Kant on social suffering: vulnerability as moral and legal value

Abstract

My chapter gives an account of Kant’s approach to social vulnerability, highlighting some of the conclusions that Kant’s doctrine of rational right and some shorter writings on political and legal philosophy allow one to draw. According to this aim, I suggest accurately telling apart two counterpoised claims in Kant’s political philosophy: his non-contractarian notion of the omnilateral will, which diminishes the weight of the standpoint assumed by individual subjects, and his cosmopolitan account of the universal interaction that civil agents display as subjects living on the same planet. I first claim that Kant’s model of the republican state does not appear as the ideal institutional framework for beings endowed with the dignity he assigns to humans. Second, I will attempt to evaluate the enlargement of the view of social agency that Kant’s treatment of equity urges, following the interpretative path that Pinheiro Walla furnished in some recent papers. Finally, I will address the limitations of Kant’s account of social justice for overcoming contemporary social quandaries.