Kant's theory of justice

to place the thought of great figures, extends well beyond those figures themselves. I have mentioned several essays that take up issues often under-represented in introductions, but that exemplify the virtues of this volume overall. There remains in its pages plenty with which advanced students can enter into critical discussion. In his very good Chapter 10 on Leibniz’s theistic arguments, Blumenfeld is appropriately forthright about their weaknesses. Odd time for him to pull his punches, then, about the utter ambiguity of the main premise in all of Leibniz’s versions of the ontological argument. Let it be true that God (alternatively: a perfect or necessary being) is by definition blessed with all perfections, necessary existence among them. What could this mean? Either that anything that is God has this perfection-in which case we get a trivial conclusion that anything that’s a necessary being exists-or else that there is a being that has this perfection--in which case we get a non-trivial conclusion by begging the question. In his (much welcomed) effort to highlight the non-phenomenalist aspects of Leibniz’s account of bodies, Rutherford (pp. 14549) emphasises that for Leibniz bodies are “constituted from” a plurality of monads: but if this is indeed to represent a theory about the nature of bodies, according to which they are “identified with” or “are” pluralities of monads, it is unclear how the (former) apparently one-many relation of constitution can give us the (latter) one-one relation of identity that is formally transitive. PERDUE UKIVERSITY KantS zy zyxwvuts zyxwv zy zyxwv 7Xeoly 0f.Yustice By ALLEN 1). ROSEN Cornell University Press, 1993. xvi J. A. COVER + 238 pp. $28.50 In this excellent book, Allen Rosen presents a clear, well-written, and cogently argued interpretation of Kant’s views on justice that situates him within the tradition of welfare-state liberalism. In general the book can be divided into two parts. In the first part, Rosen lays out the basic elements of Kant’s views on justice and situates these in the context of the broader moral theory. Rosen then deploys these materials in the second part in order to treat certain specific issues raised by Kant. The idea of freedom is central to Rosen’s treatment of Kant’s politics, as it provides the theme around which his interpretation is organised. Consequently, Rosen begins by delineating the limits of external freedom as Kant understood them. He finds these limits defined by Kant’s universal law of justice: the command that one act externally in such a way that the free use of one’s will can be made compatible with the freedom of everyone else according to a universal law. Rosen maintains that Kant’s principles of civil freedom (in the pursuit of one’s private ends), legal equality (with all other subjects), and political freedom (through participation in the process of self-government) follow from this law. zyx 178 Next Rosen demonstrates how the universal law of justice can be derived from the third formulation of the categorical imperative, thereby providing the moral justification of freedom. He holds that the universal law of justice is a categorical imperative in both its form and its content and should be seen as merely the externalised form of universal law-giving. The distinction between rational consent and external coercion as the two alternatives governing the formal relationships among different wills is central to the derivation in that consent provides the means by which the freedom of different wills can be reconciled under law. Rosen completes his explication of Kant’s fundamental theory of justice by demarcating duties of justice from ethical duties in terms of enforceability through external coercion. After which, he examines the distinctions between narrow/wide and perfect/imperfect duties. These pairs of distinctions are later applied with great deftness in the discussions that follow. After having laid out the basic elements of justice, Rosen proceeds to apply this framework to Kant’s views on legitimacy, sovereignty, and revolution. This includes quite useful discussions of Kant’s pragmatic approach to the structure of the state and his mistakes with respect to illimitable sovereignty. Here he examines the tension between Kant‘s conviction that sovereignty is illimitable and his commitment to constitutionalism, which emerged historically as a means of solving the problems posed by absolute sovereignty, arguing for the priority and greater cogency of the latter. Finally, Rosen carefully considers and rejects interpretations that present Kant as an advocate of the minimal or ‘night-watchman’ state, where welfare programmes are permissible only if they are needed to insure social stability. He finds these views based on mistaken interpretations of Kant’s opposition to paternalism and the role of happiness in his politics. Rosen correctly points out that from the claim that the state has a duty to protect civil freedom, it does not follow that the state has no other duty than to protect such freedom. Instead, Rosen argues that Kant held that the state itself was a moral person with a corresponding ethical duty of benevolence towards its citizens. Rosen finds this duty grounded in Kant’s positive principle of publicity, which commands the promotion of happiness on the part of the state and thereby can serve as the justificatory basis of a broad array of programmes devoted to enhancing the welfare of citizens. Rosen concludes by locating Kant’s enduring significance in his justification of freedom. By grounding freedom in the categorical imperative, Kant avoids the pitfalls of scepticism and relativism on the one hand and consequentialism on the other that plague so many theoreticians of liberalism. My only criticism of Rosen’s interpretation focusses on his treatment of the concepts of autonomy and the social contract in Kant. Rosen treats these notions as providing auxiliary principles, thereby shifting them out of the centre of Kant’s thought. In contrast, Kant’s discussion of autonomy in the Groundwork, one of his lasting contributions to ethics, situates it at the centre of his moral theory, for it unifies within itself the different conceptions of freedom and will at play in Kant. Further, the idea of the social contract plays a much more prominent role in Kant’s political writings than Rosen 179 zy zy zyxwvut zyxwvu zyxwvut zyxwvu zyxwv indicates, and it provides an important link to the epistemological doctrines of the first Critique, specifically Kant’s theory of ideas. The social contract is best seen as the expression of a collective autonomy in which a community of rational agents, defined as the realm of ends, make laws for themselves as a totality. Rosen, then, is correct in identifjmg the third formulation of the categorical imperative as the point of entry into Kant’s politics, but he fails to place proper emphasis on the key notions of autonomy and the realm of ends associated with that formulation and to pursue Kant’s development of these notions in the form of the social contract. On the whole, however, this is an excellent book that contains many useful and stimulating discussions of important aspects of Kant’s political thought. On that score, it makes a significant contribution to a growing body of literature in a field of Kant scholarship that until recently had lain neglected for far too long. LAMAR IJNIVERSITY KEVIN E. DODSON irhis Complicated Form OfLiji. Essays on l44tgenstein By NEWTON GARVER Open Court, 1994. xxii + 316 pp. For reasons the author himself canvasses, this book is unlikely to be as widely read as it deserves to be. In Chapter 5, Garver notes that Wittgenstein, while widely mentioned as one of the century’s important philosophers, has actually had little influence on mainstream philosophy in America. This is more so regarding the later work than the early work. Many doctrines of Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus-hgicus Philosophicus are, without much acknowledgement, floating in the mainstream, for example semantics involving possible worlds, languages of thought or ‘mentalese’,correspondence views on truth, reality as propositional, no non-logical connexions among facts or properties, these are all with us. Not that these ideas are all held as a unified doctrine or that there is a school. They just crop up all over the place. But if we keep in mind that Wittgenstein’s acknowledged mentors either could not understand him (Frege) or misunderstood many crucial points (Russell), we should not be surprised at the lack of acknowledgement. Wittgenstein’s own doubts about and devastations of his earlier views are often not taken seriously. And as Garver points out, even issues arising out of the later work that are nowadays popular, such as rule-following a la Kripke, are given emphases certainly not intended by Wittgenstein. Garver is probably right that logic (transmogrified into ‘grammar’ in the later works) was always the centre of philosophy for Wittgenstein. That Wittgenstein said it was logic and metaphysics does not affect this point very much; for, as the Tractatus shows, ontology is tailored to logic much more than vice versa. The factuality, or thattiness of reality as one might put it, is counterpoint to the theme that the proposition is prior to the name, that the sentence is prior to the word. Our picture making has not arisen out of a 180 0 Blarkwrll I‘uhlkhcrs Ltd. 19% zy zyxw