Book Review: Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy
Arthur Ripstein Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press; October 15, 2009; $49.95)
Though Kant has been enjoying significant critical attention in moral and political philosophy since Rawls published A Theory of Justice almost 40 years ago, Kant’s ideas have only rarely been defended as a whole. The chief problem with Kant’s view, one which Rawls shared with Kant’s immediate successor Hegel, is that the notion of the categorical imperative is essentially too abstract and must be given a more concrete grounding. Constructivism was to be the way of doing this. Rawls thus rejected Kant’s metaphysical argument for morality and replaced it with an intuitive account of our own deep intuitions about justice, to be brought out by the procedure of the original position, later to be refined by the reflective equilibrium. Thus Kantian autonomy was to be cashed out in terms of respect for persons.
Arthur Ripstein, though broadly sympathetic to Rawls’s project, believes that the formal theory of right underlying Kant’s account of law in the Doctrine of Right (the first book of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals 1797) is not only worth preserving, but worth championing. Ripstein’s excellent book thus proposes a comprehensive reading of Kant’s legal and political philosophy which insists that we can indeed build up a coherent system of rights from the simple idea of the innate right of humanity. Philosophically speaking, such an approach would reestablish a strong link between natural rights and positive rights and hence would go some way toward solving the vexing questions left open by Kant’s moral writings as well since the doctrine of right could then be used to make more concrete that very system.
The relation between Kant’s famous categorical imperative and the Metaphysics of Morals’ innate right of humanity is shadowy. While Ripstein does not attempt to vindicate the categorical imperative, he does provide an interesting argument through which to understand the relation between the categorical imperative and the universal principle of right (the principle which the innate right of humanity is based on, see below). The central problem to be resolved here is the relation between autonomy in morality and coercion in law. For, while the categorical imperative rejects all forms of coercion (and deception), the principle of right requires coercion. How can these two principles be made coherent without, for instance, reducing right to an instrument of the categorical imperative, something akin to Rousseau’s ill-understood idea that the state can force us to be free.