Andrew Israelsen

The relationship between Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” and his broader moral philosophy is a fraught one, with some readers insisting that the two domains are mutually supporting parts of a cohesive practical philosophy and others arguing for their conceptual and legislative independence. In this paper I investigate the reasons for this disparity and argue that both main interpretive camps are mistaken, for Kant’s Rechtslehre can neither be reconciled to his moral philosophy nor stand on its own. I argue that this failure results from Kant’s confused attempt to define the sphere of right as one that functions independently of the moral domain through the construction of non-moral yet categorical imperatives. The result is a fundamental tension in Kant’s text that can only be solved through either collapsing juridical duties into broad moral duties or denying any categorical status to duties of right.

The goal of this paper is to explicate the theological and epistemological elements of John Locke's moral philosophy as presented in the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ and ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’. Many detractors hold that Locke's moral philosophy is internally inconsistent due to his seeming commitment to both the intellectualist position that divinely instituted morality admits of pure rational demonstration and the competing voluntarist claim that we must rely for our moral knowledge upon divine revelation. In this paper I argue that Locke is guilty of no such contradiction. In doing so, I attempt to accommodate Locke's position in the ‘Essay’ that moral principles are demonstrable a priori with his views on the sanctity of Christian revelation. I then consider Locke's conception of moral ideas as a species of mixed modes, or arbitrarily constructed complex ideas, and attempt to navigate the mechanism whereby human understanding can recognize these ideas as conforming to, or straying from, divinely appointed natural law. I conclude that despite Locke's failure to actually provide a full-fledged moral theory, he lays a rationally coherent groundwork for the fulfilment of such a project that accommodates a-priori rational reflection and divine revelation as complementary paths to moral understanding