While scholars are slowly coming to realize that Kants reflections on religion in parts II and III of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason interpret religion specifically as one aspect of moral education, namely moral ascetics. After first clearly distinguishing between a cognitive and a conative aspect of moral education, I show how certain historical religious practices serve to provide the conative aspect of moral education. Kant defines this aspect of moral education as practices that render the human agent. (...) By this it is meant that certain practices can inspire moral interests either by justifying rational hope in living up to a certain standard of moral perfection or by endeavouring to unite human beings in a universal, invisible ethical community that inspires cooperation rather than adversity. (shrink)

In Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason Kant speaks of an ethical state of nature and of an ethico-civil condition, with explicit reference to the juridical state of nature and the juridico-civil condition he discusses at length in his legal-political writings. Given that the Religion is the only work where Kant introduces a parallel between these concepts, one might think that this is only a loose analogy, serving a merely illustrative function. The paper provides a first outline of the (...) similarities and the differences between the state of nature and the civil condition in Right and in ethics. The comparison points to a deeper, structural relation between the two pairs of concepts. By doing so, it makes room for developing a unitary conception of the state of nature and of the civil condition, which would underlie both the ethical and the juridical version. (shrink)

While the critically oriented writings of Immanuel Kant remain the key theoretical grounds from which universalists challenge reduction of international rights law and protection to the practical particularities of sovereign states, Kant’s theory can be read as also a crucial argument for a human rights regime ordered around sovereign states and citizens. Consequently, universalists may be tempted to push Kant’s thinking to greater critical examination of ‘the human’ and its properties. However, such a move to more theoretical rigour in critique (...) only solidifies the subversive statism of Kant’s apparent universalism, as long as it remains embedded in his prior theory of critical philosophy that privileges a singular form of reason. Universalist theories of human rights can break with this contradiction only insofar as they also displace the right to philosophy from the subject and site of ‘civil’ man to a politics of theory where no such subject or site is guaranteed. (shrink)