Larry Krasnoff

An important contemporary debate asks whether Kant’s practical philosophy should be understood as realist or constructivist. Constructivists like Christine Korsgaard read Kant as holding that value does not exist in any independent sense, but is created through the willing of rational agents. Realists like Karl Ameriks respond that the unconditional priority of the Kantian moral law demands a more traditionally realist account of value. I examine this debate by focusing on a part of Kant’s practical philosophy where value does seem to be created or constructed: the claim that desires, though not reasons in themselves, are justified as reasons if they conform to the principle of universal law. Making sense of this claim requires a reading of the categorical imperative as itself constructed to serve as a source of reciprocal practical justification. Hence a version of the constructivist reading is correct (though not necessarily the one favored by Korsgaard).

In a well-known essay, Thomas Pogge argues that Kant’s political philosophy is not comprehensive in Rawls’ sense, since it is independent of his moral philosophy. However, Pogge understands Kant’s comprehensive liberalism as the view that his moral philosophy entails his political philosophy. I question whether this is the best way to understand comprehensive liberalism, in Kant or in general. I argue that Kant’s comprehensive moral philosophy is not an independent argument for the moral truth of liberal ideals, but a liberal way of justifying an independent commitment to politically liberal values, given that we all have values that are not political.

In the title of his 1980 Dewey Lectures, John Rawls announced that his theory of justice as fairness could be described as an example of “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (KC). Rawls flirted around 1980 with a strong commitment to Kantian autonomy, only to abandon it as unnecessary to the justification of his theory of justice. The chapter argues that this supposed opposition is based on a serious misunderstanding of Rawls's intellectual trajectory, and especially of the way he understands the Kantian elements of his theory. It shows that, against the assumptions of the familiar debates, Rawls in and after KC, consistently held that the practical aims of constructivism and the philosophical goal of a fully rational justification are not in any sort of tension. Rawls's claims in Political Liberalism and after, and especially his distinction between his political and Kant's moral constructivism, in no way undermine this argument.

What is the point of appealing to a social contract? An intuitively plausible answer is that the metaphor functions as a justification for the obligation to obey the law. If I have made a contract to establish a political authority, then I am bound to obey the commands of that authority. In a contract, my agreement creates an obligation to perform. Then only remaining question is what reasons I have to make the agreement in the first place. It would then seem that classical social contract theory is divided between those who understand our reasons to agree as prudential and those who take our reasons to be moral. But this kind of interpretation fails to make sense of Kant’s political theory, which understands our obligation to enter into a civil condition as prior to the appeal to the social contract. The original contract enters into Kant’s theory at a crucially later point, after the creation of specific political institutions. It functions as a way of reconciling these institutions with the idea of rightful coercion, by imposing normative requirements on the political reasoning of legislators and citizens. For Kant, the distinctive feature of normative political reasoning is the notion of a unified will, an idea that was already present at the start of social contract theory in Hobbes, but had yet to be properly clarified. Kant appeals to the original contract not to ground our political obligations, but to explain both the coherence and the necessity of the idea of a common will for political argument.

For a long time, Kant’s Doctrine of Right languished in relative neglect, even among Kantians. The work was best known for its uncompromising views on punishment and revolution, and for a seemingly limited and not particularly original emphasis on private property. Kant’s more interesting political claims were often said to be located elsewhere: in the third Critique (Hannah Arendt, Patrick Riley), or the structure of the critical project (Onora O’Neill). When John Rawls explained why his theory of justice could be given a ‘Kantian interpretation’, he drew on concepts found just in Kant’s moral philosophy, bypassing the Doctrine of Right entirely. In recent years, however, there has been an expanding body of work on the Doctrine of Right, by writers like B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Arthur Ripstein, Elisabeth Ellis, and Lea Ypi. Ripstein and Ellis, in particular, have sought to reframe the arguments of Kant’s text in terms more congenial to contemporary legal and political theory. But can Kant’s arguments really be applied to twenty-first-century political debates? The authors in this collection of essays explore this question in different ways, by looking at different aspects of Kant’s text. What is distinctive about Kant’s conception of the social contract, or human rights? Can a Kantian political philosophy concern itself with poverty and welfare rights? Can a Kantian affirm a conception of civil disobedience? What kind of view should a Kantian have of international relations? Can Kant’s views on punishment be reconciled with a conception of forgiveness? What would a Kantian position be in contemporary debates about marriage? The authors of this volume do not always agree with one another, but they always seek to be faithful to the text, and to understand what a political position grounded in the Doctrine of Right would look like in twenty-first-century terms.

The aim of this dissertation is to locate and defend a specifically Kantian account of political agency, one that is implicit in Kant's short essays on history. The dissertation attempts, first, to show how this account emerges from Kant's more general thinking about moral teleology, and, second, to suggest the relevance of this account for contemporary political theory. ;Part I seeks to motivate these issues by sketching the current debate in political theory between Kantian constructivists and their Nietzschean critics . I suggest that this debate--which has centered around the question of what normative commitments are necessary or desirable for political theory--will remain inconclusive unless we can understand what it means to be a political agent. ;Part II attempts to show that a suggestive answer to this question is already implicit in Kant--specifically, in the culmination of Kant's various attempts to derive the assumptions of moral teleology from the logic presupposed by a moral agent. After a general defense of Kant's strategy of argument, I examine Kant's attempts to prove the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, and to offer a naturalistic defense of historical progress grounded in the unsocial sociability of human beings. Understanding the failures of these arguments sets the stage for my defense of Kant's late essay, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Continually Progressing," in which I argue that Kant has successfully located a commitment to historical progress in the attitude of a political agent. ;Finally, Part III suggests the utility of this description of political agency for a "non-constructivist" Kantian political theory. I argue that such an approach is partially but not fully exemplified by the work of Michael Oakeshott, and I favorably contrast this approach with the constructivist Kantianism offered by Habermas

Kantian autonomy is often thought to be independent of time and place, but J. B. Schneewind in his landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that there is much to be learned by setting Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy. The distinguished authors in the collection continue Schneewind's project by relating Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors and to the empirical context of human agency. This will be a valuable resource for professionals and advanced students in philosophy, the history of ideas, and the history of political thought.

This book introduces Hegel's best-known and most influential work, Phenomenology of Spirit, by interpreting it as a unified argument for a single philosophical claim: that human beings achieve their freedom through retrospective self-understanding. In clear, non-technical prose, Larry Krasnoff sets this claim in the context of the history of modern philosophy and shows how it is developed in the major sections of Hegel's text. The result is an accessible and engaging guide to one of the most complex and important works of nineteenth-century philosophy, which will be of interest to all students and teachers working in this area

According to a familiar criticism, liberal pluralism is undermined by the special value which liberals give to autonomy. This special value is then undermined by the very exercise of autonomy in practical judgement, since rational agents ought to give priority to values they have judged to be worthy, not to autonomy. This criticism presupposes an over-theoretical view of practical judgement which overlooks our need to integrate our diverse practical judgements into our lives. I explain this integration through a conception of autonomy as the ability of a plurality to act in common. Drawing on Rawls' account of overlapping consensus, I argue that this view fits not only cases of collective activity, but also cases of individuals making life-structuring commitments. Understanding the essential connection between autonomy and plurality reveals what is mistaken about the familiar criticism of liberalism

Kant's relation to Hobbesian voluntarism has recently become a source of controversy for the interpretation of Kant's practical philosophy. Realist interpreters, most prominently Karl Ameriks, have attacked the genealogies of Kantian autonomy suggested by J. B. Schneewind and Christine Korsgaard as misleadingly voluntarist and unacceptably anti-realist. In this debate, however, there has been no real discussion of Kant's own views about Hobbes. By examining the relation of Hobbes' voluntarism to a kind of conventionalism, and through a reading of Kant's most explicit discussion of Hobbes, in “Theory and Practice,“ 1 I argue that Kant's criticism of Hobbes is much more limited than it might first appear. Rather than rejecting Hobbes' voluntarism and conventionalism entirely, Kant ends up criticizing only Hobbes' understanding of the relation between these doctrines. The essay thus defends Schneewind's and Korsgaard's histories of modern moral philosophy, and raises doubts about realist readings of Kant's practical philosophy