Abstract
Although I quickly review Philip Rossi’s larger argument in The Ethical Commonwealth in History, my focus in this article is on the implications of Rossi’s work for our characterizations of justice and citizenship on a Kantian account. For in arguing that a wise reading of Kant’s political theory allows us better to grasp his overarching aims, Rossi provides convincing evidence for a pair of challenges to the currently popular interpretation of that theory. These address the relationship between Kant’s moral and political theories and the nature of the political task or project that Kantian citizens undertake. In challenging popular readings of these elements of Kant’s view, I suggest, Rossi supports an interpretation of Kantian political thought with particular resonance for our time.
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Notes
Philip J. Rossi, The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peacemaking as the Moral Vocation of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) (hereafter MS) in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Mary Gregor, tr., Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press), 6:355. All citations to Kant’s works provide the volume and page number of the German Academy edition. All quotations use The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy.
Rossi, 36.
Rossi, 37.
Rossi, 37.
Rossi, 37.
Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) (hereafter TPP) in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Mary Gregor, tr., Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8:346.
See TPP, 8:349–360 for Kant’s discussion of the definitive articles.
Rossi, 47, emphasis in original.
I separate these readings here not only because they address quite different aspects of Kant’s political theory, but because consistency does not require that one accept both or neither. Indeed, there are some interpreters (e.g., Mary Gregor) who take on one reading, but not the other.
One well-known and influential contemporary example is Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right,” Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays, Mark Timmons, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23–64. For a more recent discussion see my “Justice, Citizenship and the Kingdom of Ends” in Reason, Normativity and the Law: New Essays in Kantian Philosophy, Alice Pinheiro Walla and Mehmet Ruhi Demiray, eds. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020), 85–104.
See, for example, Marcus Willascheck, “Why the Doctrine of Right Does not Belong in the Metaphysics of Morals: On Some Basic Distinctions in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik 5 (1997), 205–227; Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 355–388.
Because Kant is speaking here of normative standards to which state laws and institutions should conform, I will use the term “justice” rather than “right” to describe his theory and its requirements. This, I think, better captures the concept with which Kant is grappling for contemporary, English-speaking audiences.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) (hereafter GW) in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Mary Gregor, tr., Paul Guyer, Allen W. Wood, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4:397.
Kant, MS, 6:231.
Kant, MS, 6:232.
Kant, MS, 6:231.
Kant, MS, 6:231.
Kant, MS, 6:314.
Kant, MS, 6:314.
Kant, MS, 6:314.
Although their accounts differ in detail, those advancing this reading include Mary Gregor, Laws of Freedom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) and, more recently, Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom.
Kant, MS, 6:236.
Kant, MS, 6:278.
Kant, MS, 6:362–363. Kant’s answer to this worry hardly involves what most would deem humane treatment for the offender and certainly is not one that most who see his moral theory as grounding his account of justice would endorse. Although his reasoning is, at least in part, that strict adherence to ius talionis would here be a “crime against humanity as such,” Kant recommends castration, e.g., for the rapist and permanent exile for the person guilty of bestiality.
For an analysis of Kant’s discussion of sex and marriage that offers grounds for his concerns about sexual relations in deep and legitimate worries about objectification see Barbara Herman, “Could it be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason & Objectivity, Louise M. Antony, Charlotte Witt, eds. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 49–67. For a reading of Kant’s penal theory that challenges his classification as a retributivist and suggests the beginnings of a Kant-based theory that would reject some of his own ground-level conclusions see my “Kant, Retributivism and Civic Respect” in Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy, Mark D. White, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 107–128.
Kant, MS, 6:237.
Kant, MS, 6:237–238.
See my “Justice, Citizenship and the Kingdom of Ends,” 92–99.
Kant, MS, 6:220.
Kant, MS, 6:311–313.
Kant, MS, 6:323–325.
For examples of this reading, see, e.g., Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 262–286; Howard Williams, “Towards a Kantian Theory of International Distributive Justice,” Kantian Review, 15(2), 43–77 (2010); and my Kant on Civil Society and Welfare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 47–60.
Kant, TPP, 8:349–350.
Among Kantian political philosophers who likewise make Toward Perpetual Peace central to their interpretations, see Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Howard Williams, Kant and the End of War: A Critique of Just War Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Apparent conflicts between Kant’s views in Toward Perpetual Peace and the Rechtslehre are among grounds some might offer for doubting Rossi’s integrated interpretation of Kant’s corpus, and especially his reading of Kant’s politics. Williams in particular, explicitly addresses some of these, arguing that conflicts between the views Kant expresses are indeed only seeming.
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Holtman, S. Moral Foundations, Shared Civic Projects and Rossi’s Kant. Philosophia 49, 1875–1885 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00298-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00298-z