Vinicius Carvalho

Kant claims that every human being has an innate right to freedom. While most interpreters treat this right as foundational to his Doctrine of Right, Kant’s argument for it has received significantly less attention. Among those who do discuss it, a prominent view (which I call the value reading) holds that the right to freedom is grounded in the value of humanity, conceived as the capacity to set and pursue ends. In this paper, I challenge this reading on textual and systematic grounds. Drawing on Kant’s repeated characterizations of freedom as an axiom of Right, I propose a novel interpretation of his argument: rather than being grounded in a value, the innate right to freedom functions as a condition of possibility for the system of mutually coercible obligations that Kant calls Right. Moreover, while on the value reading justified laws are taken to place justified restrictions on freedom, I show that on Kant’s republican conception of freedom subjection to the coercive laws of a just state constitutes external freedom.

Many interpreters have recently defended constitutivist interpretations of Kant's moral theory, but they have largely overlooked the most prominent challenge to constitutivism: the shmagency objection. In this paper, I argue that Kant employs a form of constitutivism in the Groundwork not to vindicate the authority of morality to a sceptic, but rather with the aim of explaining how categorical imperatives can bind rational agents given the nature of practical reason. As such, his view is immune to the challenge posed by the shmagency objection. By distinguishing between normative and explanatory scepticism, this paper shows that the objection only threatens constitutivist views that address the former, thereby shedding light on a fundamental difference between Kant and contemporary constitutivists in terms of their metaethical ambitions.

Kant clearly endorses some version of the ‘old formula of the schools’, according to which all volition is sub ratione boni. There has been a debate whether he holds this only for morally good actions. I argue that a closer look at the distinction between the good and the agreeable does not support this conclusion. Considering Kant’s account of the detrimental and the correct use of this thesis, I argue that rational beings always will sub ratione boni, even when they act immorally, because they act on principles. I argue that Kant’s accounts of self-love and self-conceit support this view.