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Introduction
Schopenhauer famously states that 'compassion (Mitleid) is the real moral incentive' (BM §19, 221),1more fully that the alleviation of the suffering of others is the ultimate goal of morality and compassion for their suffering leading to action to alleviate it the highest moral incentive. Among his numerous other criticisms of Kant's moral philosophy Schopenhauer accordingly emphasizes Kant's apparent rejection of compassion as a morally significant incentive, especially in the latter's exposition of the concept of duty in the first section of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals leading to the first formulation of the categorical imperative, and in a related comment in the Critique of Practical Reason.2Drawing on the Groundwork, Schopenhauer writes that according to Kant 'An action ... has genuine moral worth only when it happens exclusively from duty and merely for the sake of duty, without any inclination toward it. Worth of character is to commence only when someone, without sympathy of the heart, cold and indifferent to the suffering of others, and not properly born to be a philanthropist, nevertheless displays beneficence merely for the sake of tiresome duty.'3Covering himself with the mantle of Christianity in a way that he does not usually do, and also appealing to Friedrich Schiller's famous lampoon of Kant in the Xenien, Schopenhauer continues: 'This assertion, which outrages genuine moral feeling, this apotheosis of unkindness which directly opposes the Christian moral doctrine that places love above all else and allows nothing to count without it ... this tactless moral pedantry has been satirized by Schiller in two apt epigrams, entitled "Scruples of Conscience and Decision".' 4He then quotes from the Critique of Practical Reason, 'The disposition incumbent upon a human being to have in observing the moral law is to do so from duty, not from voluntary liking nor even from an endeavour he undertakes uncommanded, gladly and of his own accord',5and then explodes, 'It has to be commanded! What a slave-morality!' (BM §6, 137).
But in his last main work in moral philosophy, the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, specifically its Doctrine of Virtue,...