Jochen Bojanowski

“Fraternity” and the often synonymously used concept “solidarity” are usually understood as ideals or values that go beyond justice. It is no surprise that the liberal tradition has found it difficult to fully embrace fraternity as a political value. Fraternity as an expression of our moral motivation is beyond the sanctioning power of the liberal state. I will defend a different conception of fraternity in this article. Taking the feminist slogan “The personal is political” seriously, I’ll interpret fraternity as a foundational political value. Fraternity does not go beyond justice but is one of its constitutive elements. I do not use the term in the broad sense of “unconditional love.” The intended narrower meaning is based on the idea of a luck egalitarian interpretation of reciprocity or mutuality. This narrower notion of fraternity takes its initial clue from what I will call Rawls’s luck egalitarian insight. According to my interpretation, we take a fraternal attitude towards each other if we don’t demand undeserved distributive advantages and agree to a scheme of cooperation in which brute luck differences are not reflected in such a way that they lead to distributive advantages.

Geschwisterlichkeit wird in der Tradition des politischen Liberalismus häufig als moralischer Wert verstanden, der über das Ideal der Gerechtigkeit hinausgeht. Im Unterschied dazu argumentiert Jochen Bojanowski für ein neues Verständnis: Demnach sind wir im politischen Kontext zueinander geschwisterlich eingestellt, wenn wir einen gesellschaftlichen Kooperationsrahmen befürworten, in dem bloße Glücksunterschiede nicht in distributive Vorteile umgemünzt werden können. Ausgehend von dieser Idee entwickelt Bojanowski eine Theorie der Gerechtigkeit, der zufolge Geschwisterlichkeit einen konstitutiven Teil von Gerechtigkeit darstellt.

David Estlund holds that ultimate normative principles are insensitive to bad facts. This is a deliberately twisted appropriation of Jerry Cohen’s famous dictum that ultimate normative principles are fact-insensitive. In this paper, I will show why Estlund’s twist misses the point of Cohen’s argument. The fact-insensitivity claim is not a requirement to eliminate all facts from our normative theories because facts necessarily make these theories concessive. Instead, it may help us to locate the true origin of these concessions. In normative theorizing, we have not explained why a fact supports a principle if we fail to articulate the higher-order principle in light of which that fact is normatively significant.

Kant’s conception of autonomy has been criticised for identifying acting freely with acting morally. As a result, many Kantians have moved away from Kant’s moral conception of autonomy, instead proposing what I will call an “end-set- ting” or “two-way capacity” account of autonomy. I believe that we should resist these revisions and that doing so makes clear why it is only the capacity for moral autonomy that is of unlimited value. What fundamentally distinguishes our free capacity of volition is the fact that we are autonomous. This capacity en- ables us to have a conception of unlimited goodness that gives us the dignity, i. e. the unlimited value, that non-autonomous beings lack.

In this paper, I argue against the view, most eloquently advocated by Dieter Schönecker, that Kant is what I call a “sensualist intuitionist.” Kant’s text does not accommodate a sensualist intuitionist reading; the fact of reason is cognized by reason, not intuition. I agree with Schönecker that the feeling of respect for the moral law makes us feel its obligatory character, but I disagree that this feeling constitutes cognition of the normative content of the moral law. We do not cognize the validity of the moral law through feeling. I argue instead for what I take to be the standard view: We feel through respect for the moral law the limiting and humiliating effect that rational cognition of the moral law has on our sensibility.