Kant and Baumgarten on the duty of self‐love

Abstract

This article offers an account of Kant's conception of the duty of self‐love, a rarely researched subject, by investigating how he appropriated Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's prior conception. I argue that exploring this appropriation helps us to gain new insights into Kant's conception of duty, a leading thread in Kant's ethics. Substantiating this argument, I derive the following conclusions. First, Kant peculiarly affirms a duty to rational self‐love of delight. To be more precise, human beings ought rationally to love themselves in such a way that they are content with—or have a positive feeling about—themselves in acting on maxims that they are pleased to see submitted to the moral law. Further, rational self‐love of delight results from declining pathological forms of self‐love. Second, Kant retains, to a meaningful extent, Baumgarten's conception of the duty to self‐love where feeling and rationality achieve their distinct elevation.