A Kantian argument against world poverty

Kant's concept of right

Since Kant's political theory and his concept of Right have been extensively analysed and reconstructed in recent years, I will limit my discussion of his theory to its most essential elements insofar as they are relevant to my argument.

Kant's concept of Right is relevant to anyone who engages with the ideas of political authority and obligation because Kant offers an explanation of how our notions of individual rights and coercively enforceable political obligations can be reconciled. Further, Kant's theory is interesting for everyone who sees a strong appeal in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that any claim to private property must be justifiable to those excluded from the use of the claimed object. ⁵

Kant's ethics and his less well-known theory of Right form two independent, yet complementary parts of his practical philosophy. Whereas in his moral theory Kant focuses on the autonomy and the inner freedom (that is to say: the good will and right motives) of self-legislating individuals, in his Doctrine of Right he is concerned with the external freedom of persons and the conformity of their actions with the universal law of freedom irrespective of what motivates these actions. The starting point of the Doctrine of Right is Kant's premise that people possess equal moral worth as self-determining agents. As such, everyone has to ensure that their actions are justifiable to those they affect. This idea is captured by the fundamental ‘Universal Principle of Right’ (hereafter: UPR) which states that ‘Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law’ (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 230).

The principle thus requires that none of my actions must prevent another person from exercising their freedom in the same manner. We only properly respect each other's freedom and moral equality if we do not violate each other's justifiable claims to actualise our inner freedom in this world. Thus, Kant's idea of right is coupled with the authorisation to coerce others into refraining from violating our freedom: coercion is in Kant's sense a ‘hindering of a hindrance to freedom’ (1797: DR VI, 231). The reverse of this understanding of right is that it constitutes an entirely relational idea: the idea of a right presupposes other people against whom we can invoke a right claim.

Thus, what we can rightly own as individuals in the absence of any further social context (that is to say: in the absence of any political authority, in the so-called state of nature) are our bodies: since we are the only ones who can occupy our bodies and because our moral agency is inseparably tied to our physical existence, we do not wrong others by occupying our bodies and the space our bodies occupy. We therefore have a right to defend the physical integrity of our bodies from the attacks of others. This ‘innate right’ of freedom (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 237) also ensures our survival by prohibiting others to take objects that we hold in physical possession with our bodies if these objects cannot be removed without injuring us. ⁶ However, according to Kant's UPR our claims to possessing anything beyond our bodies are much more contentious. Because owning something excludes others from its use, and since no one has a privileged claim to anything besides their bodies, any further claims to ownership are highly contestable. Within Kant's theory this distinction between our bodies and external things in consequence leads to the duty to create a state. That is, since we must have a secure way of actualising our freedom in the world (by owning something as property), but no person can ‘unilaterally’ create property claims that are binding on others, we have a moral duty to establish a civil condition. The latter is characterised by a general will formed by all members who are subject to a common authority in order to create and enforce public laws and to adjudicate conflicts among the members. A civil condition thus requires representative government and the division of its powers into the three familiar branches (executive, legislature, and judiciary). Here I merely want to highlight two ideas contained in Kant's argument that are important for the purposes of this paper.

First, Kant does not deny that people can legitimately lay claim to things beyond their bodies in the state of nature. The idea of the ‘permissive law (lex permissiva) of practical reason’ (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 247) becomes necessary within his theory because without the possibility of owning something, people could not securely make use of the very freedom that is protected by the UPR. However, everything that people claim as property by reference to the permissive law is not ‘conclusively owned’ but only ‘provisionally’ theirs. This is to say that general acknowledgement of a claim is required for conclusive ownership, and such acknowledgment can only be conferred by the general will within a civil condition (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 247). Contrary to Rousseau, Kant does not think of the general or omnilateral will as an empirical reality but as an a priori idea that becomes possible by the subordination of the members of the general will to a superior head of the civil condition (Flikschuh, 2012). The subjects thus become subordinate to their representatives who can issue binding verdicts in the case of conflicting right claims of the citizens.

Second, because Kant advocates a republican form of government (1795: PP VIII, 349), in his view the citizens ideally elect representatives who finally determine the citizens’ rights in a way that accords with citizens’ status as free and equal moral beings. For this purpose Kant introduces the idea of the ‘original contract’ (1797: DR VI, 315). This contract, though, is not an actual agreement requiring the consent of the governed, but a standard of how the state ‘ought to be’ (1797: DR VI, 313), that is: of the legitimacy of the laws made by government. According to this hypothetical contract, only those laws are justifiable that ‘could have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will’ (1793: TP VIII, 297). As an example of an impermissible legal arrangement Kant (1793: TP VIII, 297) mentions ‘the hereditary privilege of ruling rank’. This example cannot pass Kant's test because it is a scheme that excludes most from the pursuit of social superiority or a political career (1793: TP VIII, 293) on the basis of a morally arbitrary feature (their social starting position in life).

Crucially, for Kant the need for a civil condition in which our rights can be conclusively decided is so pressing that we are authorised to force those who are unwilling to join this condition: ‘each may impel the other by force to leave [the state of nature] and enter into a rightful condition’ (1797: DR VI, 312). Kant, that is to say, is neither a voluntarist about political obligation nor a typical representative of the social contract tradition. In his view, we are under a duty not to offend each other's moral equality by impermissibly limiting each other's choices. Since we additionally have good reasons to avoid the uncertainty and insecurity of merely provisional rights, our duty to leave the state of nature and to form a civil condition is not conditional upon our agreement.

Thus, the crucial idea within Kant's political theory is that conclusive rights and respecting others' moral equality and freedom are only possible within a civil condition. For him, we do not need the state for protecting our pre-socially determinable property rights. According to Kant, we need the state to determine what is justly ours in the first place. The question is just whether the demand for such a condition can find its ultimate realisation within individual nation states or whether some lawful condition beyond these political units is required by Kant's theory of Right.

The argument for a global civil condition

Exercising our freedom by making choices and respecting those of others gives us a duty to form a state with a sovereign government and courts – superiors that act in our name (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 316). However, the question necessarily arises whether the need to justify external possessions to others only exists among those living within the same state. Can a state simply claim some territory and the resources in it and distribute them among its citizens without owing anyone else a justification for its decisions? Or do states have to submit to the authority of supra-state institutions that can generate and enforce a global collective will that determines what each state rightfully possesses in the first place?

The question of the limits of the sovereignty of states within Kant's theory has recently attracted greater attention. The traditional interpretation of Kant's view on this matter is based on his remarks in Perpetual Peace. Here (1795: PP VIII, 367) he famously rejects the idea of a coercive global civil condition in the form of a ‘universal monarchy’ (in which all peoples and cultures would be fused) or in terms of an international state of nation states. In Perpetual Peace Kant (1795: PP VIII, 357) recognises that

In accordance with reason there is only one way that states in relation with one another can leave the lawless condition, which involves nothing but war; it is that, like individual human beings, they give up their savage (lawless) freedom, accommodate themselves to public coercive laws, and so form an (always growing) state of nations (civitas gentium) that would finally encompass all the nations of the earth.

Here, Kant's main reason for rejecting the idea that states have an enforceable obligation to join into a coercive global civil condition (analogous to individuals who have a duty to form a state) is that as subjects to such a global order, states would no longer be sovereign to the necessary degree. Being subject to the instructions of a higher level authority (like coercive global institutions), states could not fulfil their crucial task of conclusively determining their subjects’ rights. But, as was pointed out, determining the just extent of everyone's freedom and acquired property is the very reason the state is required. Thus, according to Flikschuh (2010: 480), ‘the juridical compulsion of states would compromise their moral personality’.

However, this argument for the untouchable sovereignty and moral value of states obviously depends on the idea that states are in fact best placed (or capable at all) to fulfil their tasks and that there is no feasible alternative arrangement that could better achieve the same purposes. It is thus a legitimate question whether Kant's conceptual arguments about the need for indivisible authority hold up to empirical scrutiny, and commentators like Pogge (2009) have criticised Kant by arguing that they do not. However, there is also a number of Kant scholars (Byrd and Hruschka, 2010; Hodgson, 2012; Höffe, 2006) that offer a different interpretation of Kant's view on global justice, which they derive from Kant's later and most developed work on justice and rights – the Doctrine of Right. They argue that in this later book Kant acknowledges that establishing a global civil condition is not merely a desirable idea but rather a duty of justice that states have. For them, Kant's own writings strongly imply that the sovereignty of states is not as untouchable or efficacious as his comments in Perpetual Peace suggest.

Yet, hardly any proponent of the more recent interpretations of Kant's legal philosophy fully explores the radical implications that his theory contains. ⁷ Commentators like Otfried Höffe restrict the purpose of the mandatory global legal order to the peaceful adjudication of conflicts that arise among states whose possessions are taken as given. In Höffe's view (2006: 167, 168), the problem to be solved by a supranational authority is the resolving of the ‘residual state of nature’ that exists between ‘already established states’. Louis-Philippe Hodgson (2012: 124), too, argues that coercive global institutions could only supplement existing state power to solve the assurance problem among states:

The authority the domestic state has with respect to its citizens means that whatever problem they face in having to share a territory is already solved. For all citizens of a state, in their dealings with one another, rights are already conclusive. If we are citizens of the same state, then there is no sense in which our rights with respect to one another are provisional – as if we could not really know which one of us is the rightful owner of your car until a world state was in place. Our domestic state already provides the answers to such questions.

The problem arises as follows: almost all interpretations of Kant to date assume that states can justly distribute those external possessions that are within their territory. But why should that be the case? Or, to phrase this concern more in terms of Kant's idea of right: why should people outside a state simply have to accept that this state justly possesses its territory and whatever it contains? After all, if I claim possession of a car, I do not only exclude my fellow citizens from the possibility of possessing the vehicle; I just as much exclude everyone else in the world from owning it and (what is crucial from the point of view of the UPR) make their choices with respect to that vehicle dependent on mine. Why should I be absolved from owing everyone outside my state a justification just as much as I do to my fellow citizens? And why should the limitation of the freedom of foreigners not matter for the assessment of the legitimacy of my claim?

We can better appreciate this problem if we consider what such a ‘national possession prerogative’ would mean from the point of view of Kant's UPR. From the citizens’ perspective the prerogative implies that they merely owe each other a justification for their claims to property. Towards outsiders, though, it would be sufficient to explain that whatever citizens claim as property within their state does not require justification to outsiders. These outsiders can only demand a justification of claims to external possessions from their fellow citizens. From the perspective of an outsider, though, there simply is no right to a justification of the property claims of the citizens of other states. The mere fact that they happen to not share in the united will of this other state is a contingent but sufficient reason to preclude such a right to justification. This situation, though, seems to be clearly at odds with the very idea of the UPR. It is difficult to see why Kant names the principle the ‘Universal Principle of Right’ if it is not intended to apply to all of humanity equally, and in its formulation there is no explicit restriction of the range of the principle to compatriots: it does not limit the need to justify property claims to the borders of states. The principle rather suggests that such justification is owed globally (universally) and that property claims remain indeterminate until such a justification via a global united will is given. ⁸ And this is precisely what Kant unmistakably affirms in the Doctrine of Right – albeit in a few passages. When discussing the idea of public right that alone renders property claims secure, Kant (1797: DR VI, 266) asserts that ‘Even if [the problem of the indeterminacy of claims to private property] is solved through [a domestic] original contract, such acquisition will always remain only provisional unless this contract extends to the entire human race’.

It therefore seems clearly insufficient to argue, on Kantian grounds, that the citizens of a state do not owe outsiders a justification for the possessions they distribute among themselves because these outsiders are not members of their state. ⁹ If we move from the level of the individual citizen to that of the community the requirement of justification does not change. We might think, for instance, that citizens do not owe a justification for their possessions to outsiders because they form a people within their state. However, at another point in the Doctrine of Right, Kant (1797: DR VI, 350) also rejects such a community-based conception of distributive justice when he holds that

Any rights of nations, and anything external that is mine or yours that states can acquire or retain by war, are merely provisional. Only in a universal association of states (analogous to that by which a people becomes a state) can rights come to hold conclusively and a true condition of peace come about.

Such a contract would fulfil a necessary procedural requirement for determining what can be justly possessed in this world, in the same way that a domestic contract is the precondition of social justice within a state (thereby removing the indeterminacy concerning people's external possessions). Of course, as Kant diagnoses, such a coercive global order is currently not a realistic idea since the citizens of the nations of the world currently are not in favour of such a development. However, assuming that forming a global contract would not be impossible (e.g. that human psychology is incapable of generating the required solidarity and thus prevents people from agreeing to such an arrangement), what reason requires is not dictated by what is currently popular among people or what has been popular for centuries.

Accordingly, in the Doctrine of Right coercively enforced legal schemes at the domestic, the international, and the cosmopolitan (inter-citizen) level form necessarily complementary aspects of a complete scheme of rights: ‘if the principle of outer freedom limited by law is lacking in any one of these three possible forms of rightful condition, the framework of all the others in unavoidably undermined and must finally collapse’ (Kant, 1797: DR VI, 311). Thus, the relevant difference between Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Right is not Kant's change of heart about the realisability of the ultimate end of the principle of Right – a global coercive civil condition (there is textual evidence that he did not change his view in this regard – see 1797: DR VI, 350). ¹³ Rather, in the Doctrine of Right, Kant no longer speaks of the idea of a coercively enforced universal legal condition as a conceptual contradiction but as the ideal final end of the ‘Principle of Right’ (which is, from his perspective, possibly unrealisable). Kant's abandonment of the thought that a coercive global condition would be a conceptual contradiction follows from his claim that states are unable to determine conclusively the rights of their citizens: if states are unable to fulfil this task, their complete sovereignty is not necessary either.

For Kant (1797: DR VI, 261), the most basic external thing that persons can own is land since ‘in a practical sense no one can have what is movable on a piece of land as his own unless he is assumed to be already in rightful possession of the land’. With respect to some of the most pressing problems humanity faces today, though, we might have to modify this focus on land and territory. These remain, of course, important (Ripstein, 2009: 261–266; Ypi, 2012: 7, 8) but there are resources that are important for opportunities that persons have to have that are not directly tied to the possession of land. First, there are resources that are fugacious (such as freshwater and fish) and possession of territory or land does not necessarily give a person a claim to these movable resources (Armstrong, 2013). Second, there are still currently unowned resources (for instance on the bottom of the oceans or the artic) that would pose a tremendous problem for the UPR if it is understood to take national possessions as given. On the one hand, the principle would not require that outsiders are given a justification for what states possess within their territory. On the other hand, though, the principle would seem to require that unrelated persons owe each other a justification for the acquisition of unowned resources. Thus, the question of unowned resources, too, highlights the two ways in which the traditional understanding of the UPR problematically gives rise to split moral obligations: with respect to what justification is owed for (nationally owned resources versus unowned resources) and concerning whom justification is owed to (co-nationals versus outsiders). Third, the determining challenge of our age, climate change, shows very clearly that there are resources (such as a clean and stable atmosphere) that are vital for the opportunities that people have in life but that are not tied to territory, and which people are not guaranteed if they possess some amount of land.

As these examples show, Kant's UPR cannot be primarily concerned with the rightful possession of land. However, the principle can well be applied to fugacious and unowned resources if we do not presuppose that whatever states possess counts as already justified external possessions. To avoid inconsistency, the examples of fugacious and unowned resources push us towards a reading of the UPR that does not draw an arbitrary distinction between nationally owned resources (for which no justification is owed) and these other types of resources (possession of which requires a justifiability to both our co-citizens and outsiders). Thus, Kant's UPR requires that claims to possessing territory or resources are justifiable to all who are excluded from them – which includes co-citizens and non-members alike. ¹⁴ The unilateral property claims of states have to be approved by some kind of global general will and cannot be accepted as authoritative without further scrutiny. That is, the territorial authority and property claims of states are always conditional upon their compatibility with the UPR. ¹⁵ This problem cannot be avoided, as Arthur Ripstein (2009: 228) holds, by treating states' territory as identical to the bodies of persons that we have a duty to leave untouched even in the state of nature. This is because unlike persons' bodies, the extension of the territory of states is not incontestable and thus this argument presents as a solution what is to be determined (namely the conclusive physical extent of the state).

Consequently, the logic of Kant's concept of Right gives states an enforceable duty to form a coercive global civil condition – a duty that is contrary to the views of Rawls, Nagel, and Dworkin. The force of this duty derives from the fact that (similar to individuals who are not members of a state) states themselves remain in an international state of nature as long as they do not subject themselves to a global constitution that determines everyone's rightful possessions. But contrary to the views of recent critics of the traditional view, such a global legal scheme would not merely have to regulate the peaceful adjudication of inter-state conflicts. The global general will and the coercive international institutional scheme we still lack also has the task of determining what rightly belongs to every state in the first place. ¹⁶ This is the radical ultimate implication of Kant's idea of rights as reciprocally coercive claims that cannot be justified unilaterally, and that a common coercive order is needed to solve this indeterminacy about external possessions. ¹⁷

The duty to support the poor within the civil condition

As is well known, Kant does not offer a detailed account of what distributive justice requires within the state because the concrete details of the legitimate property regime that is part of the legal order are to be largely determined by the people. Thus, even if we accept the idea that Kant's theory of Right requires the establishment of a coercive global legal scheme, there might be little we can identify in terms of necessary elements of this scheme. Kant is explicit that political authorities like states have the sole purpose of enabling their subjects' freedom. Thus, such authorities can only exercise their power for the purpose of maintaining and safeguarding a civil condition but not for enforcing some particular conception of the good or social justice (Kant, 1793: TP VIII, 290; Ripstein, 2009: 223). That is, a state cannot force its citizens to do things that are not necessary for maintaining the civil condition as it would otherwise impermissibly violate citizens' freedom. If the state imposes any other duties it would exceed (and thus undermine) its own purpose, namely, to enable people to exercise their freedom.

However, within Kant's theory, there are certain minimal requirements that any legal order and arrangement of distributive justice must fulfil to be legitimate. If these conditions can plausibly be shown to include a ban on poverty (and the argument for the need to establish a coercive global civil condition is correct) this would mean that from the perspective of Kant's theory of justice, poverty anywhere in the world would be an injustice. While this is the argument I am going to make, we first have to understand why for Kant poverty is incompatible with justice. The Doctrine of Right contains a much debated passage that suggests that this is exactly the case. When discussing the powers of the state, Kant (1797: DR VI, 325, 326) holds that

To the supreme commander [the state] there belongs indirectly, that is, insofar as he has taken over the duty of the people, the right to impose taxes on the people for its own preservation, such as taxes to support organizations providing for the poor, foundling homes, and church organizations.

Nonetheless, there is a possible problem with this interpretation of the powers of the state to alleviate poverty among its subjects. When we are part of a society and engage in exchanges with others, we necessary enter into relations of dependence with others: crucially, my freedom to own things depends on other's choice because all our choices determine the price of pursuing other available options. So why are relations of economic dependence that can lead to the impoverishment of some morally problematic within Kant's theory, which only entails the formal criterion of the UPR, but no concrete required distributions? After all, poverty does not undermine the freedom of people if we understand this freedom in purely negative terms. Why should we not agree with F.A. von Hayek (1976) that Kant's idea is that of a libertarian state that is not permitted to engage in redistribution and welfare provisions, but whose only task is to safeguard the external freedom of its citizens with coercive means?

The reason for thinking that the Kantian state is not merely permitted, but indeed required, to engage in redistributive efforts so as to eliminate poverty among its subjects is that property is a social construct that must be justifiable to everyone as free and equals. According to Kant's standard of political legitimacy (1793: TP VIII, 297), any political arrangement must be such that ‘it is […] possible that a people could agree to it’. Thus, Ripstein (2009: 277) points out, according to this hypothetical contract test, ‘anything that could not be the object of agreement cannot give rise to […] enforceable property rights’. Consequently, there is no reason to think that people would agree to a property regime that would allow for some or many of them to end up in a situation in which they own next to nothing besides their own bodies, and in which they have hardly any opportunities to exercise their freedom without the invitation of others – that is: a situation in which they are personally dependent on the will of others to an absolute rather than a relative degree. The possibility of such personal dependence is incompatible with the UPR and could not be the outcome of a united will of these people who respect each other as free and equals either (Ripstein, 2009: 279). Thus, we can assert prior to any collective political determination of the details of social justice that under any property regime the state has the task to ensure that everyone has some minimal possessions that secure them a minimal range of options for making choices independently of the will of others. The Kantian state therefore must have the power (and its citizens a regarding prior duty) to ensure that everyone disposes over more than the mere means of subsistence (Wood, 2004: 83), and for this purpose to provide publicly funded collective goods like public places, health care, education, and equality of opportunity (Ripstein, 2009: 287–299). Within the Kantian state, poverty is almost always an unjustifiable, socially generated injustice, which becomes clear in light of Kant's remarks on beneficence in the Doctrine of Virtue where he states that

Having the resources to practice […] beneficence as depends on the goods of fortune is, for the most part, a result of certain human beings being favored through the injustice of the government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. (1797: DV VI, 454)

The Kantian argument against world poverty

At this point, the Kantian solution to world poverty emerges as a combination of the ideas discussed so far. If we accept the claims (A): that according to the original contract test Kant's theory includes a duty to eliminate poverty as a necessary condition of the legitimacy of any legal order, and (B): that humanity has the duty to create a coercive global condition to enable conclusive external possessions, it follows that no one must live involuntarily in poverty anywhere within this global civil condition lest the entire scheme of justice and property rights be illegitimate. The argument proceeds in formal terms as follows:

We only exercise our freedom rightly if our actions conform with the valid claims to freedom of choice and actions of others (the UPR).

In essence, this Kantian argument against world poverty turns many arguments of current liberal theorists (who refer to Kant in making their arguments) on their heads as it leads to conclusions these thinkers reject. Among these conclusions are that (a) global justice and distributive justice in general require the establishment of a coercive global order in which all have some kind of equal say, that (b) the current holdings of nation states cannot be taken as given but have to be either confirmed by, or revised as part of this global legal order, and (c) the fight against existing poverty is a matter of justice and not of charity. The fact that no coercive global order exists to date does not absolve us of our duty to fight poverty; the lack of such a global institutional arrangement rather presents yet another kind of injustice that is added to the existence of poverty and that is committed by those who resist the creation of a coercive global order. Thus, the Kantian argument against world poverty ultimately implies that within a justifiable global scheme much of the currently existing inequality would be impermissible.

Conclusion

If we follow Kant's arguments in the Doctrine of Right, his theory of justice provides a definite answer to the modern question whether states are under a duty to establish coercive universal international law that requires the involvement of some sort of global common will. In connection with Kant's idea of the hypothetical contract test, his theory also implies that existing poverty gives rise to enforceable obligations to eradicate this evil, and not merely to unenforceable humanitarian duties of assistance.

It is of course a prior question whether we accept Kant's political theory. However, anyone who does has to disagree with some of the main contemporary liberal egalitarians on three counts: according to Kant (1) we cannot reject the idea that there is a duty to create a global coercive scheme of law and justice, (2) there is no question that global poverty is an injustice to be fought, and (3) the current holdings of nation states are inconclusive and subject to approval or revision by a global legal order. The existence of poverty and massive inequalities that lead to personal dependence is unacceptable if we are to appropriately respect the freedom of others and to rightfully exercise our own freedom. Within Kant's theory, the existence of poverty generally signals that we exercise our freedom in unjustifiable ways – regardless of whether we have already created a global civil condition or not. One additional implication of my argument is that the champions of liberal egalitarianism must either (a) forgo supporting their rejection of extensive duties of global distributive justice by appealing to Kant; or (b) revise their accounts of global justice. In the former case their works would be of less Kantian pedigree than is often thought.