This chapter discusses the idea that being ‘in transition’ towards a juridical condition impacts or shapes our duties and rights from a Kantian perspective. It analyses the implications of treating juridical duties as if they were duties of virtue, in the absence of or under imperfect juridical institutions. It argues that this introduces a problem for Kant’s account of ethical and legal obligations because respecting the dignity of those to whom a juridical duty is owed requires treating their claims as a matter of right instead of ethics. It also criticizes the way in which Kant’s theory of acquired rights in the state of nature has been reinterpreted as a theory of ‘provisionality’. Recent Kant scholarship has highlighted the ability of Kant’s legal-political theory to guide us through messy political developments in the manner of non-ideal theory. The chapter will object that the way Kant connects provisional rights and permissive laws has little to do with non-ideal theory, and follows instead from Kant’s apagogical argument for acquired rights in the state of nature.

This chapter examines the effects that legally-oriented AI developments will have on consumer protection and to consumers’ need for legal advice and representation. The chapter provides a brief survey of the many possible ways in which AI may influence consumers’ legal needs. It provides comparative analysis of the benefits and risks of the use of AI in the legal sphere, discusses the state of regulation in this area and argues in favor of a new regulatory framework.

This chapter is devoted to the Kantian background of Fichte’s ethical theory, and argues that Fichte shares with Kant’s account of morality three key elements: first, a formal criterion of moral judgment (universal law or law of nature), second, a substantive value (humanity as end in itself) motivating obedience to duty and capable of grounding specific classes of ethical duty, and third, a conception of an ideal of moral perfection in a community of rational beings (the realm of ends). The chapter argues that, while Fichte’s ethics contains all three of these things (or at least analogues to them), Fichte departs from Kant’s ethics in three crucial ways. The first is Fichte’s alternative derivation of the criterion of judgment in a theory of conscience. The second is his alternative conception of classes of duty in a transcendental theory of the embodied, intellective, and intersubjective aspects of human agency. And the third is Fichte’s alternative account of our communicative and cooperative relations to others in a theory of social perfection.