Freedom and poverty in the Kantian state (original) (raw)

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Abstract

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

Kant, Freedom as Independence, and Democracy

While the influence of Kant’s practical philosophy on contemporary political theory has been profound, it has its source in Kant’s autonomy-based moral philosophy rather than in his freedom-based philosophy of Right. Kant scholars have increasingly turned their attention to Kant’s Rechtslehre, but they have largely ignored its potential contribution to discussions of democracy. However, Kant’s approach to political philosophy can supply unique insights to the latter. His notion that freedom and the public legal order are co-constitutive can be developed into a freedom argument for constitutional democracy. This freedom argument goes beyond freedom as moral autonomy and a libertarian idea of freedom as non-interference to a notion of freedom as a form of standing constituted by the public legal order. The trouble with other attempts to connect freedom and democracy is that they have operated with a moral ideal that is independent of a public legal order.

When the strictest right is the greatest wrong: Kant on Fairness

Estudos Kantianos [EK]

In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of the Kantian state that offers an alternative to the traditionalminimalist and to recent welfare interpretations of the Kantian state. I show that although the Kantian state has no duty to redistribute, Kant’s conception of equity or fairness (Billigkeit, MS RL VI: 234) allows the state to recognize redistribution as belonging to the ideal republic (republica noumenon), towards which all states have a non-coercible obligation to strive. I back up my interpretation with passages of the Metaphysics of Morals and of Kant’s lectures in which Kant questions the character of the duty of beneficence as a meritorious duty, given the fact that need is often the result of previous injustice of governments. The problem is that although the destitute have a right to collective aid, unlike strict right, these rights cannot be juridically enforced. This has led to the wrong conclusion that the state or the supreme commander has a duty of virtue tow...

Kant on Freedom and Obligation Under Law

2011

The article discusses the purpose of the civil condition and the obligation to move from a state of nature and asks questions about obligation in relation to the republican form of the state and on non-republican despotic forms. Immanuel Kant's position on freedom as related to obligation to law in political society will be accounted through obligation as an attribute of the free person, that a social contract cannot have a causal function and that people are morally obligated to enter the civil condition. Kant's response on how to resolve conflicts without war is through law in a civil state. It concludes that any constitutional change is a change from a state of nature to a civil condition and resistance is a necessary part of the slow progress of freedom in civil society.

Kant on Freedom

Cambridge University Press, 2023

Kant's early critics maintained that his theory of freedom faces a dilemma: either it reduces the will's activity to strict necessity by making it subject to the causality of the moral law, or it reduces the will's activity to blind chance by liberating it from rules of any kind. This Element offers a new interpretation of Kant's theory against the backdrop of this controversy. It argues that Kant was a consistent proponent of the claim that the moral law is the causal law of a free will, and that the supposed ability of free will to choose indifferently between options is an empty concept. Freedom, for Kant, is a power to initiate action from oneself, and the only way to exercise this power is through the law of one's own will, the moral law. Immoral action is not thereby rendered impossible, but it also does not express a genuine ability.

A Kantian Argument against World Poverty (European Journal of Political Theory)

Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of the first philosophers who wrote systematically about global justice and world peace. In the current debate on global justice he is mostly appealed to by critics of extensive duties of global justice. However, I show in this paper that an analysis of Kant’s late work on rights and justice provides ample resources for disagreeing with those who take Kant to call for only modest changes in global politics. Kant’s comments in the Doctrine of Right clarify that he thinks we need a coercively enforced global civil condition. But his work also contains ideas that imply that within such a global legal order there must be no extreme forms of poverty and inequality, and that the current holdings of states are by no means conclusive possessions without confirmation by the global legal order we have a duty to establish. Thus, this paper challenges the prevailing interpretation of Kant as a conservative thinker about global justice that is held, for instance, by the leading contemporary liberal thinkers such as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin.

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References (86)

Cf. Hodgson, 2013 and Mulholland, 1990: 20.
6 The closest contemporary analogue to the freedom-centered approach to poverty is Pettit, 1997: 129-170. For compar- ison of Kant and Pettit, see Hodgson, 2010b: 808-817.
I leave aside four common interpretations of the Kantian state's role in providing poverty relief. (a) The first holds that Kant is inconsistent in including redistribution within the powers of the freedom-based state. See Murphy, 1970: 145. (b) The second holds that Kant's argument is a prudential one concerning stability. In a regime that licenses huge wealth disparity, the poor will be likely to defect, meaning that over time the political order will devolve into the state of nature. See LeBar, 1999: 225-249; Murphy, 1970, 146; Williams, 1983: 196-197; Kersting, 1992: 164 n.7; Pogge, 2002: 157;
and Aune, 1979: 157, 160. For a moral rather than prudential version of the stability interpretation see Holtman, 2004: 87. (c) The third interpretation holds that poverty relief is an ethical duty of benevolence, albeit one that falls on the state rather than individuals. See O'Neill, 1989: 231-233 and Rosen, 1993: 186-202. (d) The fourth holds that the right to wel- fare is based on the value of "access to the opportunity to develop one's capacity for unconditioned purposiveness." Kaufman, 1999: 153. See also Mulholland, 1990: 20, 250-251, 317-318, 395, and Holtman, 2004: 86-106. Against posi- tions (a)-(c), I hold that Kant's remarks on poverty relief are: consistent with his overall normative project, moral rather 27 See also Ripstein, 2009: 45 and 278. This is a major subject of Ripstein, 2016. Cf. Hayek, 1960: 200. 28 This category picks out the unforeseen but foreseeable consequences of one's actions.
Ripstein's critics often ignore his account of the stages of right, thereby construing his remarks on private right as defin- itive of his understanding of the scope of the state's activity. See for example, Sangiovanni, 2012: 460-469; Valentini, 2012: 450-459; and Ebels-Duggan, 2011. In response, Ripstein insists that he is not making Kant "to be some sort of lib- ertarian, with respect to politics, unwilling to permit redistributive taxation." He rightly complains that this is to take opening presentation of the form/matter of choice distinction "to exhaust the argumentative and analytical resources available to a Kantian view," ignoring "the sequenced nature of Kant's argument," that is, the fact that public right may introduce restrictions on choice not warranted by private right. Ripstein, 2012: 488-489, and 2009: 224. For a helpful cri- tique of Sangiovanni, Valentini, and Ebels-Duggan on this point, see Zylberman, 2016: 119-120.
Toronto-Kantianism, and its fellow travelers, share this basic understanding of poverty. For example, Allais writes that for the Kantian state "poverty is inconsistent with the basic conditions of agency: having at least some basic means is necessary to survive, and to be able to make choices at all" (2014: 9). Similarly, Varden writes, "without unconditional poverty relief, des- titute citizens will find themselves without any legal access to means that are not subject to non-destitute citizens" private choices' (2014: 259). And Weinrib notes that the moral problem of poverty arises when "all the land may be appropriated by others, leaving me literally with no place to exist except by the leave of someone else," the result of which is that I must make "myself into a means for [other people's] ends, perhaps becoming their bondsman or slave" (2012: 815-816).
See Kant, 1996b: 8:295, where Kant distinguishes between natural and economic obstacles to active citizenship. I do not take up the issue of whether Kant offers a consistent definition of passive citizenship broad enough to include women, children, and workers.
See here Mulholland, 1990: 329; Beiner, 2011: 209-225; Uleman, 2004: 596; and especially Kersting, 1992: 153-154.
Varden, 2006: 271, 275 and 2015: 25-26;
Schapiro, 1999: 719-721; and Weinrib, 2008. Williams, 1983: 144-149, 178-182 and Ellis, 2008: 85-91 incorporate aspects of both the critical and exculpatory interpretations.
See Weinrib, 2008: 3, 11. John Stuart Mill provides a trenchant critique of this form of reasoning in his discussion of suf- frage in Considerations on Representative Government (Mill, 1861). And Kant himself seems to reject it in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where he argues that formerly dependent subjects' attempts at freedom "will be crude, and in general also bound to greater hardships and dangers than when still under the command but also the care of others; yet we do not ripen to freedom otherwise than through our own attempts." See Kant, 1996d: 6:188 (emphasis in original).
Of course, the master can only use the servant in ways consistent with the servant's innate right. For clarifying accounts of Kant's notion of status-relations, under which the relation between the head of household and servant falls, see Varden, 2006: 265-269, Varden, 2010, and Weinrib, 2008: 15-25.
37 Holtman helpfully points out that Kant's discussion of passive citizens gives broader content to his earlier, formal account of what it means to be sui juris (2004: 95). See also Banham, 2007: 76.
39 If the argument of this paper is correct, Kant anticipates Hegel and Marx in seeing the free market as both a partial real- ization of freedom and a potential threat to it.
Within Toronto-Kantianism, the account closest to my own is Weinrib, 2012.
41 Even if Kant's argument has this implication, it does not enjoin the withering away of the state. So resemblance to Marxism is superficial at best.
See Wood, 2014: 83-85.
For a similar proposal, see Varden, 2006: 272.
Weinrib, 1987: 503-505; Varden, 2012: 351.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify my position on whether Kant's concern for the poor implies con- cern for wealth inequality per se.
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Kant and Dependency Relations: Kant on the State's Right to Redistribute Resources to Protect the Rights of Dependents

Dialogue – Canadian Philosophical Review, 2006

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.

Kantian Right and Poverty Relief

Ethic@, 2014

I have two goals in this paper. First, I want to determine whether Kant’s justification for state programs for poverty relief in The Doctrine of Right is based on 1) Kantian duties of virtue, 2) Kantian duties of right, or instead merely on 3) instrumental arguments regarding the preservation of a State as such. I claim that the last alternative is the correct one. Second, I will argue, against Kant himself, that even his merely instrumental arguments for public programs for poverty relief are ruled out by his doctrine of right. My conclusion is that, perhaps surprisingly, the only genuinely Kantian way to provide poverty relief is privately, just as Libertarians have argued.

Kant, Coercion, and the Legitimation of Inequality

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2020

Immanuel Kant's political philosophy has enjoyed renewed attention as an egalitarian alternative to contemporary inequality since it seems to uncompromisingly reassert the primacy of the state over the economy, enabling it to defend the modern welfare state against encroaching neoliberal markets. However, I argue that, when understood as a free-standing approach to politics, Kant's doctrine of right shares essential features with the prevailing theories that legitimate really existing economic inequality. Like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Kant understands the state's function as essentially coercive and, in justifying state coercion, he adopts a narrow conception of political freedom that formally preserves the right to choose while denying that the range of choices one actually has can be a matter of justice. As a result, Kant cannot identify various forms of social pressure as potential injustices even as he recognizes their power to create and sustain troubling inequalities. For both Kant and the neoliberals, the result is that economic relations almost never count as unjust forms of coercion, no matter how unequal they are. Views that identify coercion as the trigger for duties of justice are thus particularly ill-suited to orient us to contemporary inequality.

Poverty and Property in Kant's System of Rights

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2012

Toronto. I am grateful to Hanoch Dagan, to Graham Mayeda for his research assistance and his comments, and to Arthur Ripstein for his comments and a continuing series of conversations about Kant. As part of its ongoing reading of Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals, The Law and Philosophy Discussion Group at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, considered this paper at two of its weekly sessions. I wish to thank the participants in these discussions (

A Kantian Moral Response to Poverty

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2023

Poverty is a global problem that is not only about material deprivation, but also a lack of agency and power. A Kantian response, with its focus on supporting the conditions of agency and empowerment, seems well suited to providing individuals with normative guidance on what their obligations are. The problem is that the guidance one finds within Kantian ethics is focused on the individual duty to aid or the duty to rescue, both of which have limited application in the context of a complex, wide-ranging and structural problem like poverty. Individuals, on their own, are unable to end poverty and they cannot adopt this as an end of theirs. But if they get together with enough others, things look a lot more promising. Even though a fully Kantian response to poverty requires exploring his legal philosophy and the role of the state, I focus here on the moral obligations of individuals, particularly the idea that by joining together we have increased capacity to respond and make a difference. If we start with certain assumptions about capacity and agency; namely that “ought implies can” and “only agents are duty-bearers”, it is not clear that collectives that are not (yet) agents—such as “humanity” or “the affluent” or “the poor”—are possible duty-bearers. The aim of this paper is to support a more expansive account of Kantian moral obligations in which unstructured collectives have moral duties and their individual members have duties both to help form effective collective agents, and also to fulfill their shares of the collective duty to end poverty.

A Kantian foundation for welfare rights

A Kantian foundation for welfare rights, 2019

In this article, I offer a foundation for the prima facie idea of a right to welfare based on a neglected aspect of Kant’s legal theory: his account of equity rights (aequitas, Billigkeit). I argue that these rights are not the same as the ‘moral rights’ of current literature, and that they arise as a consequence of systemic injustice. The contribution of this article is twofold: firstly, it provides an analysis and application of Kant’s underanalysed and little understood discussion of equity; secondly, it offers an alternative to contemporary accounts of welfare rights as moral rights which can better account for their juridical nature as rights.

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