Kant’s political theory stands in the social contract tradition, but departs significantly from earlier versions of social contract theory. Most importantly Kant holds, against Hobbes and Locke, that we have not merely a pragmatic reason but an obligation to exit the state of nature and found a state. Kant holds that each person has an innate right to freedom, but it is possible to simultaneously honor everyone’s right only under the rule of law. Since we are obligated to respect each (...) person’s right to freedom, and can do so only in a state, we are obligated to submit to the authority of the state if we have one, and to establish one if we do not. In the first half of the essay I reconstruct this argument in more detail. In the second half I survey four points of controversy: (i) What is the relationship between Kant’s political philosophy and his moral philosophy? (ii) How does the innate right to freedom support the postulate that we are permitted to acquire property and other private rights? (iii) How does the postulate support an obligation to found the state? (iv) How should we understand Kant’s views about political revolutions? (shrink)

Recently, scholars have criticized what they call the “Kantian-Republican” thesis of freedom as non-domination. The main complaint is that domination is unavoidable. This concern can be separated into the problem of state domination, which suggests that the state's intervening powers necessarily dominate its citizens, and the problem of majority domination, which suggests that the People necessarily dominate individual citizen as a result of the potential to form dominating majorities.

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)

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)

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)

Liberal theories of justice have been rightly criticized for two things by care theorists. First, they have failed to deal with private care relations’ inherent (inter)dependency, asymmetry and particularity. Second, they have been shown unable properly to address the asymmetry and dependency constitutive of care workers’ and care-receivers’ systemic conditions. I apply Kant’s theory of right to show that current care theories unfortunately reproduce similar problems because they also argue on the assumption that good care requires only virtuous private individuals. (...) Giving up this assumption enables us to solve the problems regarding both private care relations and systemic injustice. (shrink)

The coercive authority of the Kantian state is rationally grounded in the ideal of equal external freedom, which is realized when each individual can choose and act without being constrained by another's will. This ideal does not seem like it can justify state-mandated economic redistribution. For if one is externally free just as long as one can choose and act without being constrained by another, then only direct slavery, serfdom, or other systems of overt control seem to threaten external freedom. (...) Yet Kant endows the freedom-based state with considerable powers of economic redistribution. I argue that recent commentary has misunderstood both Kant's account of why poverty is a form of freedom-threatening dependence and the extent of the Kantian state's powers for remedying poverty. Criticizing Arthur Ripstein and the Kantianism of the “Toronto-School,” I argue that the most salient notion of dependence at issue within the Kantian framework is not the direct control of the choice-making capacities of another but asymmetrical influence in a power relationship. For Kant, poverty is fundamentally a problem of structural disempowerment. (shrink)

Though we cherish freedom and equality, there are human relations we commonly take to be morally permissible despite the fact that they essentially involve an inequality specifically of freedom, i.e., parental and fiduciary relations. In this article, I argue that the morality of these relations is best understood through a very old and dangerous concept, the concept of status. Despite their historic and continuing abuses, status relations are alive and well today, I argue, because some of them are necessary. We (...) must therefore carefully specify the conditions in which such status relations may morally obtain, as well as the duties of virtue and duties of right to which all parties are subject when it does (including a duty of care) to clearly articulate the ways in which these putatively moral status relations that essentially involve an asymmetry of autonomy (status relations) can go well or badly even within the context of the Kantian tradition from which our current legal and social practices arose. To this end, I offer Kant's own concept of status as a promising one because in Kant's theory, status is a nexus of virtue and right that is reducible to neither property nor contract but akin to each in familiar ways. Once status is admitted as an alternative to property and contract, status may be extended beyond Kant's domestic paradigm, most perspicuously to institutional ethics. In this article, I sketch a status-based theory of stakeholding that locates environmental impact, institutional oppression, and other significant features of our moral landscape within a Kantian framework of duties rich enough to more accurately characterize the complexities of stakeholding than current tradition has allowed. (shrink)

El objetivo del trabajo es mostrar que la pobreza es, para Kant, la contracara de una distribución social de la propiedad adquirida incompatible con la igual libertad de todos según leyes universales. El problema de la pobreza no es –dejó dicho Kant– un tema de beneficencia o de deberes éticos laxos de cada cual. Tampoco es un asunto de un derecho de necesidad que habilitara al pobre a robar cuando sus necesidades elementales no están satisfechas. Es un problema estructural en (...) la constitución de un estado jurídico, una grieta fatal en el diseño de sus Instituciones públicas incapaces de configurar una vida social acorde con la reciprocidad en la libertad externa de todos. (shrink)