First, I will offer significant cases of health self-surveillance pursued through technology and, second, I will propose a possible reading of their profound reasons by arguing that, as paradoxical as it may seem, they are a kind of desperate way out of typically neoliberal imperatives of self-optimisation and, thus, individual success. More precisely, I will argue that there is a significant sense in which health self-surveillance pursued through technology, from the case of the quantified self to the case of self-biohacking, can free us from the burden of autonomy that, especially in neoliberal societies, means the unbearable burden of being the best. Indeed, if we can increasingly replace our autonomy with our (technological) automation, we can also increasingly replace our responsibility for our failure with technology’s responsibility for our failure.

I focus on Kant’s claim that certain actions – like the Sympathetic Helper’s in Groundwork I – are morally praiseworthy yet do not have moral worth, and I provide a novel account of what this notion of moral praiseworthiness as distinct from moral worth is about. I argue that a morally praiseworthy action is an action done from an emotion that displays a certain quality, namely emotional aptness. One’s emotion displays this quality if it is the result of the subject training her faculties to react to a certain object/state of affairs in a way that she judges appropriate. I argue that this notion of moral praiseworthiness (a) fills a gap in the literature, (b) can be clearly distinguished from the notion of moral worth within Kant’s ethics, and (c) highlights how two distinctively moral forms of evaluations – i.e., moral praiseworthiness and moral worth – can fulfill different roles within Kant’s moral theory.