This chapter further develops the framework presented in the previous chapter. It does so by elaborating upon the value pluralism involved in the umbel view and the substantial interior of the framework. The chapter begins by accounting for the pluralism involved in the umbel view and discussing what that implies for political priority-setting. It then argues that the capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides the best available currency of justice for a multiple threshold sufficientarian theory. The chapter then moves on to provide a suggested index of eight spheres of capabilities relevant for sufficientarian justice. The index includes the following items: Basic Needs, Health, Education, Meaningful Work, Political Equality, Community, Social Status, Reasonable Autonomy. The purpose of the index is to serve as input into the further interdisciplinary and public debate on the identification of the justice-relevant threshold. The chapter ends by emphasizing that public policy should give particular priority to manifest deficiencies, such as cases of deficiency clusters, where the same group of people face insufficiency in several value spheres.

Andrews ” Reath offers a new interpretation of the doctrine, set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason, that the moral law is given to us as a “fact of reason.” Reath proposes that we understand this doctrine through the idea that what is given in this fact is the reality of a basic rational power. He argues that Kant accepts a generally ‘Aristotelian’ conception of a rational power, so that pure practical reason is a rational power with its own formal end and its own formal principle, which we know to be the moral law. Exercises of this power are (in some sense) guided by a subject’s consciousness of its formal principle, and therein lies its spontaneity and self-activity.

This chapter discusses the relation between ‘Morals’ (Sitten, Moral) and ‘Right’ (Recht) in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Two questions should be distinguished: (1) Are Kantian Morals necessary for Kantian Right in the sense that the latter presupposes Kant’s specific account of morality? (2) Is Kant’s account of Morals sufficient to justify his conception of Right, in the sense that the fundamental principles of Right can be derived from, or normatively justified by, the Categorical Imperative (or some other element of Kantian Morals) without additional normative principles? With respect to the first question, it is argued that Kantian Right presupposes a central aspect of Kantian Morals: the idea of moral universality, where moral rights and duties are the same for all. This idea must be distinguished from the Categorical Imperative introduced in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. Concerning the second question, it is argued that only when applied to individual juridical (coercible) rights does the idea of moral universality result in a Kantian conception of Right. Thus, Kant’s conception of Morals alone is not sufficient to derive juridical rights and duties.

This chapter frames the debate between those who think that Kant’s philosophy of Right is in some way independent from his moral philosophy and those who do not in two ways. First, the chapter argues that Kant recognizes only two forms of practical reason, namely the pure practical reason of morality and the empirical practical reason of prudential self-love, and that if his philosophy of Right is not to be a version of Hobbesian prudence, it can only be a part of morality – namely, the coercively enforceable part. It argues further that the moral foundation of Kant’s philosophy of Right is the innate right to freedom, itself the correlative of our obligation always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, since humanity is equivalent to the ability of each to set his or her own ends, that is, freedom. In the second part of the chapter, it is argued that the duties of individuals and rulers alike to both institute and maintain the civil condition, namely the state, make sense only as moral and indeed ethical duties, although not duties of virtue to promote self-perfection and the happiness of others.

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

The scholarly discussion of Kant’s republicanism focuses heavily on his ‘negative’ conception of freedom: independence or not being subject to another master. What has received much less attention is Kant’s ‘positive’ conception of freedom: being subject to one’s own legislation. This chapter argues that Kant’s positive conception of external freedom plays a crucial role in his Doctrine of Right: external freedom in the negative sense (mutual independence) requires and is realized by freedom in the positive sense (joint self-legislation). After first discussing the ‘innate right to freedom’, it is shown that, on Kant’s account, this fundamental right is realized fully only when external freedom is realized in both senses and in all three spheres of public right. Any satisfactory account of Kant’s republican theory must complement the focus on independence with an emphasis on citizenship and joint self-legislation.

Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue

Accounts of African letters have been riven by debates about who owns modernism and revelations about covert CIA sponsorship of African cultural institutions. Rather than relitigating the question of whether modernism in Africa is always (covertly) Euro-modernist, this chapter treats modernism as inherently dialectical. It considers African literary modernism in relation to the modernist aesthetics of Uche Okeke, who illustrated Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the Cold War-era criticism of Es’kia Mphahlele and performed poetry of Atukwei Okai, and to the chimeric category of modernity as figured in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu. At the end of the day, untethering modernism from the chimera of modernity may well enable more persuasive analyses of each. The chapter concludes with Yvonne Vera’s fiction to sketch how modernism emerges as a historical discourse and stylistic repertoire that some African writers continue to make part of practices of freedom.

As in the first volume, my attention here will be devoted mainly, though hardly entirely, to ethical philosophers’ attempts to come to grips with deontic morality understood in the terms of Anscombe’s critique. Sometimes, these will be defenses and theoretical accounts, as with, for example, the nineteenth-century utilitarians – whether empiricist, like Bentham and Mill, or “philosophical intuitionist,” like Henry Sidgwick – or the moral theories of British idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. But unlike mainstream seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy – for instance, the modern natural lawyers, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, the British rationalists, and Kant – the ethical philosophy of the nineteenth century is more often concerned to criticize deontic morality or to put it in its place. Examples here are Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Nietzsche.