Epicurus died due to a problem with his bladder and so would have done so in great pain. Oddly he didn’t try to find a real point or purpose to his existence. Rather, he thought that humans should be ready to die at any time and consider their lives complete. Kant, however, had a different view. Consider, he said, a man in a repressive society who is forced to take part in a show trial to condemn an innocent man to death. He could either lie and have happiness or he could lie and end up being tortured and properly killed. Morality – doing the right thing – couldn’t consist in people’s individual happiness.
What was his solution to this? He thought the only way we could deal with these problems was for our reason to postulate our endurance and unending existence beyond death. We need this postulate in order to maintain our “moral faith” in a life-long endeavour. Kant is now in a problematic area because he obviously still wants to prioritise reason. So, he squares the circle by saying that traditional beliefs in God coerce individuals to behave morally. His idea of God is simply something that free individuals rationally assent to, so as to sustain their moral efforts throughout their lives.
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