In person icon Financial Crises: Kant and Economic Justice

Abstract

A significant contributing factor, in our current situation of polycrisis, is economic – whether we focus on national or international economies. The grounding philosophical issue in the attempt to address economic crises is the issue of economic justice. Two of the most important accounts of economic justice in the 20th Century, John Rawls's (1971) and Robert Nozick's (1974), seem to draw on Kantian resources, but offer distinct, conflicting and perhaps even contradictory responses: a right-wing (libertarian) position and a leftist liberal stance. Yet, on some accounts, neither Nozick's account nor Rawls's theory actually employs Kant's own theory of justice, yet both (allegedly) draw out the political implications of his ethical theory. (Varden 2016) In the more recent Kantian scholarship, there has been a deliberate attempt to address the balance between these two parts of Kant's practical philosophy (his ethics and his legal philosophy) with a focused study on his 'Doctrine of Right'. (E.g., Byrd and Hruschka 2010) Recent authors have offered conceptions of economic justice which purport to draw on Kant's theory of justice and to part ways with the mainstream Rawlsian and Nozickian interpretations (as well as some other 'Kantian' alternatives, such as luck-egalitarianism). (Ripstein 2009; Forst 2024) The purpose of this panel is to examine Kant's answer to the question of economic justice by reflecting on our current predicaments from the perspective of the wealth of interpretations of Kant's account.

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