The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the 'Doctrine of Right', which deals with the rights which people have or can acquire, and the 'Doctrine of Virtue', which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, is the only complete (...) translation of the whole text, and includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. This volume will be of wide interest to students of ethics and of legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

Published in 1797, the Doctrine of Right is Kant's most significant contribution to legal and political philosophy. As the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, it deals with the legal rights which persons have or can acquire, and aims at providing the grounding for lasting international peace through the idea of the juridical state. This commentary analyzes Kant's system of individual rights, starting from the original innate right to external freedom, and ending with the right (...) to own property and to have contractual and family claims. Clear and to the point, it guides readers through the most difficult passages of the Doctrine, explaining Kant's terminology, method and ideas in the light of his intellectual environment. One of the very few commentaries on the Doctrine of Right available in English, this book will be essential for anyone with a strong interest in Kant's moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Published in 1797, the Doctrine of Right is Kant's most significant contribution to legal and political philosophy. As the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, it deals with the legal rights which persons have or can acquire, and aims at providing the grounding for lasting international peace through the idea of the juridical state. This commentary analyzes Kant's system of individual rights, starting from the original innate right to external freedom, and ending with the right (...) to own property and to have contractual and family claims. Clear and to the point, it guides readers through the most difficult passages of the Doctrine, explaining Kant's terminology, method and ideas in the light of his intellectual environment. One of the very few commentaries on the Doctrine of Right available in English, this book will be essential for anyone with a strong interest in Kant's moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but he did neither. (...) Why? In raising and seeking an answer to this question, I am not interested in what Kant’s normative silence about the institutions of Atlantic slavery and slave trade may tell us about him as a person (for example, whether he was blinded by his own racist prejudices or whether he was affected by some kind of cognitive dissonance). Rather, I will focus on what it may tell us about certain limitations of his political philosophy, limitations that might have made it THEORETICALLY DIFFICULT for him to figure out exactly what to DO about those institutions as entrenched political realities. (shrink)

For a long time, Kant’s Doctrine of Right languished in relative neglect, even among Kantians. The work was best known for its uncompromising views on punishment and revolution, and for a seemingly limited and not particularly original emphasis on private property. Kant’s more interesting political claims were often said to be located elsewhere: in the third Critique (Hannah Arendt, Patrick Riley), or the structure of the critical project (Onora O’Neill). When John Rawls explained why his theory (...) of justice could be given a ‘Kantian interpretation’, he drew on concepts found just in Kant’s moral philosophy, bypassing the Doctrine of Right entirely. -/- In recent years, however, there has been an expanding body of work on the Doctrine of Right, by writers like B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Arthur Ripstein, Elisabeth Ellis, and Lea Ypi. Ripstein and Ellis, in particular, have sought to reframe the arguments of Kant’s text in terms more congenial to contemporary legal and political theory. But can Kant’s arguments really be applied to twenty-first-century political debates? -/- The authors in this collection of essays explore this question in different ways, by looking at different aspects of Kant’s text. What is distinctive about Kant’s conception of the social contract, or human rights? Can a Kantian political philosophy concern itself with poverty and welfare rights? Can a Kantian affirm a conception of civil disobedience? What kind of view should a Kantian have of international relations? Can Kant’s views on punishment be reconciled with a conception of forgiveness? What would a Kantian position be in contemporary debates about marriage? -/- The authors of this volume do not always agree with one another, but they always seek to be faithful to the text, and to understand what a political position grounded in the Doctrine of Right would look like in twenty-first-century terms. (shrink)

Kantian legalism is now the dominant scholarly interpretation of Kant and an important approach to legal and political philosophy in its own right. One notable feature is its construal of the relationship between law and politics decisively in law’s favour: Law subordinates politics. Political judgment is constrained by and only permissibly exercised through law. This paper opposes this subordination through a close analysis of an ambiguity in Kant’s conception of sovereignty. Understanding this ambiguity requires seeing that, for Kant, (...) law cannot subordinate the sovereign’s political judgment because it is a condition which makes a legal system possible. Kant was not an exacting legalist, but a practical reasoner struggling with the pressures politics imposes on finite beings. Through discussion of a leading contemporary approach, and close engagement with its historical source, the paper raises new considerations about the relevance of political judgment in the relationship of law and politics. (shrink)

At the heart of Kant’s legal-political philosophy lies a liberal, republican ideal of justice understood in terms of private independence (non-domination) and subjection to public laws securing freedom for all citizens as equals. Given this basic commitment of Kant’s, it is puzzling to many that he does not consider democracy a minimal condition on a legitimate state. In addition, many find Kant ideas of reform or improvement of the historical states we have inherited vague and confusing. The aim (...) of this paper is to untangle both puzzles by exploring Kant’s idea of self-governance. I argue that Kant’s idea of self-governance gives us a very good starting point for thinking about how to leave room for a variety of political systems—different ideals—that have grown out of and responding to different contingent historical and cultural circumstances. It also helps us identify those areas where we want to take extra care to build in safeguards to secure stability and to take sufficiently seriously humankind’s truly nasty sides. (shrink)

Contrary to the received view, I argue that Kant, in the “Doctrine of Right”, outlines a third, republican alternative to absolutist and voluntarist conceptions of political legitimacy. According to this republican alternative, a state must meet certain institutional requirements before political obligations arise. An important result of this interpretation is not only that there are institutional restraints on a legitimate state's use of coercion, but also that the rights of the state (‘public right’) are not in principle (...) reducible to the rights of individuals (‘private right’). Thus, for Kant, political obligations are intimately linked to the existence of a certain kind of republican institutional framework. (shrink)

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant claims that killings motivated by the fear of disgrace should be punished less severely than other murders. I consider how Kant understands the mitigating force of such motives, and argue that Kant takes agents to have a moral right to defend their honour. Unlike other rights, however, this right of honour can only be defended personally, so that individuals remain in a 'state of nature' with regard to any such rights, (...) regardless of their political situation. According to Kant, we should be lenient in these cases because the malefactors are caught between two kinds of authentic normative demand, at a point where the proper authority of the state collides with a certain authority which individuals must claim for themselves. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 3, Page 549-560, May 2011.

Review of: B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Kant’s Doctrine of Right. A Commentary (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010) 336 p.

This paper claims that a particular interpretation of Kant`s legal-political philosophy, as it is presented in his Doctrine of Right, provides us with the much needed resolution to the question of the normativity of law, precisely because it brings in a perspective that avoids both positivism and ethicism. This particular interpretation follows a strategy of argumentation that I call the “argument for the intrinsic normativity of law”, i.e., the argument that law is defined and justified on its own (...) grounds, without any need to refer to ethics, or rational/enlightened self-interest. This argument highlights the concept of legal person with the innate right to freedom as the necessary presupposition of legal practices, and sets forth a fundamental sense of justice inherent to the concept of law that consists in the reciprocal recognition of legal personality. In the end, I come up with a distinctive conception of law that I formulate as a last resort of normativity in the face of a conflict wherein an ethical solution does not appeal to all parties. (shrink)

I criticize two ways of interpreting Kant's claim that property rights are merely ‘provisional’ in the state of nature.Weak provisionalityholds that in the state of nature agents can make rightful claims to property. What is lacking is the institutional context necessary to render their claims secure. By contrast,strong provisionalityholds that making property claims in the state of nature wrongs others. I argue for a third view,anticipatory provisionality, according to which state of nature property claims do not wrong others, but anticipate (...) a condition in which the authority to make such claims can no longer be unilaterally determined. (shrink)

This paper explores the alleged role of a conception of human nature for Kant’s justification of the duty to leave the state of nature and the related right to coerce others to enter the civil condition in the Doctrine of Right (1797). I criticise the interpretation put forward by Byrd and Hruschka, according to which Kant’s postulate of public right is a preventive measure based on a “presumption of badness” of human beings. Although this (...) reading seems to be supported by § 42 of the Doctrine of Right, I shall argue that the paragraph neither offers a justification of why we have a duty to leave the state of nature, nor explains why individuals are allowed to coerce others to do so. I offer an alternative interpretation of § 42 by focusing on the difference between formal and material violations of right and argue that the rationale behind the postulate of public right is the idea that remaining in the state of nature is a formal violation of the concept of right. It is therefore not prudential reason that authorizes us to coerce others to enter the lawful condition. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Kant’s discussion of juridical and ethical laws in the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals as a whole. Following Marcus Willaschek and early Allen Wood, I pose a dilemma for Kant that I call “the paradox of juridical imperatives”, a dilemma that Willaschek and Wood hold Kant can only avoid by giving up his claim that juridical laws are categorical imperatives. I show how a set of interpretative issues concerning juridical incentives, the content of (...) juridical laws, and the idea of an “indirect” ethical obligations, hang together, and must solved simultaneously in order to address the paradox. I argue, contra Willaschek and Wood, that we can dissolve the paradox, solving the network of issues satisfactorily and affirming the status of juridical laws as categorical imperatives, once we recognize that one can go wrong with respect to a principle while fulfilling the letter of its requirements. The picture that emerges is one on which we can straightforwardly affirm Recht as a moral concept for Kant, while simultaneously representing its distinctive character in his system of morality. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted opinion that the Doctrine of Right is an imperfect product of Kant's later life, affected by the author's senility. This article shows (by focusing on the 'Right of a State') there is strong evidence that the printed version of 1797 delivers not the text Kant intended to publish, but an incorrect composition out of his manuscript, being assembled by third hand. In the paper the originally intended text is reconstructed by following the (...) internal cross-references given by the author. (shrink)

Beginning with an analysis of an early satire of Kant 's doctrine of marital law, this essay draws on Walter Benjamin's condensed exposition of this doctrine in order to ask whether Kant 's notoriously unsentimental representation of marriage is, in fact, from the perspective of his own idea of law, overly sentimental. Whereas Kant ridicules the idea of a "law of war" in his program for perpetual peace, he accepts the possibility of legally sanctioned intercourse, in which people (...) use others and themselves. Between marital law and martial law lies maritime law, which concerns a surface that can be used but not mastered. (shrink)

Prominent Kantian scholars, such as Korsgaard and Waldron, claim that the very existence of juridical-political institutions is sufficient to render laws authoritative. Critics argue that this view is unpersuasive as it requires subjects to obey grossly unjust laws. Here, I identify two problems facing scholars who reject the absolutist view of political authority proffered by Korsgaard and Waldron. First, when there is reasonable disagreement regarding a law’s legitimacy the Principle of Right generates contradictory obligations as it commands both disobedience (...) and compliance. In clarifying this problem, I argue that individuals must disobey illegitimate laws where this requirement is co-extensive with the duty to leave the state of nature. However, disobedience amounts to domination when individuals are subjected to private judgments regarding the conditions of freedom. The Principle of Right cannot overcome this impasse as it does not offer reasons in favor of compliance that are distinct from those reasons legitimating the law. To address this issue, I supplement Kant’s account with Joseph Raz’s ‘service conception’ of authority to show that compliance can be rendered compatible with the Principle of Right. A second problem emerges when laws are blatantly illegitimate such that obedience cannot be justified. In these cases, the Principle of Right cannot guide legislative reform in an intuitively appealing way as it fails to address considerations of proportionality. Though this latter problem is not resolved here, identifying it helps to further clarify the relationship between Kant’s moral and political principles. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz behandelt den Zusammenhang zwischen Recht, Ethik und Moral in der MdS. Ausgangspunkt ist der Befund, daß Kants System der Pflichten in der MdS weder konsistent noch vollständig ist, weil Rechts- und Tugendpflichten, entgegen Kants Annahme, den Bereich der moralischen Pflichten nicht erschöpfen . Kants System der Pflichten beruht auf den Unterscheidungen zwischen Recht und Ethik und zwischen Legalität und Moralität. Letztere konzipiert Kant in der MdS anders als in früheren Werken, indem er sie nun auf die beiden Arten (...) der "Gesetzgebung" in Recht und Ethik und die daraus entspringenden Gesetze zurückführt . Im Zusammenhang mit der "ethischen" Gesetzgebung ergibt sich das Problem, wie es ethisch geboten sein kann, aus Pflicht zu handeln . Analog dazu stellt sich mit Blick auf die "juridische" Gesetzgebung die Frage, warum man befugt ist, andere zu rechtlichem Handeln zu zwingen. Handelt es sich um eine moralische oder eine spezifisch rechtliche Befugnis? Es zeigt sich, daß Kant zwei unvereinbare Auffassung miteinander verbindet: Aus seiner "offiziellen" Auffassung, wonach das Recht ein Teil der Moral ist, würde folgen, daß die Zwangsbefugnis im Recht moralisch gerechtfertigt werden kann. Tatsächlich ist eine solche Rechtfertigung aber nicht möglich, die "offizielle" Auffassung also unzureichend. Kant greift in der MdS aber auch mehrfach auf eine "alternative" Auffassung zurück, der zufolge das Recht als eine eigenständige Form autonomer Gesetzgebung neben der Moral steht . Dieser alternativen Auffassung zufolge, die der "offiziellen" insgesamt überlegen ist, würde die "Rechtslehre" also gar nicht in die Metaphysik der Sitten gehören. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 2 Seiten: 347-351.

Este volumen colectivo, editado por Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Paula Satne y Larry Krasnoff, constituye un aporte sustancial al estudio de la filosofía kantiana del derecho. Dadas las limitaciones de espacio, podré detenerme brevemente únicamente en algunas de las contribuciones que enriquecen el volumen, si bien todas son muy valiosas y originales.

This essay aims to bring to light the distinctive features of Fichte's construal of cosmopolitan right in the Foundations of Natural Right—in comparison to Kant's—in the light of the current philosophical debate on migration and global justice. The paper is articulated in three steps. First, it analyzes the addressees and content of Fichte's cosmopolitan right by emphasizing its limited scope: by focusing on those individuals who do not come “from any state,” Fichte's discussion of cosmopolitan right (...) foreruns Arendt's philosophical theorization of statelessness and the “right to have rights.” Second, it considers Fichte's justification of cosmopolitan right—and its compatibility with his justification of private property rights—by stressing its ontological anchoring in the notions of “absolute will,” “personhood,” and “original right.” Finally, the essay considers the systematic position of cosmopolitan right with regard to the “right of nations” and the “right of a state” in Fichte's doctrine of right by giving special attention to the range of reasons that, according to Fichte, can legitimate the rejection of a stranger. (shrink)

In this classic text, Kant sets out to articulate and defend the Categorical Imperative - the fundamental principle that underlies moral reasoning - and to lay the foundation for a comprehensive account of justice and human virtues. This new edition and translation of Kant's work is designed especially for students. An extensive and comprehensive introduction explains the central concepts of Groundwork and looks at Kant's main lines of argument. Detailed notes aim to clarify Kant's thoughts and to correct some common (...) misunderstandings of his doctrines. (shrink)

This paper argues against the common justification for the necessity of the state through the particular difficulty of private property right. Instead, I argue that the necessity of the state is internal to the concept of right in general. In order to show this, I point out how Kants adoption of hylomorphic language for the concept of right, where there is a formal and material aspect of right, allows us to understand the Rechtslehre as progressing through (...) a syllogistic deduction from innate right (major), private right (minor) to public right (conclusion). Material right is made necessary through its subsumption under formal right in the civil condition. (shrink)

This Volume contains seven works of Kant, newly translated and edited, with Introductions. What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? 1786 (Allen Wood) On the miscarriage of all philosophical trials in theodicy. 1791 (George di Giovanni Religion within the boundaries of mere reason. 1793 (George di Giovanni) The end of all things. 1794 (Allen Wood) The conflict of the faculties. 1798 (Mary J. Gregor & Robert Anchor) Preface to Reinhold Bernhard Jackmann's examination of the Kantian Philosophy of Religion. (...) 1800 (Allen W. Wood) Lectures on the philosophical doctrines of religion (1817) (Allen W. Wood -/- . (shrink)

This article has two objectives: first, to bring to the fore Kant's neglected distinction between ‘critique’ and ‘doctrine’ and, second, to relate this distinction to Kant's notion of a philosophy of right. Kant's culminating contribution to practical philosophy, the Metaphysics of Morals, contains a doctrine of right and this ‘doctrine’ has received relatively little attention thus far in English-language writing on Kant. One of the reasons for this relative neglect is, I believe, due to the (...) prevalent attention provided to Kant's practical critique at the expense of his practical doctrine. I aim to provide an account of Kant's critique of right in order to enable an understanding of Kant's doctrine of right to be provided with some initial orientation. I will be suggesting that this critique of right is presented in Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. (shrink)

John Rawls based his theory of justice, in the work of that name, on a ‘Kantian interpretation’ of the status of human beings as ‘free and equal’ persons. In his subsequent, ‘political rather than metaphysical’ expositions of his theory, the conception of citizens of democracies as ‘free and equal’ persons retained its foundational role. But Rawls appealed only to Kant’s moral philosophy, never to Kant’s own political philosophy as expounded in his 1797 Doctrine of Right in (...) theMetaphysics of Morals. I argue here that the structure of Kant’s political philosophy, with its categories of the innate right to freedom, private acquired right and public right, can clarify the relationship between Rawls’s two principles of justice and his scheme of basic liberties and primary goods. (shrink)