Laurenz Ramsauer

After each of his discussions of specific ethical duties in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant adds small sections entitled ‘Casuistical questions’. These questions have received little attention so far, and existing discussions strikingly disagree about their purpose. In this article, I argue that locating Kant’s conception of moral philosophy within a longstanding tradition of ethical reflection—one aimed at shaping human character and freeing us from our own forms of self-entrapment—helps us understand the point of the discussion of casuistical questions. On my proposed reading, the casuistical questions articulate exemplary instances of the sort of moral difficulties that human beings face, which can be traced to certain sources. Like in the practice of a therapist, the first part of dealing with these difficulties lies in achieving an understanding of their origins, which, in turn, moves us closer to overcoming them.

Kant's moral thought emphasizes both our ability to make adequate, immediate moral judgment, as well as our deep‐seated forms of self‐entrapment. Strikingly, these forms of self‐entrapment are not simply the result of reason being overpowered by forces external to it, but arise out of reason itself, as pathological versions of otherwise genuine ideals of reason. Two such pathologies are false versions of the moments of Kant's enlightenment ideal. Kant's enlightenment ideal encompasses both thinking for oneself and thinking in community with others; in their pathological versions, these moments of the enlightenment ideal become the delusion of full control over one's epistemic situation through “logical egoism” and the delegation of responsibility by choosing “immaturity” vis‐à‐vis external authority. Because these pathologies of reason easily drop out of view, interpretations of Kant's enlightenment project frequently obscure the challenge of avoiding them and underestimate the difficulty of making progress toward enlightenment. In this article, I discuss both the pathologies of reason and Kant's own implicit resolution: the capacity for healthy forms of trust. Together, the two moments of enlightenment, their respective pathologies, and healthy forms of trust constitute the original dialectic of enlightenment.

Legal theorists agree widely on two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the existence of a legal system: a legal system exists if (i) legal officials adopt a critically reflective attitude toward the legal system’s foundational rule, and (ii) the substantive laws of the system are “by and large” efficacious. The latter “efficacy condition” plausibly applies to all posited law, paradigmatically including modern centralized legal systems and less paradigmatic instances like international law. And yet, philosophers have also frequently pointed out the difficulty in determining precisely what this efficacy amounts to. In this article, I argue that the persisting difficulty of explaining the efficacy of law results from three tempting but inadequate assumptions about posited law and that our basic assumptions need to be revised accordingly.

On the currently dominant reading of the Groundwork, Kant’s derivation of ‘imperatives of duty’ exemplifies a decision procedure for the derivation of concrete duties in moral deliberation. However, Kant’s response to an often-misidentified criticism of the Groundwork by G. A. Tittel suggests that Kant was remarkably unconcerned with arguing for the practicality of the categorical imperative as a decision procedure. Instead, I argue that the main aim of Kant’s derivation of imperatives of duty was to show how his analysis of the form of moral judgement is indeed presupposed in the four types of moral imperative that philosophers of his time recognized.

Immanuel Kant was possibly both the most influential racist and the most influential moral philosopher of modern, Western thought. So far, authors have either interpreted Kant as an “inconsistent egalitarian” or as a “consistent inegalitarian.” On the former view, Kant failed to draw the necessary conclusions about persons from his own moral philosophy; on the latter view, Kant did not consider non‐White people as persons at all. However, both standard interpretations face significant textual difficulties; instead, I argue that Kant's moral egalitarianism is so thin as to remain almost entirely useless as an antidote to racism.

Fichte’s ambitious project in the Foundations of Natural Right is to provide an a priori deduction of the concept of right independently from morality. So far, interpretations of Fichte’s deduction of the concept of right have persistently fallen into one of two rough categories: either they (re)interpret the normative necessity of right in terms of moral or quasi-moral normativity or they interpret right’s normative necessity in terms of hypothetical imperatives. However, each of these interpretations faces significant exegetical difficulties. By contrast, I argue that we can understand the normative necessity of right in terms of conceptual necessity. On this view, right does not tell us what ought to be done, but instead tells us what we are doing and have done. Not only does this provide for a promising philosophical account of the non-moral normativity of right, but also provides a compelling reading of Fichte’s text in both the deduction of the concept of right in the Foundations of Natural Right as well as his discussion of the application of the concept of right and coercion.

According to a persistent assumption in legal philosophy, the social rule at the foundation of a legal system (the Rule of Recognition) serves both an epistemic and a duty-imposing function. Thus, some authors have claimed that it would be a formidable problem for legal philosophy to explain how such social rules can impose duties, and some have taken it upon themselves to show how social practices might just do that. However, I argue that this orthodox assumption about the dual function of rule of recognition is ill-founded. Contrary to the orthodox view, we have no good reasons to ascribe more than an epistemic function to the rule of recognition. Accordingly, the norms deriving immediately from the rule of recognition are no different than those entailed by other epistemic, grammatical or syntactic norms. Consequently, accounts of the normativity of law need not explain how social practices like conventions or plans might impose duties on the officials of a legal system.