Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [49]
Even John Locke (1632–1704), the great theorist of property rights and limited government, does not assert an unlimited right of self-possession. He rejects the notion that we may dispose of our life and liberty however we please. But Locke’s theory of unalienable rights invokes God, posing a problem for those who seek a moral basis for rights that does not rest on religious assumptions.
Kant’s Case for Rights
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) offers an alternative account of duties and rights, one of the most powerful and influential accounts any philosopher has produced. It does not depend on the idea that we own ourselves, or on the claim that our lives and liberties are a gift from God. Instead, it depends on the idea that we are rational beings, worthy of dignity and respect.
Kant was born in the East Prussian city of Konigsberg in 1724, and died there, almost eighty years later. He came from a family of modest means. His father was a harness-maker and his parents were Pietists, members of a Protestant faith that emphasized the inner religious life and the doing of good works.1
He excelled at the University of Konigsberg, which he entered at age sixteen. For a time, he worked as a private tutor, and then, at thirty-one, he received his first academic job, as an unsalaried lecturer, for which he was paid based on the number of students who showed up at his lectures. He was a popular and industrious lecturer, giving about twenty lectures a week on subjects including metaphysics, logic, ethics, law, geography, and anthropology.
In 1781, at age fifty-seven, he published his first major book, The Critique of Pure Reason, which challenged the empiricist theory of knowledge associated with David Hume and John Locke. Four years later, he published the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the first of his several works on moral philosophy. Five years after Jeremy Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), Kant’s Groundwork launched a devastating critique of utilitarianism. It argues that morality is not about maximizing happiness or any other end. Instead, it is about respecting persons as ends in themselves.
Kant’s Groundwork appeared shortly after the American Revolution (1776) and just before the French Revolution (1789). In line with the spirit and moral thrust of those revolutions, it offers a powerful basis for what the eighteenth-century revolutionaries called the rights of man, and what we in the early twenty-first century call universal human rights.
Kant’s philosophy is hard going. But don’t let that scare you away. It is worth the effort, because the stakes are enormous. The Groundwork takes up a big question: What is the supreme principle of morality? And in the course of answering that question, it addresses another hugely important one: What is freedom?
Kant’s answers to these questions have loomed over moral and political philosophy ever since. But his historical influence is not the only reason to pay attention to him. Daunting though Kant’s philosophy may seem at first glance, it actually informs much contemporary thinking about morality and politics, even if we are unaware of it. So making sense of Kant is not only a philosophical exercise; it is also a way of examining some of the key assumptions implicit in our public life.
Kant’s emphasis on human dignity informs present-day notions of universal human rights. More important, his account of freedom figures in many of our contemporary debates about justice. In the introduction to this book, I distinguished three approaches to justice. One approach, that of the utilitarians, says that the way to define justice and to determine the right thing to do is to ask what will maximize welfare, or the collective happiness of society as a whole. A second approach connects justice to freedom. Libertarians offer an example of this approach. They say the just distribution of income and wealth is whatever distribution arises from the free exchange of goods and services