Kant on Civil Subordination and Duties to Self

Whereas Kant denies that voluntary slavery could ever be consistent with right, he admits that human beings can rightfully occupy various positions of civil subordination as illustrated by the figures of the wife, the domestic servant, the employee and even the penal slave (or the criminal). My main objective in this contribution is to specify what distinguishes these different forms of civil subordination, and in particular, why voluntary slavery but not other forms of civil subordination is taken by Kant to be incompatible with external freedom. To address these questions, I will mobilise the Kantian notion of duties to self and, on its basis, explore the Kantian limits of consent. I will argue that the distinctive wrong of voluntary slavery consists in a violation of the internal duty of rightful honor: since “a human being cannot have property in himself” (MM 359), he cannot possibly dispose of himself as he pleases and hence allow others to dispose of himself as they please. Put differently, a human being cannot consent to his own “juridical depersonification” because doing so would contradict the “right of humanity in his own person”. But the duty of rightful honor does not rule out the possibility of voluntarily placing oneself at the service of another human being – by hiring one’s labour or even one’s person — nor even the possibility of losing one’s juridical personality by committing a crime. I will then show that while these other forms of civil subordination pose no problem from the perspective of Kant’s doctrine of right, they can nevertheless pose a problem from the perspective of Kant’s doctrine of virtue, especially when they involve a contradiction with the moral personality or inner freedom (ie, the “moral depersonification”) of one of their parties. More specifically, I will explore the conditions under which these other forms of civil subordination can be reconciled with “limiting (negative)” duties of virtue to self (MM 6:419), that is, duties which, like the duty not to be servile, prohibit human beings to act contrary to their moral self-preservation and to make themselves into things.