Kant and Slavery – Or Why He Never Became a Racial Egalitarian

Abstract

Speaker: Huaping Lu-Adler, Georgetown University Commentator: Lucy Allais, Johns Hopkins University and University of the Witwatersrand According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld constructed this narrative out of passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795), which allegedly show that he categorically condemned slavery (as well as colonialism) and thereby became more racially egalitarian. This turned out to be baseless. The passages in question, once contextualized, either do not pertain to modern chattel slavery at all or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it as a cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. A more systematic and historically informed analysis reveals that Kant never considered slavery as a moral problem to be evaluated on its own. Rather, he consistently presented it as primarily a non-moral issue to be assessed in terms of its role in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about certain practices of slavery and the slave trade, he did so from the recognition that they could deepen intra-European power struggles and thereby erode the hope for perpetual peace. The wellbeing, dignity, or freedom of the enslaved/traded “Negroes” never entered the equation. This was not just an unfortunate oversight on Kant’s part. Rather, it reflects the extraordinary complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about slavery begins to make perfect sense once we take into account his views on human history and on the relation between morality and political conditions as well as how he racialized “Negroes.”