Abstract: Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil -/- This paper starts by sketching Kant’s four ideal legal and political conditions—'anarchy,’ ‘despotism,’ ‘republic,’ and ‘barbarism’—before showing their usefulness for analyzing different political forces that may operate in any given society. Contrary to the common tendency in political philosophy to view our societies as either in the so-called ‘state of nature’ (‘anarchy’) or in ‘civil society’ (‘republic’), I propose that we might find ourselves in societies where aspects or ‘pockets’ of (...) our lives are subject to any one of these (anarchic, despotic, republican, and barbaric) political forces. I then combine Kant’s ideas on barbaric evil with Arendt’s ideas on totalitarian evil, which gives us a four-fold conception of political evil. This fourfold distinction is then used to identify some types and patterns of destructive political forces as they occur in actual, historical societies, such as racist, sexist, or heterosexist violence and oppression. (shrink)

This paper provides an entrance into central discussions regarding Kant’s account of property. The first section shows how Kant engages and transforms important, related proposals from Hobbes and Locke as well as how the ‘libertarian’ and ‘liberal republican’ interpretive traditions differ in their readings on these points. Since Kantian theories for a long time didn’t focus on Kant’s Doctrine of Right but instead followed Rawls’s lead by developing Kantian theories grounded on Kant’s (meta-) ethical writings, the second section focuses on (...) property discussions found in the Rawlsian tradition. The final section shows how important contemporary work in the Kantian tradition goes beyond Rawlsian, libertarian, and liberal republican concerns of distributive justice among free and equal citizens, to include questions central to, for example, the philosophy of care, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of sex and love, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Kant’s example of lying to the murderer at the door has been a cherished source of scorn for thinkers with little sympathy for Kant’s philosophy and a source of deep puzzlement for those more favorably inclined. The problem is that Kant seems to say that it’s always wrong to lie – even if necessary to prevent a murderer from reaching his victim – and that if one does lie, one becomes partially responsible for the killing of the victim. If this (...) is correct, then Kant’s account seems not only to require us to respect the murderer more than the victim, but also that we somehow can become responsible for the consequences that ultimately result from someone else’s wrongdoing. After World War II our spontaneous negative reaction to this apparently absurd line of argument is brought out even more starkly by making the murderer at the door a Nazi officer looking for Jews hidden in people’s homes. This paper argues that Kant’s discussion of lying to the murderer at the door has been seriously misinterpreted. The suggested root of the problem is that the Doctrine of Right has been given insufficient attention in Kant interpretation. It is in this work we find many of the arguments needed to understand Kant’s analysis of lying to the murderer in “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy”. When we interpret this essay in light of Kant’s discussion in the Doctrine of Right, we can make sense of why lying to the murderer isn’t to wrong the murderer, why we nevertheless become responsible for the consequences of the lie and why choosing to lie to do wrong ‘in the highest degree’. Finally, the Doctrine of Right account of rightful relations makes it possible for us to analyze the example when we make the murderer at the door a Nazi officer. (shrink)

This paper critiques Locke’s account of private property. After sketching its basic principles as well as how contemporary Lockeans have developed them, I argue that this account doesn’t and cannot work philosophically. The main problem is that the account requires the determination of objective value of resources in historical time, but this doesn’t exist. I conclude that the ultimate philosophical failure of this tremendously influential kind of account does not entail that it is valueless. Rather, the suggestion is that understanding (...) and overcoming its problems promises one way to overcome more general problems of systemic injustice regarding private property and the environment in our modern world. (shrink)

Kant's conception of women is complex. Although he struggles to bring his considered view of women into focus, a sympathetic reading shows it not to be anti-feminist and to contain important arguments regarding human nature. Kant believes the traditional male-female distinction is unlikely to disappear, but he never proposes the traditional gender ideal as the moral ideal; he rejects the idea that such considerations of philosophical anthropology can set the framework for morality. This is also why his moral works clarifies (...) that all citizens, including women have the right, and should be encouraged to strive towards an active condition. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends Kant’s non-voluntarist conception of political obligations. I argue that civil society is not primarily a prudential requirement for justice; it is not merely a necessary evil or moral response to combat our corrupting nature or our tendency to act viciously, thoughtlessly or in a biased manner. Rather, civil society is constitutive of rightful relations because only in civil society can we interact in ways reconcilable with each person’s innate right to freedom. Civil society is the (...) means through which we can rightfully interact even on the ideal assumption that no one ever succumbs to immoral temptation. (shrink)

This paper defends a legal and political conception of sexual relations grounded in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. First, I argue that only a lack of consent can make a sexual deed wrong in the legal sense. Second, I demonstrate why all other legal constraints on sexual practices in a just society are legal constraints on seemingly unrelated public institutions. I explain the way in which the just state acts as a civil guardian for domestic relations and as a civil guarantor (...) for private property and contract relations—and thereby enables the existence of legally enforceable claims. Throughout the aim is to demonstrate that Kant’s relational conception of justice entails that legally enforceable claims regarding sexual deeds are fully justifiable only insofar as they are determined and enforced by a public authority that we may refer to as a liberal democratic welfare state. (shrink)

This is a public philosophy article that aims to make available an idea about abortion from my Sex, Love, and Gender book.

How do we care well for a human being: ourselves or another? Non-Kantian scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource with which to understand the full complexity of human care. Kant’s philosophy is often taken to presuppose that a philosophical analysis of good human life needs to attend only to how autonomous, rational agents—sprung up like mushrooms out of nowhere, without a childhood, never sick, always independent—ought to act respectfully, and how they can be forced (...) to interact rightfully. Questions involving aspects of human life captured by what Eva Kittay aptly phrased “the fact of dependency” (1999) —such as our vulnerable, fragile, and embodied social natures, asymmetrical care relations, and deep systemic injustices—are therefore commonly thought to be beyond the grasp of Kant and of Kantian philosophy. Against this historically prominent understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy, below I engage and draw upon recent Kant scholarship which shows both the inadequacy of such rationalist readings and the fruitfulness of using Kant’s practical philosophy to enhance our understanding of human care relations. After situating my approach in the existing, relevant secondary literature on Kant’s human agent, I explore key features of Kant’s accounts of human nature and the highest good. I pay special attention to his proposal that our human nature comprises reflective and unreflective aspects and patterns that we (ought to) strive to develop, transform, and integrate in wise ways through our faculty of desire. In addition, I emphasize the dangers that our ineradicable propensity to do bad things (evil) poses for our projects of self- and other- care. I proceed by outlining how Kant’s account of moral (ethical and legal) responsibility for self and others is developed through his theories of freedom, that is, through his theory of virtue (virtuous internal freedom with its account of perfect and imperfect duties) and his theory of right (rightful external freedom with its account of innate, private, and public right). On the conception I am advancing, we are pretty messy, fragile, and vulnerable beings whose projects of caring are difficult, ongoing, and complex. On the one hand, we (should) strive to care for ourselves (by striving to manage and heal badly functioning parts and by developing, transforming, and integrating immature or distinct parts of ourselves into good wholes) and for others (assisting them in their projects of management and healing and of developing, transforming, and integrating themselves into good wholes) in ways that are both respectful and attentive to the particular people we are—people with lives of our own to live—and the kinds of relationships we share. On the other hand, we should, and can, be forced to interact rightfully, meaning interaction consistent with one another’s basic (innate, private, and public) rights and, hence, contribute to reform projects that improve our inherited, imperfect legal-political systems with regard to care relations. Bringing Kant’s philosophy into dialogue with care theorists, I conclude, advances the insights of both traditions by showing one way to arrive at a multifaceted, yet unified account of human care relations where our embodied, social as well as our rational natures are given due consideration. (shrink)

Short lexicon entry on the Rawls-Nozick discussions.

This is my AMC response to my critics Ann Cahill, Alice MacLachlan, and Jordan Pascoe in Estudos Kantianos 11(1) 2023.

Working out a Kantian theory of moral responsibility for animals2 requires the untying of two philosophical and interpretive knots: i.) How to interpret Kant’s claim in the important “episodic” section of the Doctrine of Virtue that we do not have duties “to” animals, since such duties are only “with regard to” animals and “directly to” ourselves; and ii.) How to explain why animals don’t have rights, while human beings who (currently or permanently) don’t have sufficient reason for moral responsibility do (...) have rights. At the heart of the problem lies the philosophical challenge of whether a Kantian account of moral responsibility for animals can take the animals themselves into account in the right way, that is, without utilizing arguments that (wrongly) presuppose that non-human animals are moral agents or can be morally responsible for their actions. The task of untying these two knots is the aim of this chapter. I start by defending Kant’s general claim that our duties regarding animals are not “to” them, but rather “with regard to” them. Relations between human and other animals are not relations between two kinds of moral beings, since animals are not capable of the kind of consciousness, in particular the reflective self-consciousness moral being requires. Instead the more complex human-animal relations are affectionate, social relations to which humans can and sometimes should relate morally. This is why these moral duties are “direct” only to ourselves; we are the only ones in the relations that can be morally responsible for them. Correspondingly, respect (in Kant’s precise sense of the word) is a distinctly reflective, moral emotion internal to the specific normative orientation we have only to beings that can be truly free (reflectively self-conscious), and so, to human beings; morality and respect single out how we regard ourselves and other human beings capable of freedom. As we will see, Kant has a consistent and not counter-intuitive account of why we have the moral attitudes we do about animals and of how it is that these attitudes have the appearance of being about the animals themselves. In addition, Kant can explain why it doesn’t follow from this that these moral attitudes arise from attributing moral rights to the animals themselves. Central to this interpretation is Kant’s Religion, as it contains an account of human nature that adequately explains why we have the positive attitudes we do towards animals; similarly, the Religion contains an account of human evil that explains why we consider other occasions of attitudes towards animals as genuine examples of moral failure. Hence, the Religion is central to understanding why Kant’s approach to animals is neither internally inconsistent nor counter-intuitive. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 6, Page 1081-1096, December 2021.

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals an argumentative structure (...) sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy. (shrink)

(Early) Modern social contract theories reject the idea that legal and political institutions are grounded in an alleged natural ordering or hierarchy of human beings, and instead argue that only government by a public (and not private) authority can fulfil the idea of justice as freedom and equality for all. To be authoritative and not just powerful, governing institutions must be shared as ours in this irreducible sense. I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful freedom brilliantly transforms this (...) tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory—his accounts of human nature (“moral anthropology”) and historical societies (“the principle of politics”)—as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception not only of rightful external freedom but of rightful human freedom in particular societies—with their histories—on planet Earth. With these arguments at hand, we can also better appreciate the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant—anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic—are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies we are not either in the state of nature or in civil society. In addition, in historical societies founded on principles of freedom, there are pockets of injustice or pockets that are devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework. Kant’s four ideas therefore give us more tools with which to capture the nature of different political forces and challenges facing us in our historical societies. (shrink)

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights (...) and that making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for two things. First, many concerns we have regarding privacy—both regarding what things we do and do not want to protect in its name—can be explained through an account of our moral (legal and ethical) rights. Second, to understand a further set of moral (ethical and legal) concerns regarding privacy—especially the temptation to want to intrude on and disrespect others’ privacy and the gravity of such breaches and denials of privacy—we must appreciate the way in (...) which protecting freedom requires us to take into account the sociality of human nature. I draw on Kant’s practical philosophy—his moral accounts of freedom (of virtue and of right) as well as of human nature and evil—to make these arguments. (shrink)

In our societies today, the prevalence of serious, untreated trauma means that we cannot reliably expect to receive or give unconditional love, understood as love which functions within a normative framework to protect each and all of us as having dignity. Serious, untreated trauma makes unconditional love, so understood, unreliable because each time the pattern of the psychological damage (trauma) is triggered in the traumatized person, in the wrongdoers, or in the bystanders, their behaviour easily becomes self- and other-numbing, destructive, (...) and moralizing in an irrational and often self-deceived attempt to preserve or defend themselves or others against forces felt as threatening even though they are not. It is also common for someone who lives in societal conditions where avoiding patterned, traumatizing behaviour is impossible to experience the emotional temptation to give up on the possibility of a better future for oneself, one’s loved ones, or one’s community within the larger community or the state. For some, this is experienced as a draw towards suicide, while others experience it as a serious temptation to give up on working together with the good forces in society. This paper seeks to continue Charles Mills’s work on radicalizing Kant by sketching a Kantian account of trauma and thereby develop philosophical resources that can help us fight historical oppression and violence. (shrink)

This paper shows ways to develop, integrate, and transform Kant’s and Arendt’s theories on political evil into a unified Karendtian theory. Given the deep influence Kant had on Arendt’s thinking, the deep philosophical compatibility between their projects is not surprising. But the results of drawing on the resources left by both is exciting and groundbreaking with regard to both political evil in general and the challenges of modernity and totalitarianism in particular.

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)

This chapter draws attention to some deep points of philosophical connection between Arendt’s Lectures and Kant’s own and contemporary Kantian legal and political writings in the English-speaking world today. The aim is not to convince as such, but to show ways to bridge these historical divisions such that we can utilize these important works left us in the philosophical canon as we strive to improve our understanding of politics generally and the particular political challenges facing us. In this way, this (...) chapter strives to stay in Arendt’s and Kant’s philosophical spirit of thinking of their works as resources we can use as we strive to think and do better, whether we see to do so as Kantians, Arendtians, or Karendtians. (shrink)

Lexicon entry on Kant's Essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy.".

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)

This is a public philosophy piece that explores some questions around heroes, trauma, and wrongdoing.

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)

Robert Nozick initiated one of the most inspired and inspiring discussions in political philosophy with his 1974 response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia to John Rawls’s 1971 account of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice. These two works have informed an enormous amount of subsequent, especially liberal, discussions of economic justice, where Nozick’s work typically functions as a resource for those defending more right-wing (libertarian) positions, whereas Rawls’s has been used to defend various left-wing stances. Common to these discussions, (...) as found in politics generally (where similar kinds of arguments frequently are used to defend right and the left-wing policies and conclusions) is that they end in rather stubborn stalemates: the right defending minimal states while the left defends more extensive states. Interesting, too, is that both Nozick and Rawls take themselves to be consistent with, inspired by, and furthering Kant’s freedom project in the development of their own theories of justice. In this paper, I start by outlining the structures of these debates with an emphasis on the original disagreements between Nozick and Rawls. I then show how neither theory actually employed Kant’s own theory of justice, but rather drew on or out (presumed) implications of his ethical theory. In the final sections, I argue that if Nozick and Rawls had instead used Kant’s theory of justice and not his ethics, not only would their individual theories have been stronger, but they could have found ways of overcoming the unproductive stalemates that characterize their own as well as subsequent related discussions of economic justice as we currently find them in much scholarly and contemporary political debate. (shrink)

Kimberlé Crenshaw arrived at her famous phrase “intersectionality” by carefully thinking through speeches and writings given to us by early Black feminists, such as like Sojourner Truth and Anna J. Cooper. In this paper, I expand on this groundbreaking work in two somewhat surprising ways. First, I bring the ideas of these early Black feminists together with important, related proposals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir. Second, I relate these works to central ideas in (...) Kant’s practical philosophy in an effort to develop a Kantian theory of intersectionality. In addition to grasping the distinctive, destructive directions of oppressive forces aimed at women, the poor, and minorities, I seek to understand better the new, violently destructive elements found in European modernity, as evidenced both in European colonialization as well as the Holocaust. -/- This book is published under the OA CC-BY 4.0 license. (shrink)

A private property account is central to a liberal theory of justice. Much of the appeal of the Lockean theory stems from its account of the so-called `enough-and-as-good' proviso, a principle which aims to specify each employable person's fair share of the earth's material resources. I argue that to date Lockeans have failed to show how the proviso can be applied without thereby undermining a guiding intuition in Lockean theory. This guiding intuition is that by interacting in accordance with the (...) proviso persons interact as free and equal, or as reciprocally subject to the `laws of nature' rather than as subject to one another's arbitrary will. Because Locke's own and contemporary Lockean conceptions of the proviso subject some persons to some other persons' arbitrary will, the proviso so conceived cannot function as it should, namely as a principle that restricts interacting persons' actions reciprocally and thereby enables Lockean freedom under law. (shrink)

This is an anthology that is coming out in Farsi. -/- Table of Contents (in English): -/- 1. (2021). “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy.” The Cambridge Kant Lexicon, ed. Julian Wuerth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 691-695. 2. (2010). “Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door . . . One More Time: Kant’s Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis.” The Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 41(4), pp. 403-421. 3. (2006). “Kant and Dependency Relations: (...) Kant on the State’s Right to Redistribute Resources to Protect the Rights of Dependents.” Dialogue – Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 45, pp. 257-284. 4. (2011). “A Kantian Conception of Global Justice.” Review of International Studies, Vol. 37(5), pp. 2043-2057. 5. (2010). “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right ‘Concludes’ Private Right in ‘The Doctrine of Right.’”Kant-Studien, Vol. 3, pp. 331-351. 6. (2008). “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice Is Impossible in the State of Nature.” Kantian Review, Vol. 13(2), pp. 1-45. 7. (2021). “Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 121 (2), pp. 221-248. 8. (2020). “Kantian Care.” Caring for Liberalism: Dependency and Political Theory, ed. Asha L. Bhandary and Amy Baehr, New York: Routledge, pp. 50-74. 9. (2020). “Kant and Moral Responsibility for Animals.” Kant & Animals, ed. Lucy Allais and John Callanan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157-175. -/- Thanks to all the original publishers of these articles for permitting them to be reprinted in translation here. Photo cover: pluspointsphere(.com). (shrink)

Kant’s comments on sexuality are commonly found to be at best perplexing and at worst extraordinarily unenlightened and morally offensive. In this paper, I start by reconstructing what seems to be Kant’s view on sexuality as well as providing an overview of the main, existing Kantian philosophical responses and alternative proposals to this account. In the last part of the paper, I outline a new Kantian approach to sexuality that overcomes the shortcomings of both Kant’s own and the existing Kantian (...) accounts. (shrink)

I start this paper by addressing Kant’s question why rightful interactions require both domestic public authorities (or states) and a global public authority? Of central importance are two issues: first, the identification of problems insoluble without public authorities, and second, why a domestic public monopoly on coercion can be rightfully established and maintained by coercive means while a global public monopoly on coercion cannot be established once and for all. In the second part of the paper, I address the nature (...) of the institutional structure of individual states and of the global authority. Crucial here, I argue, is Kant’s distinction between private and public right. Private right concerns rightful relations between individual legal subjects, where public right concerns their claims on their public institutions. I propose that the distinction between private and public right should be central to liberal critiques of current legal and political developments in the global sphere. (shrink)

By setting the focus on issues of dependence and embodiment, feminist work has and continues to radically improve our understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy as one that is not (as it typically has been taken to be) about disembodied abstract rational agents. This paper outlines this positive development in Kant scholarship in recent decades by taking us from Kant’s own comments on women through major developments in Kant scholarship with regard to the related feminist issues. The main aim is to (...) provide an overview of the philosophical resources already available in the literature as well as a sense of where main interpretive and philosophical challenges currently lie. More specifically, I start with a brief summary of the kinds of statements Kant makes about women that give rise to the many interpretive and philosophical puzzles facing anyone who reads his philosophy carefully. I then provide a brief historical overview of many of the pioneering women Kant scholars who made it possible for there to be so many excellent women scholars in the Kant community today and for firmly establishing the condition of woman as a point of inquiry on the philosophical map. The last section is organized in themes to give the reader a sense of the current, related discussions. I provide an overview of the more recent literature regarding Kant on women, embodiment (sexual objectification, sexual activity, sexual violence, abortion), care relations (marriage, dependents, servants), and systemic injustice (poverty, sex work, and oppression). As we will see, these many engagements with Kant’s philosophy not only help us to better understand our inherited women-undermining and problematic dependency-furthering institutions and practices, but also provide ample philosophical resources that can be utilized in our efforts to envision the project of reform such that we can achieve a better future for each and all. (shrink)

In Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” there is a philosophical and interpretive puzzle surrounding the translation of a key concept: Gewalt. Should we translate it as “force,” “power,” or “violence”? This raises both general questions in Kant’s legal-political philosophy as well as puzzles regarding Kant’s definitions of “barbarism,” “anarchy,” “despotism,” and “republic” as the four possible political conditions. First, I argue that we have good textual reasons for translating Gewalt as “violence”—a translation which has the advantage that it answers these questions (...) and puzzles convincingly. Translating Gewalt as “violence” has two further, somewhat surprising advantages. It allows us to explain how human beings can be caught in situations with no morally good ways out, and it gives us an ideal Kantian refutation of the death penalty. I then explore Kant’s account of the establishment of public authorities by means of an analogy between the birth and development of a natural person (a human being) and an artificial one (a state). This analogy helps to clarify the difference between the necessary coercive element involved in ideally establishing a state and the likely violence involved in actually establishing one. The third and final section uses the ideas of barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic to identify four different types of political forces operating at any given time in actual historical societies. Once we use Kant’s theory to improve our understanding of the various challenges our historical societies present, we also realize the importance and usefulness of philosophical precision when we translate Gewalt as “violence” and correctly define barbarism, anarchy, despotism, and republic. (shrink)

This paper considers why obtaining and sustaining a good sexual life tends to be so challenging and why the temptation to settle for a bad one can be so alluring. We engage these questions by cultivating ideas found in the traditions of feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex and love in dialogue with the works of two unlikely, canonical bedfellows—Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. We propose that some sources of these challenges and temptations are patterned and manifold in that (...) they involve trying to transform, develop, integrate certain unruly emotional structures in oneself, including together with others. Other equally patterned and unruly sources track inherited oppressive or oppressed behaviors and feelings that make emotionally healthy, morally responsible realizations of sexual ways and being more difficult for all parties involved. In contrast to these patterned challenges, some difficulties that face us stem from the fact that humans are genuinely different from one another and evolving—individually, jointly, and collectively—in their sexual needs and wants. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an interpretation of Kant’s conception of free speech. Free speech is understood as the kind of speech that is constitutive of interaction respectful of everybody’s right to freedom, and it requires what we with John Rawls may call ‘public reason’. Public reason so understood refers to how the public authority must reason in order to properly specify the political relation between citizens. My main aim is to give us some reasons for taking a renewed interest (...) in Kant’s conception of free speech, including his account public reason. Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the public guarantee of reliable media and universal education. (shrink)

Published in Studi Kantiani, XXXV: 27-48, 2022. The lack of due attention to the environment in the (Kantian) Western analytic philosophical canon is, this paper starts by arguing, puzzling and disturbing. Exploring reasons why and how philosophy lost its way regarding the environment, as well as the question of how to envision better ideals within a Kantian framework, is the topic of Part 1. I set the stage by drawing on relevant ideas from the work of Hannah Arendt before turning (...) to Kantian scholarship and Kant’s practical philosophy explicitly. Part 2 pushes the analysis further by proposing that, contrary to what many think, modern environmental disasters and modern oppression are not independent phenomena; they are, rather, interrelated. Hence, not only has modernity driven the destruction of the environment (biological life and natural earthly phenomena), but it has also resulted in the subjection of any group of people whose way of life is existentially deeply influenced by, appreciative of, or admiring of earthly being to new levels of suffering, the worst of which are best described as totalizing living death. To bring the existential suffering, especially of oppressed people, attendant to modern environmental destruction into the purview of Kantian philosophy, I propose we revisit and redeploy Kant’s account of depravity. (shrink)

An enduring source of skepticism towards Kant’s practical philosophy is his deep conviction that morality must be understood in terms of universality. Whether we look to Kant’s fundamental moral principle (the Categorical Imperative) or to his fundamental principle of right (the Universal Principle of Right), universality lies at the core of the analyses. A central worry of his critics is that by making universality the bedrock of morality in these ways, Kant fails to appreciate the importance of difference in individual (...) lives, societies, and legal-political institutions when these are realized well. Below I argue that Kant’s philosophy neither advocates moralized hyper-reflective, alienating ways of being nor seeks to justify Kant’s own and others’ prejudices in the name of morality’s universality. To see this, we need to understand both Kant’s account of human nature – of the predisposition to good and the propensity to evil – and how Kant’s theory of freedom sets the moral framework within which important non-moralizable concerns of human nature are accommodated. We can then appreciate the ways in which Kant sees both unreflective and reflective normative elements as working together as an integrated whole in emotionally healthy, morally good human beings, historical cultures, and legal-political institutional systems. (shrink)

This paper provides a Kantian interpretation of core issues involved in the trial following the terrorist attacks that struck Norway on July 22nd 2011. After a sketch of the controversies surrounding the trial itself, a Kantian theory of why the wrongdoer’s mind struck us as so endlessly disturbed is presented. This Kantian theory, I proceed by arguing, also helps us understand why it was so important to respond to the violence through the legal system and to treat the perpetrator, Anders (...) Behring Breivik, so respectfully before, during, and after the trial. I close by addressing the controversial issue now facing Norway: how capable is the Norwegian legal system to deal with cases involving extreme violence, including as committed by psychologically impaired mass murderers? (shrink)

Overview over some core themes re: Kantian autonomy.

Central to Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia is a defense of the legitimacy of the minimal state’s use of coercion against anarchist objections. Individuals acting within their natural rights can establish the state without committing wrongdoing against those who disagree. Nozick attempts to show that even with a natural executive right, individuals need not actually consent to incur political obligations. Nozick’s argument relies on an account of compensation to remedy the infringement of the non-consenters’ procedural rights. Compensation, however, cannot remedy (...) the infringement, for either it is superfluous to Nozick’s account of procedural rights, or it is made to play a role inconsistent with Nozick’s liberal voluntarist commitments. Nevertheless, Nozick’s account of procedural rights contains clues for how to solve the problem. Since procedural rights are incompatible with a natural executive right, Nozickeans can argue that only the state can enforce individuals’ rights without wronging anyone, thus refuting the anarchist. Thanks to Annette Dufner, Arnt Myrstad, Arthur Ripstein, Gopal Sreenivasan, James Sterba, Chloe Taylor, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Shelley Weinberg. Thanks also to Matt Zwolinski and Jonelle DePetro, who commented on earlier versions of the paper at the Central APA 2007 and at the 2006 Illinois Philosophical Association Conference (respectively). Finally, thanks to my graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their active engagement with the ideas during a seminar on liberal theories of justice (fall 2007). (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two principles informing Locke’s political philosophy, namely his waste restriction and his strong voluntarism. Locke’s waste restriction is proposed as a necessary, enforceable restriction upon rightful private property holdings and it yields arguments to preserve and redistribute natural resources. Locke’s strong voluntarism is proposed as the liberal ideal of political obligations. It expresses Locke’s view that each individual has a natural political power, which can only be transferred to a political body (...) through the individual’s voluntary, actual consent. On this view, the legitimacy of a political power is dependent upon its subjects’ actual consent to its authority. After briefly outlining these two ideas informing Locke’s conception, I argue that we cannot maintain both at the same time. Therefore, contemporary Lockeans must either derive restrictions upon private property concerned with preserving natural resources from other aspects of Locke’s theory or they must accept weak voluntarism as the ideal of political obligations. I argue that both alternatives pose significant problems for the Lockean project. (shrink)

This paper engages G. A. Cohen's "Rescuing Justice and Equality." The paper was originally written as a part of the NASSP (North American Society for Social Philosophy) Book Award session in 2008.

I argue in this paper that Locke and contemporary Lockeans underestimate the problems involved in their frequent, implicit assumption that when we apply the proviso we use the latest scientific knowledge of natural resources, technology, and the economy’s operations. Problematic for these theories is that much of the pertinent knowledge used is obtained through particular persons’ labor. If the knowledge obtained through individuals’ labor must be made available to everyone and if particular persons’ new knowledge affects the proviso’s proper application, (...) then some end up without freedom to pursue their own ends and some find their freedom subject to others’ arbitrary will. (shrink)

Pregnant women and persons engaging in homosexual practices compose two groups that have been and still are amongst those most severely subjected to coercive restrictions regarding their own bodies. From an historical point of view, it is a recent and rare phenomenon that a woman’s right to abortion and a person’s right to engage in homosexual interactions are recognized. Although most Western liberal states currently do recognize these rights, they are under continuous assault from various political and religious movements. Moreover, (...) though liberal theories of justice typically defend women’s rights to abortion and people’s rights to homosexual activity, these theories often struggle to capture the fundamental ground for these rights. For example, it appears hard for the liberal to say why and when only the woman and not the embryo/fetus has rights and why the right to certain sexual practices is not on par with rights to other preferences. Contemporary liberal theories of justice, therefore, have a hard time identifying what distinguishes questions of abortion and sexual activities from other questions of right and thereby also have difficulty capturing the gravity of the wrongdoing involved in coercively restricting homosexual interactions and abortion as such. I argue that Kant’s theory of justice succeeds on both counts, because it can locate the fundamental ground for these rights in an understanding of the bodily integrity of the person. Just states will neither permit nor outlaw all abortions or sexual interactions, but rather will require all such laws to be reconcilable with the protection of each person’s right to freedom. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner connects (...) historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

RésuméCette analyse situe la théorie du soin d'Asha Bhandary, telle que définie dans Freedom to Care, dans l'histoire de la philosophie, note certaines caractéristiques distinctives de la théorie qui font clairement évoluer la tradition de la théorie du soin, et soulève des énigmes et des questions concernant des éléments spécifiques de la théorie. Mes remarques portent principalement sur la première partie du livre et sur les quatre sujets suivants : (1) les racines rawlsiennes de la théorie de Bhandary ; (2) (...) les échanges de Bhandary avec Eva Feder Kittay ; (3) le choix de Bhandary de prendre J.S. Mill et John Rawls comme principaux interlocuteurs historiques ; et enfin (4) le choix méthodologique de Bhandary de cibler les « hommes/pères », les « femmes/mères » et les « enfants/filles/garçons » dans une grande partie de son analyse. (shrink)