According to Kierkegaard, the flip side of the “Reward-Disease” is willing the Good out of fear of punishment.
“Next it must be said that the man who only wills the Good out of fear of punishment does not will one thing. He is double-minded.
The other aspect of the reward-centered man is willing the good only out of fear of punishment. For in essence, this is the same as to will the Good for the sake of the reward, to the extent that avoiding evil is an advantage of the same sort as that of attaining a benefit. The Good is one thing. Punishment is something else. Therefore the double-minded person does not desire one thing when he desires the Good under the condition that he shall avoid punishment.”
As with rewards, Kierkegaard is primarily talking about immediate, “this-worldly” punishments that people wish to avoid by doing the Good:
“… double-mindedness seldom dwells on eternity’s punishment. The punishment it fears is more often understood in an earthly and temporal sense. Of a man who only wills the Good out of fear of punishment, it is necessary to say with special emphasis, that he fears what a man should not and ought not to fear: loss of money, loss of reputation, misjudgment by others, neglect, the world’s judgment, the ridicule of fools, the laughter of the frivolous, the cowardly whining of consideration, the inflated triviality of the moment, the fluttering mist of vapor.”
An example that stands out to me is doing the Good because you will “look bad in front of others” if you don’t. A good action that you know is only done because others are watching. Each one of us probably sees this, or completes acts because of this reason, every day.
Kierkegaard makes two additional interesting observations in this chapter.
First, he makes the claim that, if we saw rightly, we should want the punishment that comes from doing wrong, because it can be a medicine:
“…if he has done wrong, then he must, if he really wills one things and sincerely wills the Good, desire to be punished, that the punishment may heal him just as medicine heals the sick.”
“This is firmly established: that punishment is not illness, but medicine…. all double-mindedness that wills the Good only out of fear of punishment can always be known in the end, because it considers punishment as an illness.”
Second, he alludes to the character development that comes from continually willing the Good.
”Even if it happened to be a good man who in the agony of fear preserved a certain slavish blamelessness out of fear of punishment: still he is double-minded. He continually does what he really would rather not do…”
Over time, we should want to do the Good more and more. If have to continually try to stir ourselves, for some reason or another, to do the Good – if we are really doing what we would rather not do – then we are not fully formed yet. There is more work to do.
One final element that, to me, seems to be a continuing tension in Kierkegaard’s thought is the relation between temporal rewards/punishments and what he calls “eternity’s” rewards or punishments. For Kierkegaard, it seems that we ought to fear eternity’s (God’s) punishment. That that is a right thing to fear. And yet he makes statement’s like the following:
“…as the Good is only one thing, so it wishes to be the only thing that aids a man.”
It seems to me that fearing eternal punishment is a motivator outside of simply willing the Good for the sake of the Good. In my opinion, if you take some of Kierkegaard’s thought to its logical conclusion, “eternity’s rewards or punishments” should not have a baring on if we will the Good. Even if after this life there were simply an abyss of nothingness, we should still will the Good because it is right to do so.
This seems to be a tension in Kierkegaard’s thought throughout the work. It’s possible that this is because Kierkegaard was an orthodox Christian and thus “bound by the (biblical) texts,” some of which use the rewards and punishments of eternity as a motivator for behavior.