Rights and Duties in Kantian Political and Legal Philosophy

Abstract

The recent wave of impressive Kant scholarship in political and legal philosophy has brought to the forefront a number of foundational issues, such as the nature of rights and the problem of political authority. We suggest discussing the current state of these debates by emphasizing a couple of specific questions: What exactly is the normative status of provisional rights in Kant’s pre-institutional state of nature? Is the notion of such rights coherent? If so, what are the implications of the normativity of such (natural?) rights for their ‘juridified siblings’ in the rightful condition? How should collective will-formation processes be constrained by these rights? In particular, what do these rights mean for the self-understanding of citizens in democratic republics and for their relationship to the modern state’s authority? Are Kant-inspired accounts of civil disobedience and political protest theoretically convincing and practically viable? In relation to jurisprudence and philosophy of law, and following Jeremy Waldron et al.’s lead, we are interested in investigating the question to what extent a Kantian framework is sympathetic to the sovereignty of democratic legislation or whether it rather supports strong judicial review. Hence, panel contributions attempting to systematize Kant’s jurisprudence in the light of contemporary legal philosophies (positivism, natural rights,…) are very much welcome. More generally, we seek contributions that reflect on the relationship between pre-institutional and legal rights that are sensitive to the intricacies that come with the contrast between ideal and non-ideal theorizing.