Kant’s Duty to Make Virtue Widely Loved

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty.