Race, Culture, and the Horizons of Agency: Kant’s Racism, Systematically Understood

Marwah I.S.

AbstractThis article examines how Kant’s conceptualizations of natural history and teleological judgement shape his understanding of human difference and race. I argue that the teleological framework encasing Kant’s racial theory implies constraints on the capacity of non-whites to make moral progress. While commentators tend to approach Kant’s racial theory in relation to his political theory, his late-life cosmopolitanism, and his treatments (or non-treatments) of colonialism, empire and slavery, the problem I focus on here is that race is itself only intelligible in relation to a teleological natural history limiting certain races’ capacities to engage in humanity’s moral vocation.

McNulty M.B.

Kant's forthright rejection of rampant, ungrounded speculations in natural science, including in natural history, is well known. For instance, he dismisses the wild, unwarranted developmental histories of other early natural historians, such as Buffon and Herder, as "daring adventure[s] of reason." However, as I show in this paper, Kant himself made use of teleological speculations in natural history, particularly in his three essays on race. I argue that, for Kant, speculations about nature's purposes are necessary to explain and to buttress the unification of organisms in real species, despite observable and heritable variations among members of these species. Without hypothesizing about nature's intentions, a mechanical, efficient-causal account of nature cannot appropriately ground the unity of species. Hence, I depict Kant's account of natural history as threading a needle between merely mechanical accounts of nature - which are incapable of achieving the goals of the science - and freewheeling, conjectural narratives about the origin and development of the Earth, life, and humanity. In the end, I conclude that my account reveals a substantive role for the faculty of reason in natural history, which dovetails with recent work on Kant's views on the non-physical sciences.

Lu-Adler H.

AbstractAccording to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795). On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery (and colonialism) in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it as a cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves.

Vaccarino Bremner S.

Abstract This paper claims that Kant’s conception of culture provides a new means of understanding how the two parts of the Critique of Judgment fit together. Kant claims that culture is both the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature and to be defined in terms of ‘art in general’ (of which the fine arts are a subtype). In the Critique of Teleological Judgment, culture, as the last empirically cognizable telos of nature, serves as the mediating link between nature and freedom, while in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the connection between art and morality passes through culture. In either case, Kant offers distinct, yet interdependent, arguments for how culture demonstrates the amenability of nature to its supersensible ground: the central question Kant claims in the Introduction that the work seeks to answer. Thus, not only does this account advance a concept essential to both parts of the work; it also demonstrates how the two parts can be conceived as complementary, with each supplementing the other to solve Kant’s central question. As such, understanding the Critique of Judgment in terms of culture enables us to see how the two parts of the work do not merely share points of similarity or common themes, but presuppose one another in order to understand how nature is amenable to freedom.

Basevich E.

Eberl O.

AbstractWhether Kant’s late legal theory and his theory of race are contradictory in their account of colonialism has been a much-debated question that is also of highest importance for the evaluation of the Enlightenment’s contribution to Europe’s colonial expansion and the dispossession and enslavement of native and black peoples. This article discusses the problem by introducing the discourse on barbarism. This neglected discourse is the original and traditional European colonial vocabulary and served the justification of colonialism from ancient Greece throughout the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Kant’s explicit rejection of this discourse and its prejudices reveals his early critical stance toward colonial judgements of native peoples even before he developed his legal theory. This development of his critical position can be traced in his writings on race: although he makes racist statements in these texts, his theory of race is not meant to ground moral judgements on ‘races’ or a racial hierarchy but to defend the unity of mankind under the given empirical reality of colonial hierarchies.

Marwah I.S.

Huseyinzadegan D.

Sandford S.

This article presents a new argument concerning the relation between Kant’s theory of race and aspects of the critical philosophy. It argues that Kant’s treatment of the problem of the systematic unity of nature and knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment can be traced back a methodological problem in the natural history of the period – that of the possibility of a natural system of nature. Kant’s transformation of the methodological problem from natural history into a set of philosophical (and specifically epistemological) problems proceeds by way of the working out of his own problem in natural history – the problem of the natural history of the human races – and specifically the problem of the unity in diversity of the human species, in response to which he develops a theory of race. This theory of race is, further, the first developed model of the use of teleological judgment in Kant’s work. The article thus argues that Kant’s philosophical position on the systematic unity of nature and of knowledge in the first and third Critiques, and his account and defense of teleological judgment, are developed out of problems first articulated in his solution to the problem of the unity in diversity of the human species – that is, in his theory of race. The article does not seek to establish that these aspects of the critical philosophy are therefore racialised. But it does demonstrate, against those who deny its salience to his philosophy, how the problem of the unity in diversity of the human species and Kant’s theory of race is significant for the development of aspects of the critical philosophy and thus contributes to their philosophical problematics.

Mills C.W.

Mensch J.

Allais L.

After a long period of comparative neglect, in the last few decades growing numbers of philosophers have been paying attention to the startling contrast presented between Kant’s universal moral the...

Mills C.W.

Marwah I.S.

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood.

Marwah I.S.

Jesudason E.

Iatrogenesis is a recognised aspect of healthcare. But could kindness, a prized ingredient in such work, be implicated in some of the iatrogenic harm? In a recent paper, I noted how healthcare professionals and institutions that appear to value and vaunt kindness can, in practice, fall not just occasionally short, but often systemically so. Rather than insisting on these as aberrations, I wondered whether, our practice of kindness may, as with use of antibiotics or X-rays, have its own less considered but nonetheless harmful side effects. Here, encouraged by the resulting interest, I reflect further, including on two quite different responses to my paper from Cheung, and from Tan and Neo. In some aspects, we hold common ground. Cheung agrees the discretionary nature of kindness can pose ethical problems. Moreover, none of us are arguing kindness should be abandoned, cannot be virtuous, is merely favouritism, or forms the sole or proven cause of healthcare failures. Cheung suggests we infuse our practice with curiosity, reducing harms from discretionary kindness. Tan and Neo appear reluctant to concede such harms. They argue kindness is protected against these, including by its virtuous nature. Seasoned doubters might respond ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. In real-world conditions, when healthcare professionals and their institutions profess kindness but behave differently, is it sufficient for our learning simply to condemn them as unvirtuous? Cautiously, we could be more curious. We could ask if, by offering kindness to those close around them, this carries the side effect of depriving others, people perhaps wider afield and less considered.