The common complaint that the distinction between Kant’s moral and legal philosophy is unknown is not strictly true.  Many engaged in legal philosophy have encountered, time and again, the reminder (or admonition) to treat with care the distinction between Kant’s ethics and the rechtlehre.  Further, Kant’s political philosophy has been the subject of many fine books over the last quarter century.  What is difficult, rather, is to keep the distinction foremost in one’s mind when the philosophical heat, so to speak, is turned on.  Well intentioned, one notes the critical distinction between the purity of a will acting on moral reasons undergirding Kant’s ethics and the preservation of equal external freedom on which Kant’s political philosophy is based.  Yet when thorny questions are leveled, it is too easy to slip into familiar groves, weighing whether an action is appropriately prohibited by measuring its legitimacy against, say, the Categorical Imperative.

One problem, I suspect, is the lack of a text, close at intellectual hand, which has carefully explored Kant’s political philosophy and explicated its branches  in a wide range of subject matters.  Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy could by its intelligence, clarity and ambition fundamentally arrest and repair the sloppiness with which Kant’s political and moral philosophy are too often jumbled. Continue reading "The Moral Within, The Law Without"

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