Right and Virtue

A book about morality that opens like a law dictionary: freedom, obligation, duty, each term set in place before anything gets argued. Paul Guyer knows why Immanuel Kant starts there, and the answer runs deeper than habit: the definitions at the front of the Metaphysics of Morals carry the whole design, one morality with two different ways of holding us to it. Then the harder question. Why not happiness, the thing every one of us already wants? Guyer reads the passage where Kant refuses, one he has read more times than he can count, and it still catches him. What a state owes you turns out to be something better.