Kant and Self-Love

Kant states that suicide is immoral by applying the following maxim to universal law:

“From self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life if staying alive threatens more evil than it happiness.”

Kant’s conclusion is that this maxim itself is a contradiction because human beings have an innate ability of something he calls “self-love”. Kant describes self-love as human being’s desire for the furtherance of life. However, placing this generalized assumption of self-love only serves to undermine Kant’s theory. Even rational beings participate in behavior that Kant would argue is against the principle of self-love. One might contend that the idiots who post their arm-breaking antics on YouTube are not acting out of self-love. However, this is far from a contradiction of human nature.

Kant states that the same self-love principle that furthers our life cannot end it. But why is this not possible? An apt thought experiment would be to consider a device that turns on the heat when it gets too cold. Now if that same device turned off the heat when it got too warm, would that be a contradiction? No. The device being described is a switch, or more specifically, a thermostat and exists in society today. The point is that if we consider self-love to be a device rather than a finite concept, it becomes very plausible that it could serve these two purposes. A device can serve contrary purposes without being an inherent contradiction.

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