Kant argues that civic freedom amounts to being subject to laws to which citizens could have assented. Fichte conversely argues that personal freedom is only fully realized in a state of civil freedom and that citizens are only legitimately ruled by laws to which they have explicitly agreed. This paper shows how their differing accounts are rooted in a deeper disagreement about the relationship between transcendental and empirical freedom and the role empirical citizens’ assent ( Beistimmung ) plays in justifying civil legislation. The confrontation also shows why reading Kant as requiring citizens’ active assent may be problematic.

In Justifying Injustice Justifying Injustice: Legal Theory in Nazi Germany, Herlinde PauerStuder analyses the legal theory that Nazi jurists developed to justify the horrifying practices of the totalitarian regime. Yet how does one describe the legal theory of an order in which ‘Hitler’s will counted as a source of legality’? Although National Socialist (NS) law was not shaped by a unified legal theory, Pauer-Studer documents the lengths to which jurists schooled in the rule-of-law tradition were willing to go to justify the regime’s actions. Pauer-Studer challenges Ernst Fraenkel’s analysis of the NS state as a dual state that combines the prerogative and the normative state in a parallel structure. While recognising that the NS state developed beyond the boundaries of a normative state structure, Pauer-Studer documents how this development was prepared and enabled by the efforts of legal theorists to justify NS legal procedures. Her point is that the NS state was not a dual structure in which bureaucrats and theorists followed normative principles and advocated the rule of law while unrelated atrocities were committed by other parts of the regime but rather that legal theorists prepared a normative framework that allowed the transformation into a prerogative state. Instead of a dual state, Pauer-Studer shows us a slippery slope that allowed the NS state to slide from a normative to an increasingly prerogative state. Still, Pauer-Studer argues that even the Gestapo had to maintain ‘the bare minimal ties to the Beamtenstaat that lent it the appearance of legitimacy’. Her book maps the legal theory that attempted to justify this distorted legal regime. This description leads to a theoretical point; Pauer-Studer’s account of Nazi legal theory allows her to reframe the debate between positivism and natural law since

Onora O'Neill ist eine der bedeutendsten Persönlichkeiten aus dem Kreis der Schüler*innen von John Rawls und hat sich in ihrer ganzen philosophischen Tätigkeit intensiv mit dessen politischer Philosophie beschäftigt. Von Rawls übernimmt O'Neill die Grundidee, dass Gerechtigkeitsansprüche vernünftig gerechtfertigt werden müssen und dass wir selbst Gerechtigkeitsprinzipien in einer vernünftigen Prozedur konstruieren. Jedoch wirft O'Neill Rawls vor, idealisierte Modelle anzuführen, ohne die dahinterliegende Metaphysik kritisch zu hinterfragen. Daher plädiert O'Neill für eine Rückkehr zu Kant und seiner kritischen Überprüfung der Vernunft und der Metaphysik.

In The Architectonic of Reason, Lea Ypi provides an illuminating and innovative interpretation of the Architectonic in the first Critique. Ypi argues that Kant's project of uniting practical and theoretical uses of reason in a critical metaphysics ultimately fails because practical reason does not have its own domain in which to legislate. This article challenges Ypi's objection to practical reason's lack of a domain in the first Critique. Its main contention is that reason's need for unity in legislation may be satisfied by a belief in God as a necessary practical presupposition rather than a dogmatic metaphysical reality.

This paper challenges the role individual autonomy has played in debates on moral neuroenhancement (MN). It shows how John Hyman's analysis of agency as consisting of functionally integrated dimensions allows us to reassess the impact of MN on practical agency. I discuss how MN affects what Hyman terms the four dimensions of agency: psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical. Once we separate the different dimensions of agency, it becomes clear that many authors in the debate conflate the different dimensions in the concept they call 'autonomous agents'. They contend that, for example, reason-giving and previous autonomous acts are relevant to agency as such, when in fact they capture only one aspect of functionally integrated agency. This paper reconsiders MN in light of the functional integration of reason and emotions in practical agency. To illustrate the impact of MN on different aspects of agency, I consider examples from legal practice, which show that autonomy cannot be our sole focus when evaluating the moral implications of MN.

In the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant describes << a historical sign (signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon)>> that proves humanity's tendency for progress throughout history (SF, AA vii 84). This sign is the enthusiasm of the spectators to the French Revolution and Kant argues that it proves the causal efficacy of our moral predisposition. The idea that a sign can provide a proof and that this proof is theoretically valid is surprising given Kant's insistence that we cannot prove intelligible causes. In this paper, I argue that we need to understand the historical sign in accordance with Kant's theory of signs as a natural sign that unites the temporal perspectives of the past, present and future. To appreciate the extraordinary position of the historical sign, I confront Kant's accounts of progress by adopting the two temporal viewpoints of hindsight and foresight and show how these are combined in the historical sign.

Kant's account of progress is often mistakenly portrayed as a steady movement toward realizing the highest political good. In this paper, I show that we also need to take non-linear progress into account. What exactly the highest political good is and whether it is realizable is a separate, complicated question, which I leave aside in this paper. Instead, I focus on whether and how political agents can be motivated by a belief in progress even in times when such a belief might seem unwarranted. My main concern is the following question: Is regression in terms of realizing our ideals a reason to abandon a belief in a Kantian account of political progress? As part of my answer to this question, I consider the relationship between Kant's account of a guarantee of perpetual peace in the Treaty essay of the same name and his later reference to a historical sign in the Conflict of the Faculties. The paper considers how Kant's account of progress allows us to confront apparent moments of regression within a substantive account of progress and a robust notion of what the realization of a political ideal would look like. I focus on how an individual in a Kantian account might be motivated by the idea of political progress and how his non-linear account of progress helps the agent to be further motivated to promote political change in situations of apparent regression.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Moller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity.

This chapter presents a novel interpretation of the transcendental deduction which uses judicial imputation as a guide for understanding the structure and aim of the argument. Møller argues that the metaphysical deduction should not be read as the answer to the question quid facti, which should instead be found within the transcendental deduction. The parallel with judicial imputation shows that the transcendental deduction is a proof of an authorisation to judge. Judicial imputation presupposes that the judge has both the authority to subsume the case under the law and to apply the effects of the law to the case. This leads to a two-step interpretation of the B edition of the transcendental deduction, which focuses on appearances necessarily falling under the categories and the authorisation of the understanding to apply the categories to appearances.

This final chapter shows how Kant understands philosophical systematicity in analogy with legal systematicity. Taking into account the two other central illustrations of systematicity, architecture and organisms, Møller argues that only the legal metaphors illustrate the function of inner critique and the power-conferring role of reason’s lawfulness. This leads to an account of philosophy as the science of the laws of reason which takes into account the legal aspects of Kant’s philosophical methodology.

This chapter shows that the antinomies of pure reason present an analogy between the critique and a civil trial in which reason in the narrow sense is challenged to prove that it can legitimately possess and use its ideas. In reconstructing the different parts of this image, Møller suggests reading the tribunal image as a second-order model of evaluation of judgements. In order to achieve this aim, Møller inspects the different roles and procedures mentioned in the juridical metaphors to see how they fit the different procedures in the antinomies. The chapter untangles the notions of the tribunal itself, the trial, the witnesses, the audience and the verdict. The image of the reader as judge is considered in its intellectual historical context, which shows an affinity between Kant’s use of this image and the project of enlightenment.

The doctrine of imputation is at the centre of Gottfried Achenwall’s theory of natural law. Together with obligation (obligatio), imputation (imputatio) is, according to Ach­enwall, one of the two basic forces of a law. In contrast to Samuel von Pufendorf, he claims that imputation requires a binding law. This article shows how Achenwall’s doc­trine of imputation forms the link between law and free action and finds its form of implementation in the rulings of the courts. Imputation shows in praxi how ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ are connected in an evaluative judgement, and in this way makes it possible to evaluate a free action in the light of a moral or legal law.