Kant's indemonstrable postulate of right: A response to Paul Guyer

Kantian Review

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-39

  Flikschuh, Katrin ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60950607653     PISSN: 13694154     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1369415400000790     Document Type: Note

References (57)

1. Kant, Refl. Nr 71717=XIX 263, quoted in Reiner Wimmer, Kants Kritische Religionsphilsophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), p.l.
2. The following translations of Kant's works have been used: The Metaphysics of Morals (Part I, The Metaphysical First Principles of Right (here referred to as Rechtslehre)), trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
3. The Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933, second impression (1993 reprint);
4. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Gw), trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964);
5. The Critique of Practical Reason (CprR), trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956, 1993, reprint);
6. Towards Perpetual Peace (PP), in Kant's Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Volume and page references are to the Prussian Academy edition of Kant's collected works.
7. See Gerhard Buchda, Das Privatrecht Kants. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und zum System des Naturrechts (Diss. Jena, 1929).
8. More recently, Bernd Ludwig has proposed more substantial revisions of the originally published text, including, most controversially, shifting the 'postulate of practical reason with regard to Right' from its original location in §2 to §6. See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe zur Rechtslehre, ed. Bernd Ludwig (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986).
9. For Ludwig's defence of these revisions, see Bernd Ludwig, Kants Rechtslehre (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988).
10. For a sharp criticism of Ludwig's proposal, see Burkhard Tuschling, 'Das rechtliche Postulat der praktischen Vernunft: seine Stellung und Bedeutung in Kant's Rechtslehre', in H. Oberer and G. Seel (eds), Kant. Analysen - Probleme - Kritik (Königshausen und Neumann, 1988), pp. 273-90.
11. More generally, scholarly work on the postulate of Right is more advanced in Germany than it is in the English-speaking world. Apart from Ludwig's work, the most influential single recent publication on the postulate is Reinhard Brandt's 'Das Erlaubnisgesetz, oder: Vernunft und Geschichte in Kants Rechtslehre', in Brandt (ed.), Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), pp. 233-85.
12. See also Wolfgang Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1993) (original hardback edition published with de Gruyter, 1984) pp. 241-50.
13. Amongst Anglo-American Kant scholars, the postulate is most extensively discussed by Leslie Mulholland in his Kant's System of Rights (New York: University of Cornell, 1991), pp. 243-57.
14. See also my own analysis and reconstruction of the postulate of Right in Katrin Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 113-43.
15. I am thinking of the influential interpretations offered of Kant's practical philosophy by former students of John Rawls, such as, for example, Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
16. Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
17. Thomas Hill, Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18. See Jacqueline Mariña, 'Making sense of Kant's highest good', Kant-Studien, 91 (2000), 329-55;
19. also R. Z. Friedman, 'The importance and function of Kant's highest good', Journal of the History of Philosophy, 22 (1984), 325-42.
20. Both authors emphasize what John Silber has called the 'transcendent conception' of the Highest Good, though both attribute a meaning to this term which differs from Silber's use of it in 'Kant's conception of the highest good as immanent and transcendent', The Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), 460-92.
21. For an influential reading that is unsympathetic both towards the postulates and towards the concept of transcendence more generally see L. W. Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 242-81.
22. My use of transcendence as 'acknowledged unknowability' is indebted to T. L. S. Sprigge's interpretation of speculative metaphysics in those terms. See his, 'Has speculative metaphysics a future?', The Monist, 81 (1998), 513-33.
23. Paul Guyer, 'Kant's deductions of the principles of Right', in Mark Timmons (ed.), Kant's Metaphysics of Morals. Interpretative Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 23-64.
24. See, for example, Guyer's papers on 'Kantian foundations for liberalism' and 'Life, liberty, and property: Rawls and Kant', in Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2000.
25. RL, 6: 219.
26. Markus Willascheck, 'Why the Doctrine of Right does not belong in the Metaphysics of Morals', Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik 5 (1997), 205-27 (223).
27. Guyer,'Kant's deductions', 33.
28. Ludwig, Analytischer Kommentar, 92-101.
29. See also Bernd Ludwig, 'Whence public right? The role of theoretical and practical reasoning in Kant's Doctrine of Right', in Timmons (ed.), Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 159-84.
30. For an alternative argument regarding the relationship between the universal principle of Right and the categorical imperative, see Otfried Höffe, 'Kant's Principle of Justice as categorical imperative of law', in Y. Yovel (ed.), Kant's Practical Philosophy Reconsidered (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 149-67.
31. Cf. Reinhard Brandt, Eigentumstheorien von Grotius bis Kant (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 1974), 167-76. At RL, 6: 268, 269 Kant comments that 'the first working, enclosing, or, in general, transforming of a piece of piece of land can furnish no title of acquisition to it'. The view that it does, 'which is so old and still so widespread' is due to the 'tacit prevalent deception of personifying things and of thinking of a right to things as being directly a right against them, as if someone could, by the work he expends upon them, put things under an obligation to serve him and no one else'. As Brandt points out, in 'Comments on the observations on the beautiful and the sublime', Kant himself defended a view according to which the right to external possessions can be derived from a person's power of control over their own body, including the work produced by that body.
32. L. W. Beck, A Commentary, p. 251.
33. CprR, 5: 123.
34. CPR, A 72/ B97.
35. According to Mary Zeldin, since a postulate 'does not express what ought to be, but what is or must be, it is a theoretical, not a practical proposition; but, because it is based on a given moral law, it is related to the employment of practical reason'. See Zeldin, 'Principles of reason, degrees of judgement, and Kant's argument for the existence of God', The Monist, 54 (1979), 285-301, (294).
36. Michael Albrecht, Kants Antinomie der Praktischen Vernunft (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1978).
37. For Albrecht the postulates resolve the antinomy of practical reason, which arises from reason's search for the highest condition of everything that is conditioned. This interpretation of the postulates' systematic function differs from that of Allen Wood, for whom the postulates are required to solve the absurdum practicum argument. See Wood, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970).
38. WOT, A317/318.
39. Religion, B206/207.
40. Allen Wood, 'Rational theology, moral faith, and religion' in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 394-416 (401). Compare CPR, A 820-31/B 848-58.
41. Zeldin, 'Reason and judgement', 285: 'All knowledge, Kant argues, must be based on the forms of possible experience or deduced from premises known to be true: in the case of the existence of God, however, the former is impossible because God transcends experience, and the latter is impossible because the premises themselves, to be known to be true, would have to be grounded in possible experience, while, by the very nature of the question, possible experience has been excluded.'
42. Guyer, 'Kant's deductions', p. 33.
43. Although we have the necessary moral motivation to bring about the Highest Good, we lack 'the power to create the ideal conditions for its realisation'. Hence we cannot ourselves ensure the conduciveness of the sensible world to the practical realization of the Highest Good. Only God can do this. See Paul Guyer, 'From a practical point of view: Kant's conception of a postulate of pure practical reason', in Guyer, Kant on Law, Freedom, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 333-72, at 345.
44. Guyer, 'Practical point of view', p. 336.
45. Bernd Ludwig, 'Der Platz des rechtlichen Postulats der praktischen Vernunft innerhalb der Paragraphen 1-6 der Kantischen Rechtslehre', in Brandt (ed.), Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung, pp. 218-232, at 218.
46. Wolfgang Kersting advances this objection against interpreting the postulate of Right as a postulate of pure practical reason. See Wohlgeordnete Freiheit, 247, n. 32. I respond to this objection in 'Ist das rechtliche Postulat ein Postulat der reinen praktischen Vernunft? Zum Endzweck der Rechtslehre Kants', Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik, 12 (2004), 299-330.
47. In §7, at RL 6:255, Kant sketches such an antinomy of Right, when he says that 'rightfully practical reason is forced into a critique of itself in the concept of something external that is mine or yours, and this by an antinomy of propositions concerning the possibility of such a concept ... The thesis says: it is possible to have something external as mine, even though I am not in possession of it. The antithesis says: it is not possible to have something external as mine unless I am in possession of it. Solution: both propositions are true, the first if I understand, by the word possession, empirical possession (possessio phaenomenon), the second if I understand by it purely intelligible possession (possessio noumenon).' If Kant's statement of the antinomy of Right has received little attention in the literature, this may be because he does not actually mention it until after the deduction of the concept of merely intelligible possession - the key to the 'solution' - in §6. The statement of the antinomy in §7 thus has a 'retrospective' flavour to it. Nonetheless, the preliminary notes to the Rechtslehre show that the antinomy of Right preoccupied Kant for a considerable length of time, remaining unresolved until the introduction of the postulate of Right in the published text itself. For a detailed analysis of Kant's earlier notes on the antinomy, see Wolfgang Kersting, 'Freiheit und intelligibler Besitz: Kants Lehre vom Synthetischen Rechtssatz a priori', Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 6 (1981), 31-51.
48. Brandt, 'Das Erlaubnisgesetz', p. 244: 'Der systematische Ort des naturrechtlichen Erlaubnisgesetzes ergibt sich in einer Vermittlung von Gebot und Verbot: Es wird etwas "an sich" Verbotenes provisorisch erlaubt und damit geboten, den Rechtsanspruch der Verhinderung nicht wirksam werden zu lassen.' Brandt makes much of Kant's distinction between 'provisional Right' and 'peremptory Right' - a distinction also invoked in Perpetual Peace in connection with a discussion of the legal category of permissive laws as used in natural law theory. According to Kant it is sometimes permissible for a sovereign to refrain from implementing requisite legal reforms and to abide by existing positive laws that are strictly speaking unjust (contrary to natural law). Postponement of legal reform may be justified under conditions of political instability, or when the expected risks outweigh the benefits of implementing reforms at that point in time. Existing unjust positive laws then count as 'provisionally just' so long as it is the sovereign's firm intention to implement the necessary reforms at the earliest possible opportunity. This notion of the 'provisional' authorization of a law that is unjust but permissible clearly informs Brandt's analysis of the lex permissiva in the Rechtslehre, where the necessary commission of an injustice is justified with reference to the required inauguration of relations of peremptory Right made possible through that act of necessary injustice.
49. Cf. Kant and Modern Political Philosophy, chapters 5 and 6.
50. See, for example, Joachim Hruschka, 'The permissive law of Practical Reason in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals', Law and Philosophy, 23 (2004), 45-72.
51. See also Franz Hespe, 'Wohl dem, der im Besitze ist. Zur Eigentumsbegründung in Kants Rechtslehre' in D. Hüning, G. Stiening, U. Vogel (eds), Societas Rationis. Festschrift für Burkhard Tuschling zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot Verlag, 2002).
52. GW, 4: 463.
53. See, for example, Christine Korsgaard, 'Morality as freedom', in Korsgaard, Kingdom of Ends, pp. 158-87.
54. See also Andrews Reath, 'Legislating for a realm of ends: the social dimension of autonomy', in A. Reath. B. Herman and C. Korsgaard (eds), Reclaiming the History of Ethics. Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 214-40.
55. Jean Grondin, 'Zur Phänomenologie des moralischen "Gesetzes". Das kontemplative Motiv der Erhebung in Kants praktischer Metaphysik', Kant-Studien, 91 (2000), 385-94.
56. Paul Guyer, 'Freedom as the inner value of the world', in Guyer, Freedom, Law, Happiness, pp. 96-128.
57. Cf. Ludwig, 'Whence public right?', in M. Timmons (ed.), The Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 159-83, at 171.