Freedom as Independence and Legal Responsibility in Kant’s Doctrine of Right

I argue that Kant’s notion of freedom as independence is central to ascriptions of legal responsibility. Realizing this aspect of freedom is central to people’s ability to interact with one another in social life as free and independent actors. Legal responsibility is an organizing aspect of moral responsibility, on my view. It is not an approximation or implementation of prior and independent determinations of moral responsibility. This makes freedom as independence a core moral aspect of moral personhood, on my view, one that is realized under law. Discussions of freedom and personhood are often closely tied to discussions of moral responsibility. The practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions is thought to be a reflection of our moral personhood and freedom to act. And the tight connection between freedom and responsibility has led to numerous organizing questions about the nature of moral responsibility and the conditions under which one is warranted in holding a person morally responsible for her actions. The vast literature on voluntariness, control, knowledge conditions, causal considerations, authenticity and the extent to which one’s actions express one’s “true self,” etc. that dominate discussions of moral responsibility reflect the tight connection between moral personhood, freedom, and ascriptions of moral responsibility. The transition from moral to legal responsibility is less continuous. From the perspective of fixing the individual factors warranting ascriptions of moral responsibility, establishing the conditions under which a person can be held legally responsible seems like a subsequent question of the implementation of (more finely-tuned) ascriptions of moral responsibility, subject to imperfect human knowledge, limitations on evidence of a person’s true intentions and degree of control and voluntariness, the need for finality in judgment and public expressions of condemnation, the importance of social order and the centrality of coercion in maintaining it, and so on. Questions of legal responsibility are important pragmatic concerns, but are a distant second to arriving at a settled understanding of moral responsibility. This picture glosses over the deep connection that exists between these two aspects of responsibility and the ways in which these two types of ascriptions depend on one another, beyond questions of implementation and social order. So for example, the justification for holding people morally responsible for negative consequences in cases of bad moral luck makes frequent appeal to the justifiability of holding them legally responsible. To take another example of the interdependence of these two aspects of responsibility, ascriptions of moral responsibility are often understood in terms of the conditions under which it is appropriate to punish someone or hold them legally accountable. An employer’s moral responsibility for damage caused by her employee can be understood in terms of the appropriateness of her liability to pay for the repairs. Holding one another to legal account, I argue, is central for realizing freedom as independence. Unlike natural liberty, freedom as independence is fundamentally juridical; it is realized only under law, on my view. This puts legal responsibility at the centre of an account of freedom and moral personhood on my view. This is the reverse of many contemporary discussions of freedom and moral responsibility as these are often understood.