I The Unresolved Problem of the
Grundlegung
The
announced aim of Kant's moral philosophy, as stated most clearly and
unambiguously in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,
is to discover unconditionally valid principles of practical reason. Kant
conceives his task as falling into three parts, exactly corresponding to the
three Sections of the Foundations. First, he must identify and state the Moral
Law, the highest principle of practical reason, by which all rational agents,
merely in virtue of being rational agents, are bound. Secondly, he must demonstrate that the Highest
Moral Principle can be derived, entirely a priori, from a conceptual analysis
of Practical Reason. Finally, in light of the teaching of the First Critique,
Kant must connect up his conclusions concerning the principles guiding the
choices of rational agents with our experience of ourselves as causally
determined beings in the realm of appearance.
In sum,
then, the Foundations attempts to identify and state the principle governing the
actions of rational agents; to derive that principle from an a priori analysis
of rational agency, thereby proving that all rational agents, simply in virtue
of their rational agency, necessarily act out of respect for that principle;
and to demonstrate that we, as conditioned beings in the realm of appearance,
must act as though we know ourselves to be rational agents, even though such
knowledge is, strictly speaking, unavailable to us.
It is, of
course, a matter of considerable controversy whether Kant succeeds in achieving
all three, or indeed any, of these goals. The first is the least controversial,
for it merely involves showing that Kant and his audience of North Prussian
Pietists share a belief in a particularly rigoristic formalism. The achievement
of the third goal, involving as it does the entire complex metaphysical and
epistemological theoretical structure of the First Critique, is best left to one
side in a discussion such as this. But the second of Kant's undertakings
warrants our closest attention, for it is here that we find the greatest
controversy arising among students of Kant's moral philosophy.
The
controversy surrounding Kant's derivation of the Categorical Imperative
concerns not the validity of the derivation but its significance. Many students
of Kant's philosophy, and more broadly many students of moral and political
philosophy, will readily grant that some principle of formal consistency of
willing can be derived a priori from
an analysis of agency and rationality as such. What makes Kant's moral theory so
controversial, especially in regard to his second undertaking, is the
extraordinary claim that the purely a priori formal principle of consistency in
willing is sufficient to identify, from among the host of possible moral rules,
just those which reason commands, and which therefore constitute the substance
of morality.
Kant
actually tries three times in the Foundations to establish the universal
validity of unconditional moral principles. The first attempt is the famous
four examples of the Categorical Imperative.
Kant's arguments against suicide and self-indulgent laziness are
hopelessly inadequate. Both make explicit and utterly unjustified appeal to the
supposed objective natural purpose of some human capacity or psychological
tendency. The argument concerning ungenerosity is rather interesting, but it is
ultimately inadequate. For a variety of reasons, most scholarly and philosophical
attention has focused on the second argument, concerning false promising.
The
standard reconstruction of the false promising example, with which I entirely
agree, is to construe promising as a social practice defined by a system of
implicit, but clearly understood, rules, among which rather prominently featured
is a rule against false promising. On this view, when I utter the words "I
promise" in the appropriate social context, I am implicitly endorsing, or
committing myself to, or willing, in Kant's language, the entire system of
rules that constitute the practice of promising. But it takes only a little
reflection to recognize that the injunction against false promising is not
actually a categorical substantive moral command. Rather, it is hypothetical in
form. What Kant's argument, suitably reconstructed, demonstrates is that false
promising is incompatible with the practice of promise-making, from which it
follows that we must, in all consistency, choose either not to endorse,
participate in, and commit ourselves to the practice of promising or else choose
not to make false promises. But there is nothing in Kant's argument to dissuade
us from forswearing the institution of promising altogether. The crucial point
is that Kant has no plausible a priori
argument in support of the claim that a rational agent will necessarily enter
into the practice of promising, or more generally into whatever overarching
practice is implicit in the truthful use of language, from which the obligation
in particular to participate in the practice of promise-making might be
derived. In effect, Kant is at this point in his exposition unwittingly
assuming that the agents of whom he is speaking have some minimal commitment to
honorable social interaction with which, as he quite rightly argues, false
promising is logically incompatible. To the thorough reprobate who simply
rejects such a commitment, however, Kant has no valid objection.
Thus,
Kant's first two attempts to extract substantive moral principles from his purely
formal analysis of rational willing fail because of two fundamental problems:
First, his failure to demonstrate that rational agents have a standing,
unconditional obligation to enter into, or participate in, rule-governed social
practices in the context of which the notion of contradictory willing can be
fleshed out and given substance; and Second, his failure to identify obligatory
ends, adoption of which follows necessarily from the mere fact of being a
rational agent, and the existence of which would, in a different but equivalent
way, provide substantial content for the purely formal principle of consistency
in willing. Kant's third attempt in the Foundations is directed precisely at
compensating for both of these failures - namely, his invocation of the social
contract tradition of political theory under the guise of what he calls a
"Realm of Ends."
By
"realm" I understand the systematic union of different rational
beings through common laws. Because laws determine ends with regard to their
universal validity, if we abstract from the personal difference of rational
beings and thus from all content of their private ends, we can think of a whole
of all ends in systematic connection, a whole of rational beings as ends in
themselves as well as of the particular ends that each may set for himself.
This is a realm of ends, which is possible on the aforesaid principles. For all
rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat himself and
all others never merely as means but in every case also as an end in himself.
Thus there arises a systematic union of rational beings through common
objective laws. This is a realm that may be called a realm of ends (certainly
only an ideal), because what these laws have in view is just the relation of these
beings to each other as ends and means.
A rational being belongs to the realm
of ends as a member when he gives universal laws in it while also himself
subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when he, as legislating,
is subject to the will of no other. The rational being must regard himself
always as legislative in a realm of ends possible through the freedom of the
will, whether he belongs to it as member or as sovereign. He cannot maintain
the latter position merely through the maxims of his will but only when he is a
completely independent being without need and with power adequate to his will.
Morality,
therefore, consists in the relation of every action to that legislation through
which alone a realm of ends is possible. It must be able to arise from his
will, whose principle then is to take no action according to any maxim which
would be inconsistent with its being a universal law and thus to act only so
that the will through its maxims could regard itself at the same time as universally
lawgiving.
This
language is, of course, a direct echo of Rousseau's characterization of the
republic brought into existence by the social contract. It specifies the
procedure by which a collection of self-interested individuals can transform
themselves into a republic by entering into the mutual agreement referred to as
a social contract.
At the
close of the Foundations, despite Kant's introduction of the evocative notion
of humanity as an end in itself, and his invocation of a Rousseauean conception
of a republic regulated by a social contract, we are left with the two problems
outlined earlier: First, how to demonstrate that rational agents as such must,
in all consistency, enter into collective agreements that establish structures
of social practices in the context of which substantial meaning can be given to
the notion of contradictory willing; and Second, how to demonstrate that
rational agents who have thus constituted themselves a realm of ends or
republic will, qua rational, arrive
at a single universal, necessary, and therefore objective set of substantive
laws as the content of their collective rational willing.
Kant's most
successful attempt to solve these two problems appears not in the Foundations
but in the Metaphysics o f Morals for which the earlier work is intended
as a foundation or groundwork. Before turning to that text, however, it might
be worth pausing for a moment to observe the relationship between the
unresolved problems just stated and the work of the most prominent contemporary
political theorist, John Rawls. In his widely read work, A Theory of Justice,
Rawls undertakes to demonstrate that rationally self-interested individuals,
placed in a situation designed to mimic that of noumenal agents, will necessarily
choose to commit themselves to a set of general principles regulating the basic
structure of any society of which they may be members. By virtue of the
conditions of deliberation - characterized fancifully by Rawls as consisting in
a "veil of ignorance" - the choices made by these individuals will be
universal and necessary, hence objective, and will at the same time be
sufficiently specific to yield substantive social imperatives.
Rawls'
treatment differs fundamentally from that of Kant, of course, inasmuch as Rawls
posits rationally self-interested, which is to say in Kant's language
heteronymous, individuals. Nevertheless,
as Rawls has refined and revised his theory, he has moved more and more in the
direction of a Kantian reinterpretation of his central ideas. Rawls' theory is
a good deal more technically sophisticated than Kant's, involving as it does
notions drawn from modern neo-classical economic theory and the branch of
mathematics known as Game Theory. But, not surprisingly, Kant's theory is a
great deal more profound than Rawls', for whereas Rawls posits a society of
rationally self-interested agents, thereby giving up entirely any attempt to
identify unconditional principles of morality, Kant holds firm to the idea of
rational agents as such, abstracting even from their self-interest, and
appealing only to what can be derived from their character as agents, which is
to say from the fact that they possess practical reason.
II. The
Resolution of the Problem in the Rechtslehre
It is in
Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, the "Theory of Right" or
"Theory of Justice" [Rechtslehre] that Kant finally mounts a
full-scale frontal assault on the problems left unresolved at the end of the
Foundations. This fact - assuming for a moment that my reading of the situation
is correct - has a very interesting significance. Contrary to Kant's own
conception of the relationship between his moral and political theory, it would
appear that they are not separate and co-equal branches of the Metaphysics of
Morals. Rather, they are a single integrated theory, in which the central
thesis of the political theory is required to complete the argument of the
moral theory. In this regard, it is suggestive to compare Kant both with
Rousseau, who influenced him, and with Rawls, whom he in turn influenced.
Kant begins
the Rechtslehre by introducing the concept of justice. In a section entitled
"What is Justice?" he writes:
The
concept of justice, insofar as it relates to an obligation corresponding to it
(that is, the moral concept of justice), applies [only under the following
conditions]. First, it applies only to the external and - what is more -
practical relationship of one person to another in which their actions can
exert an influence on each other (directly or indirectly). Second, the concept
applies only to the relationship of a will to another person's will, not to his
wishes or desires (or even just his needs), which are the concern of acts of
benevolence and charity. Third, the concept of justice does not take into consideration
the matter of the will, that is, the end that a person intends to accomplish by
means of the object that he wills; for example, we do not ask whether someone
who buys wares from me for his own business will profit from the transaction.
Instead, in applying the concept of justice we take into consideration only the
form of the relationship between the wills insofar as they are regarded as
free, and whether the action of one of them can be conjoined with the freedom
of the other in accordance with a universal law.
Justice
is therefore the aggregate of those conditions under which the will of one
person can be conjoined with the will of another in accordance with a universal
law of freedom.
Thus, as Kant states two paragraphs later, "the
universal law of justice is: act externally in such a way that the free use of
your will is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to a universal
law."
Kant
glosses this, almost immediately, as follows:
[T]he concept of justice can be held to
consist immediately of the possibility of the conjunction of universal
reciprocal coercion with the freedom of everyone. Just as justice in general
has as its object only what is external in actions, so strict justice, inasmuch
as it contains no ethical elements, requires no determining grounds of the will
besides those that are purely external, for only then is it pure and not
confused with any prescriptions of virtue.
There are a
number of problems in Kant's doctrine here, arising principally from his insistence
on speaking as though the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal [or
the internal and the external, as he puts it here] can actually be drawn within
experience. All such claims, implicit or otherwise, are, of course, strictly
incompatible with the teaching of the First Critique. The real difficulty for my present purposes
is the fact that this conception of justice as justified universal reciprocal
coercion does not provide the unconditional a priori substantive content for
moral principles for which we are searching.
The
problem, very simply, is that despite the appearance of Kant's formulation,
which is cast in categorical language, the injunction is still hypothetical. IF
you choose to coerce others, THEN you yourself must submit to a like coercion.
Note, by the way, that it is as yet unclear how narrowly this injunction
constrains us, even should we choose to coerce. It would appear that there is a
very wide range of reciprocal coercions compatible with the injunction,
including some that Kant would presumably not find attractive. For example,
would his principle be compatible with a system of laws that authorizes blood
feuds and duels?
But even if
Kant can demonstrate that a group of individuals, by committing themselves to
the fundamental principle of justice, thereby so severely constrain their
subsequent legislative choices that only a single system of laws is compatible
with that principle, that system will still have a merely hypothetical status,
for it will command only those who have chosen to enter into the social
contract. What Kant needs - what he has needed from the very start - is an
argument designed to show that failure to enter a social contract can only
issue from an internal contradiction in willing. In short, Kant must show that
a rational agent as such necessarily seeks to enter into a social contract, and
does so as soon as possible.
To return
for a moment to the failed example of false promising from the Foundations,
if Kant could show that the institution of promising is required by the
fundamental principle of justice [not, one would imagine, too difficult a
task], and if Kant could also show that a rational agent as such necessarily
enters a social contract, then he could conclude that rational agents as such
are not only, in all consistency, required by mere reason alone to keep such
promises as they make, but that they are also required, by the dictates of a
priori reason, to adopt the practice of promise-making. He then really could
conclude, as he wishes to, that false promising is an example of contradictory
willing all the way down.
I do not
believe that Kant accomplishes these extraordinary tasks. If I did, I would, in
all consistency, forthwith embrace his ethical theory. But I think I can show
that he makes an extremely imaginative stab at the second of them in the Rechtslehre,
where, as I shall suggest, he advances an argument designed to show that we
have an unconditional obligation to enter a social contract.
The key to
his argument is the concept of property.
An object is mine de jure (meum juris) if I
am so bound to it that anyone else who uses it without my consent thereby
injures me. The subjective condition of the possibility of the use of an object
is possession.
An
external thing is mine, however, only if I can assume that it is still possible
for me to be injured by someone else's use of the thing even when it is not in
my possession. Consequently, there would be a self-contradiction in the concept
of possession if it did not have two meanings, namely sensible possession and
intelligible possession- Sensible possession means the physical possession of
an object, whereas intelligible possession means the purely de jure possession
of the same object.
Kant goes on to discuss the distinction between sensible and
intelligible possession in ways that are thoroughly problematic, involving as
they seem to the legitimacy of a distinction between the phenomenal and the
noumenal within experience. We can leave that difficulty aside for our
purposes, for it is of course the concept of intelligible possession, or
possession de jure, that is relevant.
Almost immediately, Kant states what he calls the Juridical Postulate of
Practical Reason, which asserts that "it must be possible to have any and
every external object of my will as my property." In other words, as Kant explains, "a
maxim according to which, if it were made into a law, an object of will would
have to be in itself (objectively) ownerless (res nullius) conflicts with Law
and justice.”
Before
analyzing how Kant justifies this postulate, and uses it to accomplish his
fundamental aim in his moral theory, it is worth pausing to remind ourselves
just what is being claimed here, for a great deal of contemporary importance is
at stake. It is not too much to say that Kant is here laying the groundwork for
the refutation of all manner of environmentalist and ecological doctrines, as
well as a number of nationalist doctrines based upon a conception of the
objectively privileged territory, homeland, or place of a people. Kant himself,
of course, is looking backward, not forward. His intention is to destroy the
last vestiges of feudalism, and lay the groundwork for a thoroughly rational
commodification of natural objects.
What the
principle says is that anything can, in principle, be someone's possession.
There is nothing unownable. It does not follow, needless to say, that
everything is actually owned; only that there is nothing - no tree, no river,
no plot of land, no species of animal or plant, no planet, no solar system -
that by its nature resists ownership, that is such that it cannot be the
rightful possession of some individual or group of individuals. And possession
here implies rightful use of the possessed thing, by the owner, in pursuit of
the owner's purposes, and also alienation or legal transfer of the possession
of the possessed thing to another rational agent.
Needless to
say, this conception flies in the face of the pre-capitalist traditions against
which Kant is arguing. To suggest that the Earl of Northumberland owns
Northumberland, and can sell it to the King of France, should he choose, is
fundamentally to undermine the notion of hereditary family possession implied
in the familiar allusion to the Earl as simply "Northumberland," as
in one of Shakespeare's plays. Donald Trump, on the other hand, can perfectly
well sell the Trump Shuttle to Delta, should he find himself a bit short of
cash.
In a more
modern vein, any suggestion that the human race stands in a symbiotic, or
fiduciary, or other moral relationship to nature is completely incompatible
with Kant's Postulate. Equally incompatible, of course, is any form of
religious or quasi-religious privileging of species or things other than the
human species or other species of rational agents, should they exist. In the
coin of Kant's Realm of Ends, the principle "Treat humanity always as an
end, and never simply as a means" is inscribed on the obverse. On the
reverse, however, is found the correlative principle, "Anything else may
be treated as a means only."
Kant now
offers an extremely strong interpretation of the concept of intelligible
possession. "A thing is externally mine," he says, "if it is
such that any prevention of my use of it would constitute an injury to me even
if it is not in my possession (that is, I am not the holder of the
object)." What Kant is speaking of here, as he indicates immediately, is
intelligible possession, or de jure
possession. The language might lead us to conclude that Kant is deliberately
trying to construct a justification for the most thoroughgoingly unregulated
period of capitalist expansion, but that would be a trifle hasty, I think.
Kant's Postulate is perfectly compatible with positive legislation to constrain
the ways in which property owners deal with their property - zoning laws, and
so forth. What the Postulate says is that all such laws must be acts of a
legislature constituted by a social contract. They cannot be deduced,
independently of legitimate legislation, from the nature of the objects themselves.
It is not that an owner must be allowed to do with his or her property whatever
he or she wills, but that such freedom must at least be possible, in order for
there to be de jure possession.
Having
defined the concept of de jure
possession, Kant immediately makes what is for him, by this late stage in the
unfolding of his system, an entirely predictable move. He asks for a deduction
of the concept of purely de jure
possession of an external object [what he calls, parenthetically, possessio noumenon). That is to say, he
seeks to show that the concept finds legitimate employment, indeed must find
legitimate employment, within the realm of experience.
Put as
simply and clearly as I am able, Kant's argument for the possibility of de jure possession is this: Since I am a
phenomenal being - since I am, in other words, a rational agent that manifests
its agency in the realm of appearance - my will at least potentially requires
the cooperation of nature for the fulfillment of its purposes, whatever they may
turn out to be. Even if I adopt the extreme stoicism of an Epictetus, seeking
only virtue and not the powers or pleasures of the world, nevertheless I shall
find myself compelled to employ some portions of nature as means to my ends.
But the laws of nature are such that I can use a portion of
nature as a means to my ends only by appropriating it, and thereby excluding
others from a like appropriation of those same portions. In short, for the
accomplishment of what I will, for the enactment of my maxims, I require
property.
Were I an
incorporeal being, not manifesting my agency in space and time, I might have
neither the need for, nor indeed the possibility of, property. Imagine, for
example, that I were merely a noumenal
rational agent whose acts consisted in the contemplation of pure ideas or the
endless elaboration of the relationships among abstract logical constructs. In that case, my appropriation of modus ponens or the law of the excluded
middle would in no way exclude others, for the contemplation of a timeless
truth of logic does not require that others be denied its use or enjoyment. But
because we are phenomenal beings whose agency is manifested in space and time,
my appropriation at least potentially excludes you.
Kant's
argument thus far can be summarized in a series of conditionals, preceded by a
declarative assertion that comes as close as he thinks possible to the flat
claim that I am a rational agent. The argument looks like this:
1. Insofar as I
act, I must assume, though I cannot know it, that I am a rational agent, which
is to say, that I am free. [This is the conclusion of the Third Section of the
Foundations.]
2. If I am a
rational agent, then willing an end, I necessarily will the means. [This, Kant
has persuasively argued in the Second Section of the Foundations, is analytic.]
3. If I will
the means to the fulfillment of my ends, then, as a phenomenal being - one
whose agency is manifested in the realm of appearance - I must legitimately
appropriate, which is to say take de jure
possession of - portions of the spatiotemporal realm as means.
4. If I must
take de jure possession of some
portion of the spatio-temporal realm as means, then it must be possible for me
to do so. What is more, there must be, in principle, no portion of the natural
world that it is not possible for me to possess, inasmuch as there is nothing
in the nature of willing as such that places limits on what might, according to
the laws of nature, serve as means to my ends.
From all of
which it follows that de jure
possession must be possible.
The question remains, however: How is de jure possession possible? What is required for such legitimate
possession to be actual? Locke, of
course, had begged this question in the Second Treatise of Government by
simply asserting the right of property as a truth revealed by the natural light
of reason. But Kant, correctly in my view, recognizes that this is a radically
unsatisfactory grounding for the right of property. Instead, like both Hobbes
and Rousseau before him, Kant grounds the right to property in a prior mutual
agreement, or social contract, among all those who, in the pursuit of their
ends, may come into conflict with one another in the appropriation of portions
of nature.
Legitimate
ownership involves the exclusion of others from the use and enjoyment of a
portion of nature, an exclusion that may be instituted by force if necessary.
Such a use of force, Kant argues, if in all consistency universalized, entails
mutual constraints among all the members of a society - where society here can
be understood quite simply as the totality of persons who, in the pursuit of
their ends, are likely to interfere with one another. So Kant concludes that
the possibility of property entails the existence of a social contract.
And now
Kant concludes his argument in a strikingly bold and imaginative fashion. The
central text is §8 of the First Chapter of the First Part of the Rechtslehre.
Here it is in its entirety:
When
I declare (by word or deed), "I will that an external thing shall be
mine," I thereby declare it obligatory for everyone else to refrain from
the object of my will. This is an obligation that no one would have apart from
this juridical act of mine. Included in this claim, however, is an
acknowledgment of being reciprocally bound to everyone else to a similar and
equal restraint with respect to what is theirs. The obligation involved here
comes from a universal rule of the external juridical relationship [that is,
says the translator, the civil society]. Consequently, I am not bound to leave
what is another's untouched if everyone else does not in turn guarantee to
me with regard to what is mine that he
will act in accordance with exactly the same principle. This guarantee does not
require a special juridical act, but is already contained in the concept of
being externally bound to a duty on account of the universality, and hence also
the reciprocity, of an obligation coming from a universal rule.
Now,
with respect to an external and contingent possession, a unilateral Will cannot
serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would be a violation of
freedom in accordance with universal laws. Therefore, only a Will binding
everyone else - that is, a collective, universal (common), and powerful Will -
is the kind of Will that can provide the guarantee required. The condition of
being subject to general external (that is, public) legislation that is backed
by power is the civil society. Accordingly, a thing can be externally yours or
mine only in a civil society.
[And now, Kant concludes with a
dramatic flourish:]
Conclusion:
If it must be de jure possible to
have an external object as one's own, then the subject must also be allowed to
compel everyone else with whom he comes into conflict over the question of whether
such an object is his to enter, together with him, a society under a civil
constitution.
The
conclusion of the argument prior to this point, you will recall, was that de jure possession must be possible, or,
as Kant puts it in the text before us, "it must be de jure possible to have an external object as one's own."
Combining this with the conclusion of the argument just quoted, we can now
conclude that it must be allowed to compel others to enter with one into a
society under a civil constitution. Since this necessity is universal, it of
course follows that others have an equal right to compel me to enter civil
society.
We can now
see that in the text of the Rechtslehre, Kant finally provides
what was missing from the argument of the Foundations, namely a demonstration
that such obligations as faithful promising are not hypothetically, but are
rather categorically, imperative.
Kant's
argument is open to criticism at every stage, of course, though it is
nonetheless, in my estimation, extremely interesting. Before sketching some of
those criticisms, let me call attention once again to an implication of the
argument that goes directly counter to the most common impression concerning
Kant's ethical theory. Kant is generally viewed as a rigorist, an objectivist,
a universalist, a theorist who claims to be able to demonstrate a priori the
universal validity of very powerful moral principles that are binding on all
agents regardless of their nature or circumstances. And this impression is
quite correct. But readers of Kant almost always draw the natural conclusion
that he believes these moral principles to be binding on us even in the absence
of a legitimately established state. In the familiar language of liberal
political theory, Kant is seen as siding with Locke on the question whether the
moral law is binding on agents in a state of nature. But it should now be clear
that Kant's argument actually entails the opposite conclusion. The procedural
obligation to enter into a social contract is certainly binding upon agents in
a state of nature, but the moral principles enacted into law by the Legislature
of a state thus established are binding only after, and on the condition of,
the establishment of the legitimate state.
Kant
clearly does not intend this consequence of his moral theory. Quite to the
contrary. But his failure to provide a satisfactory theory of obligatory ends
forces anyone wishing to embrace his moral theory to rely upon the legislation
of the legitimate state as the only source of morally binding substantive
principles of practical reason.
And this
leads us ineluctably to the question sketched above, whether a legitimately
established state, based upon a unanimous social contract and committed to
embodying the fundamental principle of justice in its laws, is thereby
constrained to a single structure of justice that thus constitutes the
objective, universal, unconditionally binding system of principles of practical
reason? This, I take it, is essentially
the question originally posed by John Rawls in the earlier versions of his
theory, before he drained it of its force and interest by an endless series of
ad hoc adjustments, concessions, baroque elaborations, and qualifications.
If the
answer to the question is yes - if, let us say, a legitimately established
republic of rational agents in search of principles compatible with the
fundamental postulate of justice must necessarily come upon and agree to Rawls'
Two Principles of Justice - then by combining Kant's argument and Rawls', we
would have a very powerful defense indeed of a universal system of moral
principles. The argument, in a nutshell, would go like this:
1. Rationality
as such entails consistent willing.
2. Consistent
willing, for a phenomenally appearing agent, entails the possibility of
property.
3. The
possibility of property entails the necessity of establishing a state through a
social contract.
4. A legitimate
state composed of rational agents will necessarily enact one and only one set
of fundamental principles of justice, namely the Two Principles of Justice.
5. Therefore,
we are all, as phenomenally appearing rational agents, obligated universally
and unconditionally to form legitimately grounded political communities with
those with whom we come into contact, and in those communities to enact the Two
Principles of Justice as the fundamental laws governing our interactions.
There are
three stages in this argument: the derivation of the requirement of consistent
willing from an analysis of what it is to be an agent; the deduction of the
necessity of entering a social contract from an analysis of the preconditions
of property; and the demonstration that reason dictates one and only one system
of principles as the content of a legitimate state.
My own view
is that the first stage in the argument, which as I have indicated we find in
the pivotal portion of the Second Section of the Foundations, is
essentially sound. To be an agent is to be moved by reasons, and the logic of
reasons requires consistency of willing. What counts as a good reason for me
necessarily counts as a good reason for any agent in relevantly similar
circumstances.
The third
stage of the argument, I am convinced, is mistaken. Neither Rawls nor anyone
else has, to my knowledge, made a convincing case for the claim that free and
equal rational agents must, insofar as they are rational, coordinate on a
single system of substantive principles regulating their interactions with one
another.
It is the
second stage that I find especially interesting, in part, I confess, because I
have managed to make it clear to myself only recently. Can the material
circumstances of human existence - our spatio-temporality, our dependence for
the pursuit of our ends on inanimate nature - ground an argument that we have a
standing procedural obligation to attempt rational community with those agents
with whom we interact? Can we, as Kant
claims, compel such rational community?
I think we
can conclude immediately that we cannot compel others to enter with us in a
social contract, for the essence of such an agreement is that it represents
mutual willing, and that implies that it is voluntary. But am I required,
simply by the constraints of rational consistency, to seek such community with
others, or is it consistent with my status as an agent to adopt nothing more
than an instrumental stance vis-a-vis those with whom I interact? Is this,
after all, the real content of the injunction to treat humanity as an end and
not simply as a means?
I honestly
don't know. My pre-philosophical inclination is to believe that the answer is
yes, that there is something about construing myself as a rational agent that
requires me, in all consistency, to attempt to achieve rational community with
others whom I consider to be agents as well - though I do not consider myself
bound, should they reject that attempt, to treat them as I would have agreed to
treat and be treated, had we actually achieved rational community. But at this
point, I do not see an argument that can make that conclusion plausible.