Micha Glaeser

Joseph Raz holds that, whereas a commander in issuing her command intends to impose an obligation on the commandee, a requester in making her request purports to create a pro tanto reason for the requestee through her act of request. Chapter 2 uses a series of examples to develop a set of “formal constraints on the concept of request” and then uses these constraints to argue that Raz’s account of request does justice to neither the relation between requester and requestee nor to that between a requester and her own request. The chapter then marshals elements from Kant’s ethics and Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on testimony in order to articulate an alternative conception of the normative structure of request, one according to which request should be understood in terms of a principle obligating requester and requestee to jointly harmonize their ends.

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia contains one of the earliest and best-known criticisms of John Rawls’s theory of justice in general and the difference principle in particular. The discussion of Nozick’s critique of Rawls in the literature has focused on his argument against “patterned” conceptions of justice, of which the difference principle as Nozick understands it constitutes merely one version among others. In this article I consider the objection Nozick raises against the difference principle specifically, namely that it unfairly favors the “worse endowed” over the “better endowed” members of society. I argue that Nozick’s charge of unfairness against the difference principle is ambiguous between two distinct interpretations of the difference principle and as such divides into two distinct objections, the pre-cooperative and the cooperative fairness objection. I then argue that neither of these two interpretations of the difference principle represents the actual, Rawlsian difference principle accurately and that, more fundamentally, Nozick lacks the concept of politics as the distinctive moral category implicitly at work in Rawls’s theory of justice. Not as much of Nozick’s charge of unfairness against the difference principle therefore remains on reflection as may have appeared at first sight.

One of the few points of consensus in the Kantian literature is that Kant’s Moral Law is binding universally and unconditionally. Hence, the Moral Law is binding for all human agents (universally) irrespective of the agents’ particular interests (unconditionally). Whether or not we intend to act on the Moral Law, this is the law we ought to follow. Beyond this point of consensus, however, even the most important details are matters of controversy. What exactly does the Moral Law require of us? What, if anything, grounds its bindingness? In particular, does Kant argue that the Moral Law is binding because it is ‘self-legislated’? What is the relation between the Moral Law (supreme principle of morality) and substantive moral laws such as the law that we ought to promote the happiness of others? What does Kant mean by his claim that the will has autonomy? In the four articles discussed in this special issue, Kleingeld proposes novel answers to these questions. This introduction presents the articles and brings to the fore the larger theme tying them all together.