair.
We may begin with the last-mentioned criticism of the empirical-
hedonist interpretation for conceiving the desire for pleasure as the prox-
imate cause of action. This is a claim to which this interpretation is not in
the least committed. Clearly, the fact that an action aims at the agent’s
own pleasure does not entail that the desire for pleasure is the proximate
cause of the action. Reath himself must acknowledge this, since he must
acknowledge that action can aim at one’s own pleasure (this is an obvious
truth), while he believes that desire for such pleasure is never the proximate
cause of action (given the necessary role of the will [Willkür] in generating
action). There is no reason why the empirical-hedonist interpretation
cannot concur with Reath in seeing an act of will as the necessary climax
in the causal history of every human action. In the case of action on a
material practical principle, this interpretation will hold that the end of
one’s own pleasure is adopted, and the action toward that end is taken,
through an act of will. The empirical-hedonism interpretation will still be

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 57
distinguished from the revisionist view by the former’s identification of
one’s own pleasure as the end of all action from material practical prin-
ciples. It requires no other connection between pleasure and action than
this one.
As for Reath’s claim that maxims are the determining grounds of
choice, it cannot be reconciled with Kant’s writings. In his commentary
on “Theorem II” in the second Critique, Kant identifies pleasure as the
determining ground of choice for all material practical principles. In
arguing that determining grounds are maxims, Reath thus commits
himself to the absurd view that pleasure can be a maxim. This is a category
mistake. Reath himself characterizes a maxim as “a reason that can be
stated in the form of a principle,”21 and obviously pleasure, being a feeling,
does not fit this description. Moreover, Kant speaks of the “determining
ground of the maxim” (“Bestimmungsgrund der Maxime”), implying that
determining grounds in some sense belong to maxims (see, e.g., CPrR 34
and 45); he also says that in a morally worthy action the determining
ground is the universally valid form of the action’s maxim (e.g., G 460 fn.,
CPrR 29). Both of these locutions imply that Kant cannot be identifying
determining grounds with maxims. Finally, this identification is at odds
with Kant’s description of material practical principles as those “that
presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining
ground of the will” (CPrR 21). Clearly, a maxim is not an object of the
faculty of desire; so this characterization of material practical principles
becomes unintelligible on Reath’s interpretation of the notion of a deter-
mining ground.
Reath is right that on Kant’s conception of action “all actions proceed
from maxims, and . . . no incentive can determine the will except by being
incorporated into a maxim which the agent freely adopts.”22 Yet this
point can be accepted without supposing that determining grounds are
maxims. As I view the Kantian conception of maxims, maxims are not
identical to determining grounds – an idea that Kant, to the best of my
knowledge, never endorses – but rather include reference to them.23 The
determining ground of an action, or more immediately of a willing, is the
motive that moves one to act (or to will). Kant believed these motives are
fundamentally of two kinds, corresponding to his division of practical
principles into material practical principles and formal practical prin-
ciples. I argue elsewhere that these two kinds of motive reduce to self-love
and respect for the moral law.24 An exhaustive dichotomy between motives
of self-love and moral motives is precisely the sort of psychological over-
simplification that defenders of Kant abhor, but it is an ever-recurring
theme in Kant’s moral writings. The following passages from the second
Critique and the Religion are characteristic presentations of it:

The maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises; the law of morality commands. [CPrR 36]

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58 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

. . . [T]he human being (even the best) is evil only because he reverses the moral order of
his incentives in incorporating them into his maxims. He indeed incorporates the moral law
into those maxims, together with the law of self-love; since, however, he realizes that the
two cannot stand on an equal footing, but one must be subordinated to the other as its
supreme condition, he makes the incentives of self-love and their inclinations the condition
of compliance with the moral law – whereas it is this latter that, as the supreme condition
of the satisfaction of the former, should have been incorporated into the universal maxim
of the power of choice as the sole incentive. [R 36]25

Yet we should be clear that a determining ground does not directly deter-
mine the will. For Kant the human will has the freedom to endorse either
motives of self-love or motives of respect for the moral law. But once the
agent freely wills to act in accordance with such a motive, it becomes the
determining ground of the agent’s action, and the agent’s maxim, when
formulated, will include reference to it.
Even if, contrary to Reath’s view, the determining ground of action
cannot be a maxim, my proposal that we locate the determining ground
of actions from material practical principles in self-love may seem erro-
neous as well. For Kant says in his commentary on “Theorem II” that the
determining ground of such action is “pleasure arising from the represen-
tation of the existence of a thing” (CPrR 22). While in a strict sense this
claim is at odds with my understanding of determining grounds, I can
accommodate the claim when it is taken more loosely. And, in fact, any
satisfactory understanding of determining grounds has to take some of
Kant’s particular claims about them loosely, because they are in a strict
sense inconsistent with each other. In addition to the description just
cited of determining grounds of actions from material practical prin-
ciples, Kant characterizes such a determining ground variously as “the
pleasure or displeasure to be felt in the reality of some object” (CPrR 22),
“an object (matter) of the faculty of desire” (CPrR 21), and an inclination
(CPrR 81), among other ways. But what all these characterizations have
in common in Kant’s view is a connection to self-love, understood as the
desire for one’s own pleasure. They simply describe different stages in the
causal chain leading to action from a material practical principle: whether
the pleasure we derive from anticipating our attainment of an object, our
consequent desire for the pleasure we anticipate from actually attaining
the object, or our desire for that object (which when habitual counts as an
inclination) as a means to pleasure.
In rebutting Reath’s interpretation of Kant’s principle of happiness,
I have so far criticized his understanding of Kant’s concept of a deter-
mining ground. But the problems for Reath’s interpretation go beyond this.
The indications of empirical hedonism and empirical egoism in Kant’s
commentary on “Theorem II” are too clear to be explained away. That
the principle of happiness is egoistic is shown by Kant’s identification
of it with the “principle of self-love.” That it is hedonistic is revealed by

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 59
Kant’s definition of ‘happiness’ as “a rational being’s consciousness of
the agreeableness of life uninterruptedly accompanying his whole
existence” (CPrR 22), his talk of “the feeling of agreeableness that the
subject expects from the reality of an object” (CPrR 22) determining the
faculty of desire, and his observation that in choosing objects from
material practical principles an agent’s concern is “only how much and
how great satisfaction [Vergnügen] they will furnish him for the longest
time” (CPrR 23).
Reath is bothered by such statements, but he believes his interpretation
can adequately cope with them. Given that on his interpretation “the
principle of happiness refers not to what one chooses, but to how one goes
about choosing,” he is forced – in what may seem a feat of understate-
ment, given his exegesis – to write off Kant’s identification of this prin-
ciple with a principle of self-love as “somewhat misleading.”26 He construes
Kant’s references to expected satisfaction “as the overall satisfaction of
one’s preferences.”27 This extricates the concept from any hedonistic con-
notations it might have, since one’s (nonmoral) preferences, Reath points
out, need not be hedonistic. But, unfortunately for Reath, Kant’s terms
for satisfaction, ‘Vergnügen’ and ‘Zufriedenheit,’ can denote only a kind
of feeling; they are never synonyms for ‘satisfaction’ in the sense of the
satisfaction or fulfillment of preferences, as Reath’s interpretation requires.
Thus, in this respect, Reath’s exegetical strategy founders on a fallacious
equivocation on the term ‘satisfaction.’
As for Kant’s preoccupation with choosing based on anticipated
feelings of agreeableness, Reath believes this can be “cast in terms of decid-
ing what one desires most.”28 Reath’s idea is that the greater the anticipated
feeling of agreeableness, the stronger the desire. Yet this reduction of
anticipated feelings of agreeableness to desires is dubious on its merits.
We need think only of desires requiring self-sacrifice for their fulfillment.
Take for example kamikaze pilots, the object of whose strongest desire,
the destruction of enemy targets, was not at all anticipated to be attended
by personal feelings of agreeableness. So we should be wary of attributing
such a reduction to Kant in the clear absence of any explicit endorsement
of it on his part.
Another flaw with Reath’s proposal that anticipated feelings of agreeable-
ness be understood as desires is that a number of passages in Kant’s
discussion of “Theorem II” imply that the reduction goes in precisely
the opposite direction: Kant conceives of desires in terms of anticipated
feelings of agreeableness. Thus Kant characterizes an agent’s (empirical)
desire as “something related to a subjective feeling of pleasure or dis-
pleasure underlying it by which is determined what he needs in order to
be satisfied with his condition” (CPrR 25). Here we have (empirical)
desire linked hedonistically to pleasure or displeasure on the one hand
and egoistically to satisfaction with one’s own condition on the other.

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60 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Elsewhere, Kant speaks of the “agreeable or disagreeable as the matter of

the faculty of desire” (CprR 24).
This runs counter to a key component of Reath’s interpretation. For
Reath insists that:

the hedonism involved is not a theory of motivation, but what Rawls has called “hedonism
as a method of choice.” In other words, Kant appeals to a homogeneous feeling of pleasure
to serve as the criterion by which the value of different desired ends is determined. 29

Here, pleasure is seen as a consequence of an attained end rather than a

motive to pursue it. And this opens the way to a theory of nonmoral
motivation that is not essentially hedonistic. For we might value a free
society most of all, or the reduction of suffering in the world, or some
other nonhedonistic, nonegoistic end, so long as anticipated pleasure is
relegated to the mere role of anticipated consequence used to help decide
among competing desires. But if the “agreeable or disagreeable” is “the
matter of the faculty of desire,” then, contrary to Reath, empirical moti-
vation does indeed essentially aim at pleasure.
Aside from the textual objections to construing Kant’s empirical
hedonism as a method of choice rather than a theory of motivation, one
might question whether anticipated pleasure can function as a criterion
for determining the value of desired ends without thereby being incor-
porated into the desire the agent chooses to act on. Suppose I have com-
peting desires for ends E1, E2, and E3, where E1, E2, and E3, as such, are all
nonhedonistic and nonegoistic ends. In deliberating over which of these
ends to choose, I assign the most value to E3, precisely because I antici-
pate the greatest pleasure from it, and I therefore choose to act on my
desire for E3. It seems clear in this scenario that the pleasure I anticipate
from E3 plays a causal role in my choice to act on my desire for E3. But if
this is so, it seems unwarranted to deny that the pleasure I anticipate from
E3 is, in the final analysis, part of my motivation in choosing to pursue it.
As I have already pointed out, the motivational dichotomy between egoistic
hedonism and respect for the moral law is a recurring theme in Kant’s moral
writings, and it is natural to read it into his discussion of material and formal
practical principles. Material practical principles locate the determining
ground of our actions in egoistic desire for their hedonistic “matter” or ends,
while formal practical principles make the determining ground of actions
reverence for duty. Another confirmatory passage is worth noting here. In
the second Critique’s “Antinomy of Practical Reason,” Kant remarks that:

either the desire for happiness must be the motive to maxims of virtue or the maxim of
virtue must be the efficient cause of happiness. The first is absolutely impossible because (as
was proved in the Analytic) maxims that put the determining ground of the will in desire
for one’s happiness are not moral at all and can be the ground of no virtue. [CPrR 113;
italics added to parenthetical remark]

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 61
In addition to underscoring what Kant views as the exhaustive dichotomy
between self-interested motives (which reduce to the desire for happiness
or self-love) and moral motives (which prompt action from “maxims of
virtue”), this passage clearly indicates the status of the principle of happi-
ness as a principle regarding ends, rather than a decision-procedure that
does not delimit ends. For a “desire for one’s happiness” obviously has to
do with ends.
Even the passage from the Grundlegung that is so often taken as incon-
trovertible evidence of Kant’s acceptance of altruistic inclinations can be
seen upon closer inspection not to veer from empirical hedonism. In the
first section of that work, Kant adduces the example of the “many souls
so sympathetically 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 so far as it is their own
work” (G 398). In Kant’s description of such agents as acting “without
any other motive of vanity or self-interest,” the qualification “other” is
typically overlooked. Kant is saying that such agents have no other motive
besides the joy they experience in helping; they do not seek, for example,
praise or reward. Kant depicts the nature of this kind of case more per-
spicuously in the second Critique:
It is very beautiful to do good to human beings from love for them and from sympathetic
benevolence, or to be just from love of order; but this is not yet the genuine moral maxim
of our conduct, the maxim befitting our position among rational beings as human beings,
when we presume with proud conceit, like volunteers, not to trouble ourselves about the
thought of duty and, as independent of command, to want to do of our own pleasure [emphasis
added] what we think we need no command to do. [CPrR 82]

Actions done from love of another, from “sympathetic benevolence,”

and from “love of order” do not provide us with instances of nonegoistic
empirically motivated actions. For their motives are all reducible to the
pursuit of “our own pleasure.”

3. Conclusion
Because Kant is one of the more systematic thinkers in the history of
philosophy, it is especially important that the specific components of his
philosophical system be understood correctly; for the more systematic the
philosophy, the more a correct understanding of the whole depends on a
correct understanding of the parts. I have tried to show in this paper that
the supposition that Kant is not an empirical hedonist cannot bear the
weight of the textual evidence. Since Kant’s hedonistic empirical psycho-
logy is systematically related to his views on the nature of moral motiva-
tion, and by implication to his views on the nature of the freedom that

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62 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

underlies moral agency, we deny him this empirical psychology only at

the cost of distorting our view of these other features of his philosophy.
Reath, Allison, Korsgaard, Baron and other advocates of a picture of
a kinder, gentler Kant who recognizes the importance of altruistic
inclinations in the moral life cannot have their cake and eat it too.
They are welcome to defend an ethic that includes empirical altruism.
But they may not rightly assert that they enjoy Kant’s imprimatur in
doing so.30

Independent Scholar
Stuttgart, Germany

NOTES
1
For representatives of this interpretation see Lewis White Beck (1960) A Commentary
on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 92 –
102; the contributions by Terence Irwin, pp. 39f., Ralf Meerbote, pp. 66 – 67, and Allen
Wood, p. 83, in Allen Wood (ed.) (1984) Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press; and Stephen Darwall (1983) Impartial Reason, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, p. 174.
2
In Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70, pp. 42–72.
3
See Allison, H. (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p. 102; Korsgaard, (1996) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, p. 56; and Baron, M. (1997) Three Methods of Ethics, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, p. 83, fn. 34.
4
Reath, A. (1989). “Hedonism, Heteronomy and Kant’s Principle of Happiness,” Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly 70, p. 46.
5
Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations of Kant in this paper are from the transla-
tions in the Cambridge compilation Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996). Page references are to the Akademie edition of Kant’s works.
6
Op. cit., p. 47.
7
Ibid., p. 47.
8
Ibid., p. 48.
9
Quoted in Reath, ibid., p. 47.
10
The translation of this passage, from Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre,
is my own.
11
The translation of this passage, from Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze
der Natürlichen Theologie und der Moral, is my own.
12
Op. cit., p. 52.
13
Ibid., p. 56.
14
Reath notes: “The interpretation being proposed must hold that your ultimate reason
for choosing an action over alternatives can be the fact that it yields most satisfaction,
without feelings of satisfaction being your aim” (ibid., p. 55).
15
Ibid., p. 59.
16
Ibid., p. 53.
17
Ibid., p. 54.
18
Ibid., p. 54.
19
Ibid., p. 55.

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 KANT’S EMPIRICAL HEDONISM 63
20
Ibid. I am in agreement with Reath here, and I would add that any human behavior
that is directly caused by a desire ipso facto does not fall under the concept of action for
Kant. As I interpret Kant’s conception of an action, every action has a maxim. Were it
possible that desire could cause action directly, no maxim of action would be necessary.
21
Ibid., p. 54.
22
Ibid., p. 53.
23
See § § 4 –5 of my paper “The Nature of Kantian Maxims” (not yet published).
24
See ibid., § 4.
25
For a small sampling of further passages supporting this dichotomy, see MM 382,
CPrR 74, and G 407.
26
Op. cit., p. 60.
27
Ibid., p. 62.
28
Ibid., p. 62.
29
Ibid., p. 61. The reference to Rawls is to A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1971), pp. 554–560.
30
My thanks to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for
helpful criticism of earlier drafts of this essay.

© 2005 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.