Kant on Political Obligations

This chapter first outlines key interpretive traditions—libertarian, legal positivism, participatory democratic—in the existing scholarship on Kant’s theory of political obligations and discusses how women and minority scholars in the field have transformed it through their analyses of situations confronting people whose lives are characterized by serious and systemic oppression. It then proposes that these discussions give us reason to rethink the assumption in much philosophical theory—namely, that the question of whether or not political obligations exist in a particular society can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Indeed, giving up this assumption when we analyze the choices facing oppressed people is likely a first step in making political theories more suited to the moral complexities of our actual, historical societies.