Making the happiness of others our end

Kant says that a virtuous persons has the happiness of others as an end.

Note that this is not an end in the sense of a goal which we try to achieve. For the goal can’t be that all others are happy. If that were the goal, we might as well not even try: we’re not going to achieve it. Nor can the goal be that some others are happy. For that’s already so, and so nothing need be done. Could the goal be that many others are happy? I suppose that my actions could make a difference between not-many and many being happy. But it seems rather unlikely that they could. And if a careful examination of the world were to show that independently of my actions many others are happy, again such a goal would lead to my not having to do anything.

Maybe the Kantian end of happiness is distributive. For each person distinct from yourself, you aim at this person’s being happy. So you have a large number of goals, one for each person distinct from yourself. But that’s not right, either. For suppose that Alice is miserable, and you know you can’t make her happy. But you can make her happier. Surely that’s a part of what the virtuous person aims at. So is it, perhaps, that in the case of each person distinct from yourself, you aim to make them happier than they currently are? However, imagine that Alice is miserable, but you know that her condition will at least slightly improve over time, no matter what you do. Then you don’t need to do anything to make her happier, and so a goal of making others happier doesn’t make you do anything for Alice—even if you could make Alice much happier.

Perhaps, though, the end of happiness is doubly distributive: it distributes over persons and over what you might call “possible pieces of happiness”. For each person x and each possible piece H of happiness, you aim at x having H. But now the virtuous person’s aims are vast, since there are many, many possible pieces of happiness—maybe even infinitely many. Maybe this is right, but it seems implausible.

All this makes me think that when Kant talks of the happiness of others as our end, he is not talking of an end as a set of specific goals to be achieved. Maybe he is saying that in general a virtuous person has a tendency to perform actions with specific goals of the form: Make Alice happier with respect to her toothache. The “end” of happiness isn’t an end, or a multiplicity of ends even, but a kind of architectonic pattern in our goals.