Autonomy and the Idea of Freedom: Some Reflections on Groundwork III

This article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph of Groundwork III. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of the relevant domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument of Groundwork III. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role in Kant’s moral conception.

Against the poetics of decadence: Latin America and the aesthetics of regeneration

In the late nineteenth century, sociological studies often functioned as a channel between the psychological and criminological sciences and the traditional field of literature. I argue that Nordau’s work, which drew as much upon Italian criminology as it did upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s sociological theory of aesthetics, constituted a major path by which ideas of degeneration taken from the medical and criminological sciences came to be a fundamental tool of interpretation of modern Latin American culture. One of the main lines of argument in this chapter is that social theories on the degeneration of modern art were useful to vast sectors of the late-nineteenth-century intellectual elites to identify with the values of modern civilisation. By linking the development of literary modernismo to the wider engagement with questions about the features of modern civilisation, this discussion offers a new reading of modernismo as a movement that in its boom phase helped foster ideas of modernity as an essentially urban − and therefore transnational − phenomenon through notions of refinement, disease and degeneration. The second part of the chapter shows how Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel marked a turning point from decadent civilisation to the idea of Latin American culture by building on a moral conception of aesthetics.

Rawls, John (1921–2002)

Rawls’ main work, A Theory of Justice (1971), presents a liberal, egalitarian, moral conception – ‘justice as fairness’ – designed to explicate and justify the institutions of a constitutional democracy. The two principles of justice outlined in this text affirm the priority of equal basic liberties over other political concerns, and require fair opportunities for all citizens, directing that inequalities in wealth and social positions maximally benefit the least advantaged. Rawls develops the idea of an impartial social contract to justify these principles: Free persons, equally situated and ignorant of their historical circumstances, would rationally agree to them in order to secure their equal status and independence, and to pursue freely their conceptions of the good. In Political Liberalism (1993), his other major text, Rawls revises his original argument for justice as fairness to make it more compatible with the pluralism of liberalism. He argues that, assuming that different philosophical, religious and ethical views are inevitable in liberal society, the most reasonable basis for social unity is a public conception of justice based in shared moral ideas, including citizens’ common comception of themselves as free and equal moral persons. The stability of this public conception of justice is provided by an overlapping consensus; all the reasonable comprehensible philosophical, religious and ethical views can endorse it, each for their own specific reasons.

Introduction

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of liberalism, which is best understood as an expansive, philosophical notion. Liberalism is a collection of political, social, and economic doctrines and institutions that encompasses classical liberalism, left liberalism, liberal market socialism, and certain central values. This chapter then introduces subsequent chapters, which are divided into three parts. Part I, “Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Economic Justice,” clarifies the distinction between classical liberalism and the high liberal tradition and their relation to capitalism, and then argues that libertarianism is not a liberal view. Part II, “Distributive Justice and the Difference Principle,” analyzes and applies John Rawls’s principles of justice to economic systems and private law. Part III, “Liberal Institutions and Distributive Justice,” focuses on the crucial role of liberal institutions and procedures in determinations of distributive justice and addresses why the first principles of a moral conception of justice should presuppose general facts in their justification.

Constructivism, Facts, and Moral Justification

This chapter responds to G. A. Cohen’s criticisms of Rawls’s reliance upon social and psychological facts about humans to argue for his principles of justice. Cohen contends that such facts are irrelevant to the justification of fundamental principles of justice and that Rawls’s difference principle is not a fundamental principle but a principle of regulation to accommodate injustice due to human selfishness. I respond to these criticisms by discussing three reasons why the first principles of a moral conception of justice should be “fact-sensitive”: First, a conception of justice should be compatible with our moral and psychological capacities. Second, a conception of justice should provide principles for practical reasoning and supply a public basis for justification across conceptions of the good. Third, a moral conception should not frustrate but affirm the pursuit of the human good, including the exercise and development of our moral capacities and sense of justice.

Political morality and neutrality

The article gives the reasons why a distinction between political morality and ethical conceptions needs to be drawn, as well as the reasons for which political liberalism is a substantial moral conception, and as such in tension with certain understandings of the neutrality. Further, the text analyzes the definition of personality through capacity for action (above all ethical). Recognition of this capacity is necessary, but not sufficient to attribute to a person a special status from the standpoint of political morality, since individuals also must be capable to coordinate their ethical actions with moral principles of others. Further, the text critiques Charles Larmore?s moral grounding of the theory of justice on respect of persons by arguing that the concept of respect should be considered as part of the complex interrelationships with other moral concepts, such as equality. In this way, neutrality regarding content of respect, as well as neutrality regarding capacity for ethical action turns out to be insufficient.

Morality, Ontology, and Corporate Rights

Does the ontology of corporations matter for corporate rights? Much of the philosophical literature on corporate rights focuses on whether corporations are real entities, aggregations of individuals, or fictions to which rights or other entitlements can be ascribed. We argue that this focus is misplaced. Whether corporations have rights, and the sort of rights they have, is a question of moral theory. It is not fundamentally a matter of ontology, as F.W. Maitland thought, or a matter of legal or moral semantics, as H.L.A. Hart once argued. The going moral theory, not conceptual requirements or explanatory criteria, determines the conditions a corporation must satisfy to have various rights and duties. We argue that this truth is independent of the deontic, consequentialist, or hybrid character of the moral theory. This paper defends three claims. First, the ontological status of a group as an intentional agent is neither necessary nor sufficient for its moral status or entitlements. A moral theory in principle could recognize groups that are not intentional agents, and a group’s existence as an intentional agent does not by itself require moral recognition. A moral commitment to corporate rights and duties is therefore not determined by the indispensability of groups in explaining group behavior. Second, the substantive claims of a moral theory (understood broadly) determine the conditions for assigning rights and duties to corporations. Third, this moral conception of corporate rights has both legal and moral implications for the treatment of corporations.