Berkley Center

Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, systematically prepared the participants for her original suggestions about how to reconstruct Immanuel Kant’s conception of the “ethical community” by first presenting his argument that we have a duty to exit the political state of nature. After having done that, she developed her own suggestions by working in an analogous way to explain both why, for Kant, we also have a duty to exit the ethical state of nature, and what this might mean. Prof. Ebels-Duggan worked her way through her argument by means of a handout, taking questions and objections as she went along. She mentioned, but did not have time to cover, Japa Pallikkathayil’s view that the tie between political indeterminacy and ethical indeterminacy is tighter, in that the resolution of the latter depends throughout on the resolution of the former.

As she explained in introducing her argument, she sees both the political and the ethical cases as broadly analogous. In both, we start (in the relevant “state of nature”) with provisional claims that have content, but whose content is importantly indeterminate. Foundational moral considerations provide us reason to specify these claims, making them more determinate. Although these Kantian starting-points are a priori, Kant emphasizes that actually carrying out this specification requires contingent interactions among actual people. In this way, Prof. Ebels-Duggan suggested, the view steers between a “thoroughgoing realism,” on which fundamental [and a priori] norms are fully conclusive and a “thoroughgoing relativism,” on which norms are wholly contingent on contingent social interactions. An initial objection asked how the proposed schematic view could be an improvement on either of these alternatives: realism is metaphysically weird and relativism has costly implications. Doesn’t the suggestion about contingent specification combine the worst of both worlds by buying into realism about the foundations and accepting relativist add-ons to it? Prof. Ebels-Duggan replied that while the view she was presenting did not purport to address the problem on the relativist side, it does address the problem on the realist side as long as it is combined with a constructivism about moral principles.

Her reconstruction of Kant’s argument for a duty to exit the political state of nature highlighted the realist elements by flagging various points of dependence upon Kant’s Universal Principle of Right (UPR: the moral law, as it applies to external freedom) and the One Innate Right that Kant defends, to “freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can consist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law ….” (Metaphysics of Morals 6:237). For instance, the argument depends upon the claim that establishing property claims is necessary to establishing a right to external freedom; and the argument for that claim, in turn, depends upon the premise that moving someone else’s body to make use of something is a violation of that person’s external freedom. This latter claim is a substantive moral one that rests on the UPR. Contrary to Locke, Kant held that no individual has an authoritative basis for establishing any property claim in the state of nature. Property claims thus remain indeterminate in the state of nature, and cannot be made good until some system arises to assure that people with similar claims will have those claims respected. This requires that (some) people end up with permission to enforce those claims. This, Kant argues, requires the existence of a state. To the question of why it has to be a state, and not a consortium of people who get together to enforce a system of property claims, Prof. Ebels-Duggan answered that this would be a state, in the relevant sense. Another question elicited the observation that the argument hinges on the importance of having a determinate system of property right, but not on the content of that system. A system of communal property, she suggested, would meet the requirements of the argument.

Because just about all of our actions depend upon using external things, the system of property law that results from entering political society enhances freedom by reducing dependence on the bare good will of others. Kant’s appeal to the move from the state of nature to civil society, in this regard, shows a clearer gain than Locke’s (on whose view definite property rights exist in the state of nature) and gets farther than Hobbes’s (which seems never to arrive at normative conclusions).

In the political story, the key fact moving the argument is the dependence of our external actions on things. In Prof. Ebels-Duggan’s ethical parallel, the key fact is the dependence of our actions on the cooperation of others. Unless my setting of ends sometimes provides you with reasons to cooperate with me, I would be very limited in what I could do. That we seem to have moral reason to cooperate with the projects of others—even strangers—is illustrated by Prof. Ebels-Duggan’s case of keeping out of the way of another’s photo of the Grand Canyon. Given the widespread availability of professional photos of the canyon, this cannot be presumed to be an objectively important project; still, it seems disrespectful to ignore the other’s project. How can another’s choices of project authoritatively create reasons for others? If the other articulates a reason in favor of the project that one recognizes as valid, then authority is unnecessary, as this reason becomes internalized in one’s own use of one’s internal, end-setting freedom. If the other rearranges the world to keep others out of the way of his snapshots, that, too, involves no end-setting authority. How, then, can an individual’s end-setting be authoritative for another? Prof. Ebels-Duggan’s answer is that this can happen in the context of a relationship in which individuals work out with one another what they will do together.

Prof. Ebels-Duggan’s suggestion about this builds on Kant’s discussion of ethical community in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Given her stress on the parallel between Kant’s political account in the Rechtslehre, the political half of the Metaphysics of Morals, why not work instead with the Tugendlehre, the ethical half thereof? Her response was that the ethical domain just is the domain of interpersonal interaction, and the happiness of others—one of the two “obligatory ends” Kant defends in the Tugendlehre—is best thought of in terms of making others’ ends one’s own.