This paper investigates the nature of political justification from the point of view of Kant’s moral philosophy. It explores Kant’s theory of justice in relation to three important questions in legal-political philosophy. First, what justifies the foundations of Kant’s theory of justice? Second, what is the role of historical and anthropological considerations in Kant’s legal-political thought? And third, what is Kant’s vision of how various reforms of a state’s legal-political institutions are justified by liberal republics? To answer the first question, I analyze Kant’s distinction between external freedom (justice) and internal freedom (ethics/virtue), including how these ideas work together in his overall moral philosophy. This includes investigating what Pogge identifies as the Rawlsian question of the “independence” of Kant’s theory of justice, as well as the issue of the relationship between the Categorical Imperative and the Universal Principle of Right. For the second question, I pay attention to Kant seems to be sensitive to, and hence accommodate certain historical and social facts within the structure of his theory of justice. Finally, to investigate the third question, I outline Kant’s ideas of “private” and “public” reason in relation to Rawls’ idea of public reason. Core analyses here include ways in which public officials must reason in order not to betray the authority vested in them as well as the important role for freedom of speech in Kant’s theory. This last part of the paper focuses on the legal-political parameters within which a liberal republic continuously justifies its use of coercion, including its attempts at reforming or improving its own functioning.
