Kant has traditionally been viewed as an unhelpful resource for environmental concerns, despite his immensely influential moral and political philosophy. This paper shows that Kant’s Critique of Judgment can be a valuable resource for environmental ethics, with methodological implications for political action and environmental policy. I argue that Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Critique of Teleological Judgment provide philosophical tools for valuing nature aside from interest and for developing forms of environmental protectionism. My approach differs from other Kantian accounts (...) that discuss our moral relations to nonrational nature, since these usually rely on Kant’s limited statements about flora and fauna in his Lectures on Ethics, Metaphysics of Morals, and the Analytic of the Beautiful. Though we can defend indirect duties toward animals and beautiful plants, as these accounts convincingly show, they rarely engage with the possibility of us having moral views of ecosystems. Moral views of nature can be useful as methodological heuristics for mobilizing and instituting environmental policies regarding climate change such as biodiversity loss, and this paper will provide a defense of a Kantian moral view of nature from which subsequent climate-related actions can be motivated. (shrink)

An influential interpretation of Kant’s Doctrine of Right suggests that the relationship between public right and freedom is constitutive rather than instrumental. The focus has been on domestic right and members’ relations to their own state. This has resulted in a statist bias which has not adequately dealt with the fact that Kant regards public right as a system composed of three levels – domestic, international and cosmopolitan right. This article suggests that the constitutive relationship is between all levels of (...) right, on the one hand, and ‘freedom in the external relation’ of all human beings, on the other hand. (shrink)

The article investigates the problem of Kant's proposal for a final global legal order. Kant expressed his stance very vaguely in the consecutively published texts On the Common Saying, Toward Perpetual Peace and The Metaphysics of Morals, which enabled numerous, often contradictory interpretations. The aim of the paper is to propose an alternative method of analysis of Kant's texts, which on one side reconciles textual discrepancies in his writings and on the other throws new light on many of the previous (...) interpretations. In order to accomplish this goal, I draw distinctions between four perspectives, from which the philosopher considers this issue in his writings. This allows me to give the final form of Kant's world peace, explain the character of the international state of nature vs the original one, and understand the role of the principles of politics and the status of Kant's teleological understanding of history. (shrink)

Some of the most pressing contemporary social problems result from the amalgamation of a mass of actions that are not intentionally coordinated. Although these essentially aggregative harms are foreseeable, it is unclear what moral duties individuals have with regards to them. This paper offers a new analysis of these problems and uses a nonideal contractualist approach to argue in favour of two kinds of duties for individuals. Collectivization duties that require individuals to act responsively with a view to ensuring that (...) there are effective governance agents that reliably, fairly, and efficiently prevent these outcomes in the long-term and duties of restraint that require individuals to avoid action of a kind that is likely to come together with other actions to cause serious EAH in the immediate future when restraint with regards to actions of this kind could help prevent the outcome from occurring. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this article I discuss whether from Kant’s philosophy we can determine a moral duty to deal with global inequality, a problem that in Kant’s time was inexistent since it is a modern trend resulting from the industrial revolution. In doing this, I consider three main issues related to Kant’s thought and partially re-developed by contemporary authors: the individual moral duty to collaborate with nature’s purposiveness, which is aimed at attaining perpetual peace through humans fully developing their capacities, the normative (...) requirement to reform the global economic structure so as to prevent cases of coercion and deception suffered by vulnerable economic agents, and the validation of global property titles, in the same way as occurs at the national level when people leave the state of nature and enter a civil condition. The aim of the article is to investigate whether in Kant’s philosophy of history and of right, which can be considered as the theoretical connection point between the ancient cosmopolitan aspiration and a modern and articulate cosmopolitan philosophy, we may find some first moral insights regarding the contemporary debate over the existence of global duties of socio-economic justice. (shrink)

This article explores the bases of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in his more systematic writings on freedom, judgment, and community. My argument is that, if we peer beneath his more explicitly normative prescriptions for achieving “perpetual peace,” we find the tools not just of a cosmopolitan vision but what we might call a “cosmopolitical method.” While many assume Kant’s political thought descends directly from his moral philosophy, a look back at relevant passages in the first Critique reveals an alternative reading that points (...) toward his theory of reflective judgment, which combines practical freedom with judgments based on theoretical concepts. Of particular importance is Kant’s conception of community as commercium, through which Kant discerns all matters of right to concern the way free actors are constrained to share the earth in common. These considerations allow for a broader way of thinking about Kantian cosmopolitanism, one that is responsive to the reflective judgment of world citizens as they encounter new challenges. (shrink)