As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.

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.

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.

The question of how politics and ethics connect, if at all, in our societies is crucial, especially given today’s socio-economic and geopolitical challenges. Commentators have sought answers in Kant’s texts: the relation between the Categorical Imperative (CI) as the fundamental principle of ethics, and the Universal Principle of Right (UPR) as the fundamental principle of politico-legal norms, has been variously interpreted as one of simple dependence, simple independence, or complex dependence. Recent interpretations increasingly agree that Kant was not a simple independentist. However, questions persist about the philosophical significance of Kant’s account, specifically whether certain aspects of his thought inconsistently commit him to simple independentism. One aim of this chapter is to illustrate this critical strategy starting from a specific interpretation of the UPR. It is argued that, although robust, this interpretation is not the most accurate. While this strategy opens new avenues for further objections to Kant, the chapter concludes that the complex dependentist reading is philosophically the most convincing to date.

Chapter 2 illustrates the ideologies and worldviews of the South Korean right. I specifically analyze the processes through which liberal democracy became a core ideological principle for the South Korean right and the ways in which the concepts of liberal democracy and freedom have been used by them. Tracing narratives and counternarratives about liberal democracy over time, I argue that the core ideas of liberal democracy championed by the South Korean right – as a defense against communism, North Korea, and the radical left – have not changed substantively. While liberal democracy, as used by the right, was merely political rhetoric intended to disguise political repression and legitimize authoritarian rule in the period before democratization, liberal democracy is currently used in a democratized context as the opposite of direct and participatory democracy and left populism. The right’s idea of liberal democracy in South Korea, with its fixation on anticommunism and the glorification of former authoritarian leaders, fundamentally distorts the meaning of democracy.

Tracing the historical forces that have shaped the contemporary political landscape and ideological terrain in South Korea, Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the “right” and “left” have been constituted and understood. The definitions of ideological and political categories in Western milieus cannot be directly applied to the South Korean context, because the ways in which the left and right are understood are historical and social constructs that vary across time and geography. The unique historical and geopolitical context of the Korean peninsula – the division of the two Koreas and the Korean War, followed by three decades of authoritarianism – made anticommunism hegemonic and produced an extremely limited ideological setting for South Korean politics. This chapter argues that, due to the conservative hegemony and the right-leaning political environment in South Korea, the far right has been understood as representing mainstream conservatism, and centrists have been cast as the radical left. Thus, the distinction between the far right and mainstream conservativism within the right is blurred in South Korea.

We study the structure and utility of the category formed by small categories and retrofunctors. We analyze key properties of this category, such as limits, colimits, and factorizations, and explain how these structures support various forms of composition and interaction. The chapter delves into the cofree comonoid construction, exploring how it connects to familiar concepts in category theory, and extends our understanding of state-based systems. We also discuss applications of retrofunctors and demonstrate how they can be used to model complex processes in a structured way.

The details of the example of the ‘murderer at the door’ – as it is commonly, if inaccurately called – are more complicated than most interpreters assume. This chapter is dedicated to the details of the case, many of which surface only in the light of other eighteenth-century versions of the story. Does the would-be murderer know that the person hiding his intended victim knows about his murderous intentions? Why are the options of the person asked about the victim’s hiding place restricted to yes or no, and how would this restriction work in practice? What are the reasons or motives of someone who intends to lie to a would-be murderer? And what are Constant’s ‘intermediate principles’, which he introduces to defuse the problem case? The chapter also explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s discussion of the case in his 1798 System of Ethics. Fichte and Kant agree that lying is not a legitimate option; but Fichte is by far the more radical moralist of the two.

Kant’s critique of perfectionism in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals launches lively debate on the limits of coercion and the requisites for free action, foundational for post-Kantian perfectionism. The Critique of Practical Reason reformulates the Leibnizian concept of spontaneity as a ‘true apology for Leibniz’, salvaging what is most vital in his thought. Spontaneous freedom does not externalise a unique content, as in Leibniz, but now conceived as negative liberty, signifies the will’s ability to abstract from external causes or to admit them selectively according to rational criteria. Spontaneity is the condition for an order of right, as the sphere of compatible external actions among juridical subjects. Here Kant effects a second modification of Leibniz, in the idea of mutual causality or reciprocity. The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 elaborates the distinction between pure and empirical practical reason, freedom and happiness, and delineates the sphere of rightful interaction. Neither happiness nor virtue are subject to constraint, but in the sphere of right coercion or mutual limitation is the condition that assures and generalises freedom.

Kant’s criticisms between the Groundwork (1785) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) do not eradicate perfectionism but transpose it to a new register, the perfection of freedom itself and the conditions of its exercise. Kant’s evocative but incomplete statements of his political position after 1785 elicit numerous debates among Kantians on the basis and limits of state action. Early Kantians view progress as the outcropping of spontaneous freedom, not as administered and imposed. These debates, involving Hufeland, Reinhold, and Humboldt, offer various combinations of Leibnizian and Kantian ideas. In response to Kant’s Groundwork, Hufeland justifies legitimate political constraint through its contribution to systemic perfection. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s early formulation of the limits of state action derives from Kantian anti-paternalism, the Groundwork assertion of the inviolability of rational beings, combined with a modified Leibnizian monadology admitting interaction. His defence of a minimalist state is a possible but not a necessary consequence of Kantian premises. It draws criticism from Karl von Dalberg, who defends Wolffian reformist interventionism.

Kant’s 1784 lectures on Achenwall is commonly known as the Feyerabend lectures because the manuscript was attributed to Gottfried Feyerabend. These lectures range over the topics eventually treated in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1798), which include both right and ethics. From these lectures we learn how Kant thought about the concepts of end in itself, self-sufficient end and human dignity just prior to writing the Groundwork (1785). Kant accepts much of what he finds in Achenwall, but also advances criticisms of the concept of obligation found in Achenwall and also in Baumgarten. He also rejects Achenwall’s attempt to justify coercion of duties of right simply through the distinction, common in the tradition since Pufundorf, between perfect and imperfect duties. The present discussion concludes that in the 1780s Kant’s position on the relation of right to ethics was still unclear. He appears to base right on the ethical value of humanity as end in itself, but also worries that grounding right on an ethical principle cannot explain why duties of right may be coerced.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

Chapter 2 introduces the normative theory on which the book relies. Principles of natural law are guides for practical human action. The principles are “natural” because they are knowable through human reason and valid guides to action whether they have been accepted in any community’s laws. They are “law” in that they supply reasons or justifications for action. Natural law theory focuses human action on survival and on flourishing understood rationally. Natural law justifies reasoning with interests, understood as distinct components of a person’s well-being. Natural law also justifies reasoning with rights, understood as entitlements to act and be free from interference backed by claims against others. Natural rights focus social and political life on desirable, low, and uncontroversial goals like survival and freedom. Natural rights also help specialize – around distinct fields of human activity organized around people’s bodies, their capacities to make livings, their capacities to associate, and their capacities to use property.

This chapter presents an overview of Plato’s moral realism. The metaphysical framework of Plato’s moral realism is explained. This framework’s fundamental principle is the superordinate Idea of the Good, which is both the anchor for moral realism and the unhypothetical first principle of all. Thus, for Plato normativity is woven into metaphysics (Section 1.1). A taxonomy of types of moral realism is provided within which Plato’s moral realism can be situated (Section 1.2). Plato’s moral realism is compared to versions of antimoral realism and naturalistic versions of moral realism (Section 1.3). The priority of “good” to “right” in Plato is explained (Section 1.4). The priority of “good” to “value” is further explained. The universality of the Good goes beyond objectivity and is intended to preclude the possibility that “good” and “good for me” can possibly conflict (Section 1.5).

This chapter considers the law of civil remedies: the definition and nature of ‘remedies’ and the relationship between remedy and right. It provides extracts which discuss the ongoing debate about whether judges should have discretion in the remedies they grant. It considers the nature of the common law and equity divide in Australian law as expressed in case law and in academic discussion. Finally, it outlines a functional approach to remedies.

Kant’s Rechtslehre is concerned with the freedom that is to coexist with the freedom of choice of others in accordance with a universal law. I argue that this freedom is not to be directly equated with freedom of choice: it is instead the independence that is a condition of genuine free choice because it ensures that one is not constrained to act in accordance with the choices of others. Kant’s distinction between active and passive citizenship, however, is incompatible with this notion of independence because property rights of a certain type make it possible for some citizens to dominate other citizens, who cannot, therefore, be classed as genuinely independent. Thus the concept of property is central to the question of how right can secure the freedom of citizens. I show that Kant understands this concept in terms of a relation between persons with respect to things, rather than in terms of only a relation between a person and a thing. I argue that although Kant appears to argue in favour of private property, he does not sufficiently justify this form of property by demonstrating that other forms of property would be less compatible with the freedom that right is to secure and guarantee.

I begin with an account of the fundamental aims of Hegel’s ‘science of right’ so as to show how his account of property faces two key challenges: justifying the concept of property and any specific form of it, on the one hand, and integrating property into the system of right, which includes subordinating it to any higher moments of right, on the other. I then turn to Hegel’s argument for private property. I distinguish between two interpretations of his argument: the ‘embodiment’ interpretation and the ‘recognition’ interpretation. I identify serious problems with the first interpretation and then argue for a version of the second one that entails the type of triadic model of the concept of property developed by Fichte and already implicit in Kant’s Rechtslehre. I show that this triadic model, and thus Hegel’s full argument for private property, becomes explicit only at the stage of contract. Next, I discuss how Hegel seeks to integrate private property into ethical life, and I argue that the idea of ethical life is, in fact, more compatible with some form of common or collective property because this form of property is more expressive of this idea.

This chapter begins with Fichte’s early theory of property as presented in his defence of the French Revolution from 1793. My intention is to show how tensions within this theory of property can be explained in terms of an unsuccessful attempt to establish a necessary connection between the right to property and labour. In the later Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte’s attempt to explain the connection between the right to property and labour leads him to reject his earlier dyadic (person–thing) model of the concept of property. A triadic (person–thing–person) model is instead shown to follow from Fichte’s understanding of the concept of right and the role of recognition in his theory of right. The connection between the right to property and labour is explained in terms of how each person’s property rights must enable him or her to live from his or her labour. This will be shown to demand forms of property other than private property in relation to certain activities and the resources required by them. Fichte nevertheless speaks of ‘absolute property’ and thereby suggests the possibility of some role for private property within the rational state.