Moral Community: Escaping the Ethical State of Nature

In The Doctrine of Right Kant argues for an obligation to leave the Juridical State of Nature and found the state. Less familiar is a passage in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason where he argues for an obligation to leave what he calls the Ethical State of Nature by joining together in the Moral Community. Both texts address and try to resolve a tension between our individual freedom and our authority to make claims on one another. The Doctrine of Right takes up the apparent tension between freedom and legitimate coercive government authority, arguing that such authority is a condition for the exercise of freedom. You can establish your rights, thus securing your freedom, only in the civil society where we reciprocally recognize the rights of all. The Religion addresses personal, rather than political, relationships. Kant’s remarks there are both suggestively rich and disappointingly vague. But I take it that they include, among many other ideas, the thought that regarding other people as capable of making choices that give you reasons to act is a condition of the full exercise of your freedom in another sense. The relevant freedom is what Kant calls inner freedom, and is identical to the Groundwork’s better-known concept of autonomy. In the Religion, Kant thus gestures at this ethical parallel to the thesis of the Doctrine of Right: you can establish the authority of your choices, making your autonomy possible, only in the Moral Community, a form of relations in which we reciprocally acknowledge authority to give reasons to one another. Kant provides no detailed argument for this thesis. In this paper, I aim to do so. I first review the main lines of argument in the discussion of the Juridical State of Nature, and then develop the argument for the interpersonal case.