Why Even Kantian Angels Need the State: Comments on Robert Hanna's "Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature"
Against a widely-held interpretation of Kant's political philosophy, according to which Kant holds that all finite rational beings have an innate right to freedom as well as a duty to enter into a civil condition governed by a social contract in order to preserve that freedom, Robert Hanna contends that Kant is in fact an anarchist. Hanna's argument for his novel thesis that Kant ultimately views the State as an unjustifiably coercive institution that should be eliminated depends heavily on the claim there is an outright conflict between Kant's political theory in The Doctrine of Right and Kant's ethics. I argue that we should resist Hanna's provocative claim that Kant's ethics directly falsifies his official political theory. Further, I suggest that even morally autonomous Kantian angels need the State to guarantee the protection of their external freedom and to promote justice. ; Anne Margaret Baxley (Ph.D. UC-San Diego) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches courses on Kant, the history of philosophy, and ethics. Her book entitled Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy was published by Cambridge University Press (2010). Baxley has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center and The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at the Murphy Institute at Tulane. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of University Women. Her articles on Kant's ethics have appeared in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Kant-Studien, The Review of Metaphysics, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Inquiry, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
