Kant, Racism and the Dictates of Reason

For a while, discussions of the relation between Kant’s views on race and his philosophical system relied on the assumption that the universality of Kant’s claims is inconsistent with his racist claims. Thus, on some accounts, Kant held both that, on the one hand, all human beings have equal moral worth, and, on the other, human beings have different levels of moral potentials depending on their race (racial hierarchism). (E.g., Mills 2019) On some other accounts, Kant changed his mind in the mid-1790s and abandoned racial hierarchism, in order to espouse an egalitarian position. (E.g., Kleingeld 2007) A relatively new direction in the debate regards both these interpretative positions as sharing the view that racism contradicts Kant’s moral universalism and political egalitarianism; yet, part of the new direction consists of a rejection of this view, and an argument that the complexity of Kant’s system allows Kant to hold consistently both moral hierarchism and moral universalism. (Lu Adler 2023) Interestingly, on this new view, Kant could advance his racist views, while at the same time not having "to have any malice in his heart. [… Rather, his] single-minded adherence to the dictates of reason came with a regrettable byproduct, namely a cold indifference to the atrocities suffered by human beings in concreto." (Lu Adler 2023: 27-8) The aim of this paper is precisely to examine the link between these Kantian dictates of reason and the cold indifference to suffering. References: Lu Adler, H. (2023) Kant, Race and Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kleingeld, P. (2007) "Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race", in The Philosophical Quarterly. 57(229): 573-92. Mills, C. (2019) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.