Helga Varden

This paper argues with Kant that the only justifiable basis for a legal system is an innate right to freedom, which is defined as the right to be subject only to universal law and not to the arbitrary choices of others. Since rightful interaction is possible only within public institutional frameworks, we cannot respect one another’s innate right to freedom simply by interacting as virtuous individuals or as just states. In fact, only public authorities can have coercive authority, the rightfulness of which is dependent upon the institutional framework constitutive of them. Of particular interest hesre is the requirement on states to provide public, institutional solutions to problems such as poverty and the failures of economic and financial systems. In addition, I pay special attention to why only the national public authority can establish a monopoly on coercion even though the establishment of a public authority is constitutive also of transnational rightful relations.

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.

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.

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.

This paper critically engages Cohen’s rejection, in Rescuing Justice and Equality, of Rawls’s conception of redistributive justice. I argue that Cohen’s reading of Rawls is flawed and that his suggested revisions to Rawls’s theory are no improvement. The better interpretation involves seeing Rawls’s project as closer to Kant’s than, as Cohen assumes, to libertarians and egalitarians of his own stripe. Once we interpret Rawls as providing a so-called “public right” account and we add Kant’s account of “private right”, Rawls escapes the problems Cohen charges him with and we obtain good reasons to side with Rawls’s Kantian liberalism against Cohen’s egalitarian anarchism.