Happiness And Virtue In Kant's The Metaphysics Of Morals

Happiness and virtue describe a pair of vague terms at best, ambiguous in nature nevertheless we as a society generally strive to acquire what can be defined as a very subjective feeling or state of being. Naming happiness as one of the pinnacles of a person’s existence, a bold declaration, does not depict the entirety of life’s portrait, there are flaws with that statement.

In Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals, he inserts a dialogue between student and teacher introducing a concept that seems to be used sparingly. Teaching a student normally becomes a monologue, not allowing questions only hinders the student from thoroughly understanding material that is taught to them. Kant describes how a Socratic dialogue is not used because a student intermittently does not what questions …show more content…
Kant in the dialogue with student and teacher also points to a truth that virtue has no guarantees. Here lies a possible major fault in religious logic that though one does good, good things will come or that being worthy does not necessarily mean happiness will come.

Towards the end of the dialogue the topic of duty is briefly touched which offers an important subject matter that happiness and duty go hand in hand. Acting to conform to the law is our duty as people is what determines our worthiness of happiness questions the teacher
The issue with duty as well is that it is an ambiguous sense of purpose, not everyone has the same sense of duty. Multiple factors determine a persons sense of duty such as culture, background, environment etc. With many factors that the way a sense of duty is developed it is important to integrate knowledge with psychology in order to help understand the way people think. Additionally, I believe that Kant’s idea that moral catechism should be separate from religious is correct however people frequently blur the line between the