Synthetic a Priori Propositions of Right: Kant on Political Obligation

Abstract

In this essay, I shall study some aspects of Kant´s approach to a complex topic that lies at the core of modern political philosophy: That of political obligation. The specificity of juridical-political obligations, particularly concerning the difference between them and ethical obligations, is one of the fundamental themes within the realm of the modern political philosophies of the social contract, basically for the three following reasons. In the first place, (a) political obligation is a central topic of modern philosophy by virtue of the conceptual challenge it entails, namely, that of thinking the original political phenomenon of modernity, the state, for the first time in the history of philosophy with categories and modes of argumentation that were strictly juridical, in contrast to the deliberate subsumption of political philosophy under dogmatic theology, traditional metaphysics or ethics. This challenge was a double one, for the starting point of the incipient autonomisation of political reflexion, concomitant with its novel object of examination, was that of subjective natural rights. The difficulty this posed was how an absolutely valid and, at the same time, artificial (as opposed to ´natural´) juridical normativity could be obtained from a minimum of natural, pre-juridical normativity. I think the task of giving coherence to the foundation of state´s sovereignty upon individual tituli and moral powers is a task whose success depends in great measure on each author´s ability to shape the notion that connects both these ends, i. e., the notion of political obligation. In the second place, because of this point of departure located in the realm of subjective rights, the notion of political obligation became a (b) problem, since it became necessary to explain how and whence it could be produced a juridical-political normativity that was no longer ´natural´. Modern political philosophers had to answer the question ´Why do I have to obey the state, rather than to no one?´, before they turned to the specifics of political obligation. The most successful solution modern political philosophy found was the eminently Hobbesian argumentative strategy, which came with no small further shortcomings, of considering obligation as self-created: There is ?no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own; for all men equally are by nature free? (Lev., Chap. 21, p. 268). Now, combined with the state?s absolute sovereignty, the idea that political obligations must rest on some voluntary action of the individual implied an inextricable connection between political obligation and the notion of consent, which, in turn, plays an important part in the modern understanding of juridical or civil freedom (´liberty of the subjects´, as Hobbes called it). In fact, Hobbes´s conception of political obligation as arisen only from ´some act´ does not necessarily mean that one will create the laws one will have to obey, nor that the obligated ones shall participate in the law-creation process. Far from this, the act Hobbes refers to is limited to assenting to norms already sanctioned by someone else. This connection between political obligation, freedom and consent, which prima facie Rousseau´s and Kant´s conceptions of political autonomy put in check, causes some conceptual inconsistencies, even in contemporary philosophy. Following Carole Pateman´s thesis in The Problem of Political Obligation, we can affirm that even though for modern political philosophy, individual consent was the touchstone for state legitimacy, in reality it is relegated to the moment of entering the juridical condition. With this, individual consent ends up being subsumed under a promise of political obedience, and, in contemporary theories of liberal democracy, reduced to a merely formal inclusion in deliberative institutions, and shrunk to the sporadic occasion of voting. The displacement that the modern concept of consent operates in the meaning of political obligation (that is, from self-obligation to mere assent) overshadows two analytical distinctions, to wit: (i) The difference between consenting to norms generated by others and being the co-author of those same norms others and I will have to obey; and (ii) the difference between duties whose normative validity is not determined by the given consent of the ones obligated by it and obligations whose validity does depend on some act of the obligated. A third reason why the problem of political obligation is (c) central to political philosophy has to do with the strongly individualist-voluntarist dimension the justification of political obligation gained in the Modern Age, because this is the modern social contract?s conceptual germ. In effect, the act of contracting seems to be the paradigmatic way by which people can freely assume juridical-political obligations they would not have neither by nature nor before performing such act. The act of contracting becomes, thus, the act that generates obligations par excellence. As the origin of obligations, the contract can be understood as an objectivation of subjective self-obligation. As to Kant, in these three nuclei, he holds thesis and positions that, at least prima facie, contradict each other and that in some respects follow the path of the modern political-philosophical tradition, to abandon that road in some others. For this reason, to carry out a systematic study of the topic in question, we first have to sketch the topography of these discrepancies and tensions. To this task I will set myself here, with the main aim of proposing that Kant offered useful solutions to the problems inherent in the modern understanding of political obligation. In the next section, (2), I will analyse the way Kant addresses the elementary problem of how those obligations that we do not have by nature arise. To do this, I will focus on the double question: Why are propositions concerning acquired rights synthetic and what is that that makes them a priori? Now, although Kant puts the question for the possibility of generating juridical-political obligations at the centre of his reflection on the necessity of the state, the first of the juridical-political obligations, the exeundum, does not rely on the consent of those who are under it to be valid. Therefore, in the third part of this communication (3), I will conclude by trying to explain how we are to understand the coexistence, in Kant´s political philosophy, of juridical-political obligations that do not need consent to be valid, with obligations that do need it. I think the complexity of Kant?s conception of juridical-political obligations, far from causing systematic inconsistencies, allows him to prevent self-obligation from falling into mere assent to norms created by someone else, without our participation.