Kant, Material Domination, and Global Justice

In all republican conceptions, from the classical ones, through Rousseau and Kant, up to the contemporary neo-republicans and their critics, you are dominated if you fall under the arbitrary power of others. However, the normative challenge, then, is to understand the arbitrary power consists of. In the contemporary literature, for relational theorists, domination occurs when power is exercised to alter the free actions of others in a manner contrary to a power-subject’s interests – ‘manifest’ or ‘real’ – or when an agent possesses the capacity to interfere, intentionally and at their pleasure, in certain choices that the other is in a position to make. But, in these conceptions of domination, the idea of moral and political individual autonomy is not a crucial element. On the contrary, it was the normative benchmark in the classical Rousseau and Kant conceptions of domination. Indeed, for them, domination means obedience to the foreign wills of others as opposed to ‘obeying only oneself ’ or ‘being his own master’. However, unlike Rousseau, Kant’s account seems too formal and, thus, his conception of domination lacks an adequate material dimension. In this presentation, first, I will suggest a way to overcome this shortcoming. Precisely, I sustain that domination occurs when a person does not have adequate key power resources (material and immaterial) with respect to others to be a co-author of the primary rules (political, legal, socioeconomic, etc.) that govern the social relations in which they are involved. Second, I will try to extend this Kantian conception of domination beyond the domestic level. Indeed, our global social relations are governed by a set of political, legal, and socioeconomic rules. For this reason, I think it is correct to argue about ‘primary rules’ and justice also in a global context. In any case, a Kantian conception of domination applied at the global level should avoid both strong ‘statism’ and strong cosmopolitan ‘globalism’.