EVENT DETAILS

Martin Schwab (UCI) on Kant and Jurisprudence

Please join us for the next meeting of Law, Reason and Value, the new colloquium in jurisprudence co-sponsored by the School of Law and the School of Humanities.

Our speaker will be Martin Schwab, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, who will discuss 'Kant's Doctrine of Right - Some Critical Reflections' (please see abstract below).

The discussion will run 5-6:30pm Law 3500. There will also be a faculty dinner following the discussion; if interested please email jhelmrei@uci.edu to receive a copy of Dr. Scwab's paper.

Kant's Doctrine of Right - Some Critical Reflections
Martin Schwab, University of California-Irvine.

 [From the Introduction:]

The paper follows the sequence of basic forms of natural right/law in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals the "Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Rights.

I try to address two main issues. The first is the sequence of these natural rights. They appear to be one linear sequence where the later rights develop more fully what the earlier parts introduce with only partial character, a sequence of unfolding in increasing differentiation. I want to show how at each juncture reason must intervene in order to secure the next step, and that this occurs against backgrounds of alternatives not discussed by Kant. This makes
the "Doctrine of Right" less stringent than its author seems to have thought.

The other idea is that the Doctrine of Right has a dominant theme running through the whole work. That is a certain concept of freedom of choice. Kant's natural law is the presentation of a complex form of freedom for agents operating in a community. It is a freedom of choice (Willkür). And the law - one of the purposes of the law - is to fashion and secure this kind of freedom. It is a self-imposed freedom that is, simultaneously, the freedom of choice for individuals, and the freedom of choice of and in the collective.