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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. As noted in the “Bibliographical Note” to Constant’s speech “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns”, the text was delivered in 1819, and draws on ideas already published by Constant in the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and in the Principles of Politics (1988: 310). 2. See esp. ch. 8. The text was first published in April 1797, and not in 1796 as the editor of Kant’s Practical Philosophy claims (1996: 607). 3. This interpretation of Sartre’s story is presented by Kevin Sweeney in “Lying to the Murderer: Sartre’s Use of Kant in ‘The Wall’ ” (1985). Serge Zenkin acknowl- edges earlier attempts to draw the parallel between Sartre’s story and Kant’s “On a Supposed Right to Lie” (1985: 225 n2), and challenges Sweeney’s interpretation by an attack on the very premise of Sweeney’s study, namely the relation between philosophy and literature. 4. There is no evidence that Sartre intended to get involved in the debate between Kant and Constant. As Sweeney notes, examples similar to Constant’s can be found in works as early as Plato’s Republic, and Sartre could have taken inspiration also from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Sweeney 1985: 16 n7). This may go some way towards explaining why Sartre does not consider the two conditions set by Kant’s discussion of Constant’s example. 5. I have here in mind those who claim to put forward their own theories, such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas or Karl-Otto Apel, but also those who claim to stay close to Kant’s texts and improve on Kant’s ideas, such as Onora O’Neill, Henry Allison, Christine Korsgaard, Barbara Herman and Paul Guyer; the list can eas- ily continue. I have discussed in more detail Rawls’s and Habermas’s accounts of justification by comparison to those of Kant and Sartre in my doctoral disserta- tion, ‘Persons and Politics in Kant and Sartre’ (2001). A very recent discussion of Kant, Rawls and Korsgaard is offered by Paul Guyer, who concludes that, given Kant’s and Korsgaard’s unsuccessful attempts to vindicate the ambitious Kantian project of justification, one should perhaps settle with the more modest Rawlsian account (Guyer 2011). 6. In what follows, I will use ‘moral’ to include both ethical principles that indi- viduals are expected to adopt, because they are the right principles, and political principles, which are enforced through the threat of political power and which need not be observed from a specific motivation. 7. The most famous representative is Rawls, who interprets his early theory of justice as a version of Kantian constructivism (1980). 8. We can find it formulated almost in the same words by Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his The Limits of State Action, a book written in the period 1791–2, and pub- lished for the first time posthumously in 1852 (1993). For instance, Humboldt says: “As to those limitations of freedom, however, which do not so much affect the State as the individuals who compose it, we are led to notice a vast difference between ancient and modern governments. The ancients devoted their attention 241 242 Notes more exclusively to the harmonious development of the individual man, as man; the moderns are chiefly solicitous about his comfort, his prosperity, his produc- tiveness. The former looked to virtue; the latter seek for happiness. And hence it follows that the restrictions imposed on freedom in the ancient States were, in some important respects, more oppressive and dangerous than those which characterise our times” (1993: 7). The book greatly influenced Mill in his writing of On Liberty. However, concern for the difference between ancient virtues and modern happiness can be also found in Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses,as well as in Locke’s Second Treatise. 9. For instance, we can find it expressed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the suggestion is that ethics is a subdivision of political morality (1998: 1094a–b, 2). 10. Isaiah Berlin is one exponent of this unilateral defence (Berlin 1997). 11. Taylor defends a notion of freedom as self-realization, which includes also the concept of freedom as liberty from constraints, but he thinks the question con- cerning the political implications of the concept of freedom represents a different question from that at issue in the debate between freedom as self-realization and freedom as absence of constraints. Thus, he says: “Whether we must also take the second step, to a view of freedom which sees it as realizable only within a certain form of society; and whether in taking a step of this kind one is necessarily com- mitted to justifying the excesses of totalitarian oppression in the name of liberty; these are questions which now must be addressed” (1997: 428). 12. “Once we admit that the agent himself is not the final authority on his own free- dom, do we not open the way to totalitarian manipulation? Do we not legitimate others, supposedly wiser about his purposes than himself, redirecting his feet on the right path, perhaps even by force, and all this in the name of freedom? The answer is that of course we don’t” (Taylor 1997: 421). 13. Note, however, that it is in principle possible to say that an ethically valid principle of action is that which has been chosen arbitrarily. The implication is that there is no other condition for the ethical validity of a principle apart from its having been chosen. As we will see, this is sometimes a view attributed to Sartre and is also taken to be an implication of the constructivist interpre- tation of Kant. See, for instance, Robert Stern’s “Kant, Moral Obligation and the Holy Will” (2011). The problem with this ‘account’ of normativity is that, because an arbitrary choice can be any choice, moral normativity is reduced to the idea of actual choice, and this makes the supporter of such a view unable to account for the distinction between a descriptive claim, like ‘Person A has cho- sen value V’, and a normative claim, such as ‘Person A ought to have chosen value V.’ 14. I make haste to add that I use here ‘political’ in a narrow sense. I agree that there are many factors in a society, apart from politically enforced laws, which influence the way in which society is organized. I should also mention that I take this broader notion of politics, which includes all factors affecting the organization of society, to be limited to those factors that exert their influence through some form of power: peer pressure, social structures, tradition, culture and many others. I contrast this with factors that are effective in virtue of their being considered morally right. 15. Habermas is currently one of the most prominent defenders of this notion. A possible implication of Habermas’s defence of political autonomy is the pre- supposition that a person’s “greatest good” lies “in the activities of political life” (Rawls 1995: esp. 150–70). In turn, Habermas challenges Rawls’s position Notes 243 as privileging the “modern”, “liberal” rights of political freedom (Habermas 1995: 128). 16. Sometimes it may seem that intuitions stand for those spontaneous reactions a person has when she is presented with an issue and asked her opinion. In this case, my intuition about abortion would be whatever happens to cross my mind when the problem of abortion is presented to me. Rawls qualifies this view, however, by referring to “considered convictions of justice” (1994: 20). Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was revised in 1999; I use here the pagination of the edition listed in the bibliography. 17. On Rawls’s account of justification, see Scanlon (1992). 18. Some of the most interesting accounts of justification are put forward by Karl-Otto Apel (e.g. 1988), Habermas (e.g. 1993), O’Neill (e.g. 1989), Rawls (e.g., 1994 and 1980) and Scanlon (e.g. 1998). I argue against Apel’s and Habermas’s solutions in “Phenomenology and the Ethical Possibility of Differences: A Recent Answer to an Old Question” (2004). See also my “Dealing Morally with Religious Differences” (2011). 19. In fact, one of the reasons why he eventually disowns his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1948; delivered in 1945) seems to be precisely because it would show him to be too Kantian. In what follows, I will not draw on this lecture in my comparison of Kant and Sartre. 20. According to Sweeney, in the first place Sartre’s story represents a critique of Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché, which preoccupied Sartre ever since 1933–4 when he was studying Husserl’s philosophy in Berlin. The epoché effects “the bracketing or setting aside of one’s natural attitude toward the exis- tence of things in the world so as to reduce the objects of one’s experience to a presentation of phenomena. This reduction, according to Husserl, allows one to perceive the world objectively” (Sweeney 1985: 7). To be sure, it is not at all clear that Husserl actually viewed the phenomenological epoché in this way, and that Sartre’s critique is not a critique of an inappropriate interpretation of Husserl. James Edie, for instance, argues that, “stripped of its pseudo-polemic and reduced to its bare bones, to its ultimate meaning, Sartre’s surface disagreement with Husserl is merely factitious, a purely verbal and not a substantial dispute” (1993: 105). 21. George Kerner’s introductory book, Mill, Kant, and Sartre: An Introduction to Ethics (1990), provides valuable insights into certain aspects of the relation between Kant’s and Sartre’s philosophies, but goes over some of the most important fea- tures of Kant’s and Sartre’s moral theories.
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