In discussing Kant’s claim that the state of nature is provisional, such that agents stand under a moral duty to exit it, recent interpretive approaches to Kant’s Doctrine of Right (DR) have vacillated between what I call the theses of weak and strong provisionality. Weak provisionality holds that in Kant’s state of nature the claims of justice—paradigmatically, claims concerning property—are conceptually intelligible. In the absence of an institutional enforcement mechanism, however, agents lack rational motivation to adhere to these claims. By contrast, strong provisionality attributes to Kant the view that in the state of nature agents lacks the requisite normative criteria to distinguish moral claims of justice from mere individual assertions of force. It holds that while as a descriptive matter of fact agents in the state of nature may make claims concerning right, they have no grounds to conclude that these represent genuinely binding norms of reason as opposed to unilateral exercises of power.
Based on a reading of Kant’s remarks on the impossibility of securing property rights in the state of nature, I suggest that he holds a version of the strong provisionality thesis hitherto unrecognized even by its defenders: Kant’s view is that prior to the institution of a just state making claims to justice represents a form of practical self-contradiction. Thus, against the textbook picture of Kant as concerned with what duty demands of individuals come what may, i.e., independently of contingent matters of history and politics, Kant thinks that to be a fully developed moral person is a political achievement. Kant’s ostensibly Lockean attempt to justify the state on the grounds that it secures pre-political rights thus ends up at the door of both Rousseau’s and Hegel’s political conception of morality as grounded in the institutional achievement of reciprocity.
