Kant's Theory of Justice

When he finished the Groundwork in 1785, Kant was convinced that he could produce the Metaphysic of Marals within a very short time. However, the latter work did not appear until 1797. This substantial delay alone might suggest that his final account of morals was quite different from what Kant himself had envisaged twelve years earlier. Concentrating mainly on its political part, I shall try to show that the Position Kant developed in the 1790's in Theory and Practice, Perpetual Peace, Rechtslehre, and Tugendlehre is in fact quite different from, and also more successful than, the rudimentary account in the Groundwork. A reader familiär with those later works may well wonder whether they display a systematic theory at all. And indeed, the theory I shall attribute to Kant is nowhere clearly stated. Nonetheless, I think that my conjecture makes good sense of the political principles Kant affirms, and also coheres well with other Kantian themes and with much of what he has to say about the justice of political actions and institutions. Being a reconstruction of Kant's own position, the theory I shall sketch is not äs progressive äs many of his recent followers would like. But no purpose is served by torturing Kant's own work until it matches what we now view äs the most reasonable