ENLARGING THE MORAL DOMAIN OF JUSTICE: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF NEO-KANTIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Patricia Moynagh

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ENLARGING THE MORAL DOMAIN OF JUSTICE: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE

OF NEO-KANTIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT
by
Patricia Moynagh
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Politics
New York University
May 1995
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ii
Acknowledgments
I break my own rule that one should refrain from
universalizing one's subjective maxims by saying that "all
graduate students should have Mark Roelofs as their
advisor."
around,
But, there would not be enough of Mark to go
(nor is it to be assumed that he would want the job)
so I amend it to all should be fortunate to have one like

him.
Mark is a great source of inspiration and encourages
critical thinking.
He is always there for his students,
in
mind and spirit, despite his own very frantic schedule.

From the beginning of my graduate career, Mark taught me to
look for the presuppositions behind everything.
I remain
deeply indebted to him for this.

I thank Mark Lilia for his consistent good sense, and
for his ability to help me see how to make an argument
stronger, and for valuing the time it might take to get it a
little closer to how I wanted it to be.
I could not, but am beginning to more,
He could see, when

the virtues in
staying focused on less in order to say more.
My early
readers will recall the other two projects contained in this
one, and how the integrity of these projects should stand on

their own.
I thank Russell Hardin who walked into NYU just
needed him to.
I only wish I had known him sooner.
me pondering a new set of questions.
as I
He has
As Russell joined my
project, Bertell Oilman's good fortune took him to Japan and

Australia to study Marxism, but away from my project.
thank him for all his encouragement and for the

conversations.
Especially the one before he packed his bags
the night before leaving to share some final thoughts with

me about Rawls and dialectics.
I also thank him for
returning to my project via the
modern wonder of the fax
machine which brought his critical and challenging questions

across the oceans,
assumptions.
forcing me to elaborate some of my own
I also thank him for all his work on
abstractions and internal relations which I have borrowed

for my own purposes.
I would also like to thank Seyla Benhabib whose works
continue to inform my own.
Fortuitous circumstances placed
her just up the street from me twice.
iv
I thank her for her
graciousness on both occasions, particularly I am grateful

to her for inviting me to sit in on her class "The Discourse
Theory of Legitimacy" at the New School, and for agreeing to
read my work.
I thank Christine Harrington for joining my
project in the later stages and Marshall Berman for reading

earlier drafts.
Both have brought critical input.
Two very dear friends and graduate school colleagues,

Lori Marso and Marla Brettschneider, both now professors
themselves,
life.
continue to enrich my academic and personal
I look forward to all of our future conversations,
explorations and experiences together and value all those

that have gone before.
And last but not least,
in fact most of all,
I thank my
husband Bruce Cronin, who, in the final months of my re

writing, not only took on the lion's share of the domestic
work, but displayed his vast and unique culinary talents
along the way.
I thank him for his extraordinary
intellectual and emotional support.
I hope his new
experiences at Madison, where he begins his professorship

this fall, will be all he wants it to be and more.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction

Kant and the Moral Domain of J u s t i c e ..........
3
M e t h o d o l o g y ........................................ 10
Organization of the S t u d y ......................... 11
PART I
Chapter Two: The Politics of the Categorical Imperative
O v e r v i e w .......................................... 17
Kant's Fear of R e l a t i v i s m ......................... 18
Membership in Two W o r l d s ......................... 23
Establishing the Supreme Moral Principle
.........
33
Separating Duty from I n c l i n a t i o n ................ 38
The Politics of Revering the Moral Law: What
About P e o p l e ? ......................................41
External Relations
.................................
46
The Illusions of the Self-Legislating Cogito . . .
53
Kant's Categorical Imperative(s)
57
Kant's Illustrations
...............................
63
Chapter Three: The Politics of Enlarged Mentality:

Sublating the Categorical Imperative
O v e r v i e w ...........................................76
Re-working Kant's Concept of Enlarged Mentality . . 78
Kant's Maxim of Enlarged Mentality: Shifting to
the Standpoint of O t h e r s ..................... 82
Determinant and Reflective Judgements .............
98
Interactive v. Substitutionalist Universalism . . . 103
Kant as a Radical Pluralist with Principles . . . . 109
The Kant-Aristotle Debate: A Brief Encounter
. . . 113
vi
PART II
Chapter Four: Rawls: Going Behind the Veil of Ignorance

through a Procedural Re-interpretation of the
Categorical Imperative
O v e r v i e w ............................................. 124
An Attempt to Recast the Social Contract
......... 128
The Kant-Rawls Connection .......................... 139
The Politics of the Original Position: Too Empty
or Too F u l l ? .....................................142
More on the Politics of Rawlsian Abstractions . . . 158
Feminist Objections ................................. 160
C o n c l u s i o n ........................................... 167
Chapter Five: Habermas: Going Public with the Categorical

Imperative through Communicative Action
O v e r v i e w .............................................
Communicative v. Instrumental Reason ..............
Going Public with the Categorical Imperative
. . .
Practical Discourse .................................
Communicative Action: Originary or Compelling?
. .
172
173
179
184
199
Conclusion: Enlarging the Moral Domain of Justice

Testing the T h e s i s ..................................
Negative Freedom
...................................
P a t h o l o g i e s ...........................................
Looking Beyond Deontological Liberalism ...........
C o n j e c t u r e s ...........................................
Bibliography
210
220
222
224
226
230
Introduction
This dissertation is about the moral domain of justice
appropriate for a democratic polity.
narrowly construed?
How did it ever get so
What would it mean to broaden it beyond
the narrow spheres of deontological Liberalism?1

Modern conceptions of justice seek to consistently
privatize questions of happiness and virtue,
envisioning them as broadly shared concerns.
rather than
With so many
institutional arrangements and cultural practices sustaining

a conception of political morality that is limited to the
legal-constitutional disposition, any discussion of what
makes for "the good life" as compared to "mere life" have
largely been left out of our modern definitions of
Michael Sandel defines Deontological liberalism as

"above all a theory about justice, and in particular about
the primacy of justice among moral and political ideals.
Its core thesis can be stated as follows: society, being
composed of a plurality of persons, each with his own aims,
interests, and conceptions of the good, is best arranged
when it is governed by principles that do not themselves
presuppose any particular conception of the good; what
justifies these regulative principles above all is not that
they maximize the social welfare or otherwise promote the
good, but rather that they conform to the concept of right,
a moral category given prior to the good and independent of
it." See Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of
Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 1.
1
justice.2
Theoretically,
the choice is stated in very
stark terms: either justice or the good.3

society the choice is clear,
In liberal
justice must trump the good.
Justice is public, while the good is private.

from many valid perspectives,
Of course,
the ascent of the
deontological ethic can be seen as a justified check upon

dogmatic conceptions of the good life.
While this is a
defensible position, and one can raise many points in its

favor, it remains highly insufficient.
What does it mean to inquire into more substantive
areas of concern about what makes for the good life while
concurrently committed to leaving dogma behind?
For it is
dogma itself, visible in any of our social and political or

cultural practices that proclaim some to be the ontological
inferiors of others
(whether men over women, whites over
blacks, West over East, rich over poor,
and so on) that
2Aristotle distinguishes between the "good life" and

"mere life."
He sees the end of political science to be
"the best end, and political science spends most of its
pains on making the citizens to be of a certain character,
viz, good and capable of noble acts."
"Why, then, should we
not say that he is happy who is active in accordance with
complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external
goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete
life."
See Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," Book I,
chapter 9, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon,
ed. (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 946 and 948,
respectively.
Provisionally, I define justice as a matter to which
all can make a legitimate claim, and the good life as
consisting in particularized and infinite versions of
happiness.
2
first eased the rise of deontological justice and then

increasingly gave it license to include all in its promises
for Liberal freedoms.
But promoting substantive inquiry into the good life
nondogmatically is not an easy task,
and it is one that
promoters of modern conceptions of justice have not

entertained or pursued as a possibility.
Such kinds of
questions are from the outset said to be outside of their

purview.
But why should they be?
However one answers these
questions, we, the modern sons and daughters of the

bourgeois revolutions have been raised to call it a just
society that not only protects,
individual striving.
but also champions this
Thus, the quandary: how can we broaden
the moral domain of justice without dogmatically prefiguring

the good, while still very much valuing it?
Kant and the Moral Domain of Justice

Immanuel Kant plays a key role in narrowing the moral
domain of justice.
back up again.
But he also shows a way to open it right
This is what makes him a fascinating figure
to study when we take up the question of the moral domain of

justice and what belongs in it.
following pages,
As I will show in the
Kant has left us with two very different
legacies in this area.
The first, his concept of the
Categorical Imperative,
is the basis for the deontological
ethic.
This is the Kant that we tend to think of when
considering questions of justice.
However,
there is also
another Kantian legacy that has been virtually ignored,

of Enlarged Mentality.
that
This thesis will argue that the
concept of Enlarged Mentality is far more appropriate and

compelling for a truly democratic polity.
Unlike other great figures in the history of political
philosophy,
Kant never produced a major work on the subject.
There is no Republic, no Leviathan, no Social Contract.

Yet, the problem of human freedom, particularly the tense
and fragile relationship between justice and the good life,
is at the center of Kant's political thought.
Kant seems to
have truly agonized over how best to get a handle on this

conflict-ridden, yet in-constant-need-of-a-solution
relationship.
There are obvious tensions built into this
relationship, and it has meaning for us only as we further
relate it to our own historically acknowledged struggles in
which we are always already embodied and moving.
relationship deserves close attention because,
relationship,
This
like any
it can be ignored or it can be better attended
to.
In the following pages, we shall see how Kant offers
two very different ways in which to address the inevitable
tensions.
One way is through repressing these tensions in a
rather "once and for all" manner, where a cognitive
conception of justice that relies on self-legislation is

exchanged for a politics of engagement; the other way is
through acknowledging the tensions through devices that
require "reflective judging," imagination, and greater
context-sensitivity to others in our contingentlyacknowledged situations.
I will tease out the two different responses Kant
offers by focusing upon the second of his three great
questions.
Kant asks himself "What should I do?"
leads him in two opposing directions.
This
Kant's first answer
is contained in the Categorical Imperative, which enjoins

each individual to take this question on alone and through
consciousness itself come to determine through willing what
of one's own subjective maxims could be fitting for all.
As
he develops the Categorical Imperative, we will see how Kant

abstracts so much content away from his question that he can
only ever answer it in the negative.
I shall suggest that
he should have left it at that, rather than try to derive

more positive content from what he himself formulates for
negative purposes.
This will come through more clearly when
we examine the results of his attempts to derive positive

content from the Categorical Imperative.
But Kant looks beyond the Categorical Imperative, or at
least I shall make a case for this.
When we shift our focus
to his alternative conception of Enlarged Mentality, we see
Kant opening up other possibilities to answer this question

in more positive terms, but this time he meets with greater
success.
Universal freedom and equality are not bargained
away for something less.
He still regards these as our
valid presuppositions for justice, but the integrity of

content re-appears as, of course,
it must because it never
goes away, nor should we want it to once we better address

it.
Now the importance of "shifting one's ground to others"
more particularly rather than universalizing one's

subjective maxims for all is emphasized as the crux of moral
sense and political commitment.
Inter-subjectivity and
greater context-awareness are points Kant now stresses in a

way he does not with the Categorical Imperative where
dissociated self-identification cannot be overcome.
I shall try to portray what I call the "Politics of
Enlarged Mentality" as a sublation of the Categorical
Imperative,
retaining some of it, but qualitatively moving
beyond it.
The negative virtues of the Categorical
Imperative are not put into question as much as they are

shown to be extremely inadequate.
I claim that a compelling
understanding of what belongs in the moral domain of justice

cannot ignore real-life struggles, but must seek to better
address them.
Ultimately,
I maintain that the moral domain
of justice must expand to include our needs, hopes, and

desires as politically important to engage, not repress.
And that Kant's conception of Enlarged Mentality,
if not
Kant himself, opens up a way through which we might better

begin to do this.
My thesis is a challenge to neo-Kantian theories of
justice that systematically subordinate,
and sometimes seem
to outright ignore, social and cultural struggles as a

priori outside of the moral domain of justice.
Unlike Rawls
and Habermas who creatively re-work Kant's Categorical

Imperative, but never get beyond its deontological contours,
I claim that it is better to begin where ant left off.
In
attempting to re-work Kant's alternative political

philosophy,
I try to show how this enjoins us to better
understand and care about what the Categorical Imperative

obliges us not to destroy.
This is each other in all of our
historical concreteness, and not only as mutually worthy of

respect, but certainly also deserving of this as well.
Kant's influence upon modern political philosophy
pervades.
He openly affirms liberal ideas of freedom and
equality in a way that is qualitatively different from

Hobbesian4 "possessive individualism"5 or the Lockean labor
4See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,

1980), especially chapters 12-31.
(New York: Penguin,
5See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of

Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985)
7
theory of property.6
Kant spends a good deal of tiir;e and
energy arguing that these ideas can be gleaned,
though never
really known, from pure and practical reasoning.

this, he argues,
And all of
requires confirming through our own
experiences which he also acknowledges is where we

necessarily begin.
Hegel complicates and consciously historicizes these
ideas, but they are no less relevant for him as he
introduces culture and societal context into a dialectics of
individual freedom and equality, on the one hand, with that
of solidarity and community that unfolds in a situated
"ethical life" on the other.7
And though Marx appropriates
Hegel's logic to explain how the material world shapes us

before we can shape it,8 he does not question the worth of
6See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, (New

York: Mentor, 1960), Book Two, especially Chapter Five
entitled "On Property" pp. 327-344.
7See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V.
Miller, trans., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
especially Chapters IV-VI, where, for example, he says,
"what counts is not simply knowing in general, but
conscience's knowledge of the circumstances." (p. 3 93); and
his Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, trans, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967), especially Third Part, "Ethical
Life", pp. 105-223.
8See Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," in The MarxSngels Reader, Second Edition, Robert C. Tucker, (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), p. 50. "As individuals
express their life, so they are.
What they are, therefore,
coincides with their production, both with what they produce
and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus
depends on the material conditions determining their
production."
8
freedom or equality.
Marx, more than most,
recognizes how
ideology can mask inequalities; through immanent critiques,

he seeks consistently to expose the gap between an ideology
that proclaims egalitarianism and an actuality that does not
correspond.9
Kant's thinking on the problem of human freedom and
equality not only influences and dominates the prior two
centuries, but it continues to have far-reaching effects on
contemporary political philosophy as well, reappearing in
different formulations.
Probably the two most influential
theories of today that are clearly indebted to Kant's

political and moral philosophy are those of John Rawls and
Jurgen Habermas.
My questions which are hovering about the
justice-good life tension uncomfortably thrust me back to

Kant in order to clarify how Rawls and Habermas have
selectively drawn from his corpus in their respective
attempts to re-figure but one part of it, albeit the
dominant p a r t .
In my attempt to portray Kant's two competing political
philosophies,
I will focus primarily upon the politics of
his epistemology and his aesthetics.
I will rely heavily on
9See, for example, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The

German Ideology, C. J. Arther, ed. (New York: International
Publishes, 1985) . See also "On the Jewish Question," in
Karl Marx: Early Writings, (New York: Vintage Books, 1975),
pp. 211-241.
9
his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals to show the

politics contained within the Categorical Imperative.
my discussion of the politics of Enlarged Mentality,
For
I will
primarily use his Critique of Judgement.
While I will make
ample references to his many other works,
I will not rely on
what has traditionally been considered his "political"

writings, most of which are contained in Hans Reiss' edited
volume.10
In this regard,
I agree with Arendt that his
political writings are less important for his theories of

justice than the works cited above.11
METHODOLOGY
In order to show the limits of the politics contained
within the Categorical Imperative,
I will turn my specific
focus to two highly creative attempts to re-formulate it:

those of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas.
Rawls speaks
primarily from the Anglo-American tradition, while Habermas

comes out of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Yet
despite their vast differences, both seek to re-cast the

Categorical Imperative in more compelling terms than its
creator could.
My theoretical claim is that Kant has
something much better to say, and that it might prove more

profitable to creatively re-work his alternative,
ed.
rather
10Immanuel Kant, Kant's Political Writings, Hans Reiss,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
See chapter three,
footnote 10.
10
than what I posit he himself was taking steps to move

beyond, however incipiently.
Through an immanent critique of Rawls and Habermas,
will attempt to show how both theories fail to adequately

address their intentions of how best to generate and
cultivate a compelling generalized view.
Immanent critique
is a method that uses internal, rather than external,

standards to judge the success of a particular theory.
That
is, it does not question the stated goals of the theory, but
rather uses the goals themselves as a standard by which to
judge the results.12
I use immanent critique because I do
not challenge the validity of these theorists questions, but

rather their procedures for answering them and the politics
contained within the answers.
ORGANIZATION OF THIS STUDY

This work is divided into two parts.
set Kant's Categorical Imperative
In Part One,
(chapter two)
opposition to his Enlarged Mentality perspective

three).
in
(chapter
His Groundwork will be my major source for
presenting the Categorical Imperative,

sole purpose of this work.
since this is the
I will also draw from the Third
Critique, where he lays out his theory of judgement,
and nis
12The idea of immanent critique comes from Hegel and is

reformulated by Marx (see Karl Marx, "For a Ruthless
Criticism of Everything Existing," in Robert Tucker, e d . ,
The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition, [New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1977) .
11
second maxim of taste called Enlarged Mentality.

course of my critique,
In the
I will draw from many of his other
works -- and they inform the thesis -- but the textual

arguments and exchanges are mainly from these two Kantian
works.
In addition,
I will draw heavily from A r e n d t 's
insights and build upon Benhabib's in regard to this

alternative Kantian perspective.
I will dramatize and
stylize the contrast in order to show the social and

political implications of his "lost legacy" for democratic
theory and how different it is from the Categorical
Imperative.
In Chapter two I address Kant's fear of relativism
which leads him to want to forever ground what he comes to
call the Supreme Principle of Morality.
I will also
discuss his impeachment of "ordinary" metaphysics and the

politics that emerges from his replacement.
Throughout,
contextualize Kant and the theoretical issues and problems

confronting him in order not to impoverish what Kant was up
against.
I examine the different ways in which Kant
presents the Categorical Imperative in order to show that it

cannot guide, except negatively.
Finally,
I look closely at
Kant's specific illustrations through which he attempts to

apply the Categorical Imperative in positive terms.
same section,
In this
I ask what different possibilities open up if
we approach these illustrations with a different Kantian
12
mind set, the enlarged one.
I will
conclude by showing the
inadequacies of trying to derive positive content from the

showing that it can only have the
virtues of negativity.
In chapter three,
I shift my focus to Kant's concept of
Enlarged Mentality which I claim offers a more authentic way

through which to resolve the tension between justice and the
good life.
In this section,
I will portray Kant's concept
of Enlarged Mentality as a kind of sublation of the

showing how it absorbs that which
remains compelling in this Kantian inheritance, without

falling prey to universality that remains abstract and
formal.
In other words, Enlarged Mentality never enjoins
any to question the inherent worth of each and every human

being, and in this way shares the same theme motivating the
Categorical Imperative, but it goes beyond this.
look at Kant's definition of Enlarged Mentality,
also calls "the second maxim of taste."
I will
or what he
As I do this,
will incorporate Hannah Arendt's insights with Kant's in

order to develop the moral and political significance of
this alternative perspective.
I will also look at Kant's
distinction between "determinant" and "reflective" judgement

in order to develop my own claim that re-working Kant's
alternative political philosophy is best seen as a sublation
of the Categorical Imperative.
13
In sum, this chapter will
demonstrate that Kant's concept of Enlarged Mentality

represents a potential way in which to see how justice and
the good life may not be all that far apart after all.
In Part Two,
I will test the thesis that drawing from
the Categorical Imperative, no matter how creatively re

formulated, seems to sabotage the pursuit for how best to
think about how to derive a compelling generalized view,
appropriate for a democratic polity.
In doing so, I will
turn my specific focus to the two most highly influential

contemporary neo-Kantian theorists: Rawls
Habermas
(chapter four) and
(chapter five).
Chapter Four will focus on Rawls's "procedural re

interpretation of the Categorical Imperative."
Specifically,
I will examine the political implications of
going behind the Veil of Ignorance as a privileged vantage

point from which to gauge how best to think about what
belongs within the moral domain of justice.
insights garnered from feminism,
critical theory,
Drawing upon
communitarianism and
I will challenge Rawls's core assumption
about the nature of the self and his endorsement of the

deontological ethic.
I will not question Rawls's emphasis
on the need for a compelling generalized view, but rather,

how he thinks it best conceptualized and attained.
Finally,
I will conjecture how Rawls's theory might have been far
14
more engaging had he attempted to reinterpret Kant's concept

of Enlarged Mentality.
In Chapter five, I examine Habermas's attempt to go
public with the Categorical Imperative, and his approach to
how we might best generate a compelling generalized view.
will examine what becomes of the Categorical Imperative when

reformulated in the more sociologically dexterous hands of
Habermas.
In doing so, I will ask whether he can breathe
fresh air into this well-worn concept by making it more

compelling than Rawls could, or if he too abandons some of
his own best insights.
Moreover,
I will ask if Habermas,
despite comparative gains we can readily recognize in his

attempts to render the Categorical Imperative dialogical,
nevertheless ultimately limits the moral domain of justice.
And if so, how?
Finally, what role, if any, can a
reinterpretation of Kant's lost legacy of Enlarged Mentality

play so that the politics of radical intersubjectivity for
which Habermas makes a case becomes more actual, more
substantive?
Are there some ways in which Habermas's
program appears to be in sync with the dynamics of Kant's

maxim of Enlarged Mentality?
In addressing these questions,
I will investigate his conception of practical discourse.
15
PART I
16
Chapter II
The Politics of the Categorical Imperative
I sit daily at the anvil of my lectern and guide the
heavy hammer of my repetitious lectures, always beating
out the same rhythm.
Now and then a nobler sort of
inclination stirs in me somewhere, a desire toexpand
beyond these narrow spheres . . .
--Immanuel Kant in a letter to J. G. Lindner1
Overview
In this chapter,
I examine how the Categorical
Imperative narrows the moral domain of justice.
In doing
so, I will organize it around the following points.
First,
I address Kant's fear of relativism which leads him to want

to forever ground what he comes to call the Supreme
Principle of Morality;
Second,
I discuss his impeachment of
"ordinary" metaphysics and the politics that emerges from

his replacement.
Throughout,
I contextualize Kant and the
theoretical issues and problems confronting him in order not

to impoverish what Kant was up against.
I examine the different ways in which Kant presents the
Categorical Imperative in order to show that it can only
1See Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 175999, Arnulf Zweig, ed. and trans., (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1967), p. 4.
17
guide us negatively.
Finally,
I look closely at Kant's
specific illustrations through which he attempts to apply

the Categorical Imperative in positive terms.
I ask what
different possibilities open up if we approach these

illustrations with a different Kantian mind set, the
enlarged one.
I conclude by showing the inadequacies of
trying to derive positive content from the Categorical

Imperative,
negativity.
showing that it can only have the virtues of

Before I can make a case for the politics of
enlarged mentality, which I mostly reserve for the next

chapter,
I will show the inadequacies that I am claiming
beleaguer the categorical imperative.
I begin with what I
posit led him to develop it.

Kant's Fear of Relativism
Kant sets himself the quite awful task of grounding
morality for all times and
want to do this?
places.
Why would anyone ever
What good can it do?
If Kant can provide
a compelling first principle for morality,

end to moral relativism.
Many scholars,
then he puts an
for example Richard
Bernstein, argue that it is a fear of relativism that

propels Kant to look for a convincing metaphysics of
morals.2
According to Bernstein, Kant is suffering from
2Richard Bernstein, Beyond Ohjectivsim and Relativism,

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
18
"Cartesian Anxiety."3
Kant, like Descartes,4
searches for
an Archimedean point from which all else can be then be

measured or assessed.
categorical.
He wants one sure thing,
something
An imperative would satisfy and ease the
tensions once and for all.
All our political actions and
inter-relations can then follow from the moral orientation

at its base.
Bernstein aptly describes how lurking in the background
of Kant's search for an Archimedean point is a dramatic
EITHER/OR.5
Either there is a metaphysics of morals or
morality has no grounds.
Either there is a universal,
objective moral law or morality is without foundations.6
3See Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and

Relativism.
4See Rene Descartes, Second Meditation, "Of the Nature
of the Human Mind; and that it is Easier to Know than the
Body," Discourse on Method and the Meditations, (London:
Penguin Books, 1988).
Descartes says, "Archimedes, in order
to take the terrestrial globe from its place and move it to
another, asked only for a point which was fixed and assured.
So, also, I shall have the right to entertain high hopes, if
I am fortunate enough to find only one thing which is
certain and indubitable." p. 102.
Relativism.
6For arguments critical about impartiality or
universalism see, for example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and
the Limits of Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985).
He argues forcefully that there is something
wrong about universal thinking or impartiality.
See also
Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) who is also
suspicious of impartiality, and who thinks such arguments
suppress differences.
19
Only when we get a look at his conception of Enlarged

Mentality do we see how much more fluid Kant is trying to
be.
With his alternative conception,
Kant begins to show a
way to be far more context-sensitive, yet not morally

unprincipled.
He will talk less about duty and focus more
upon the importance of "shifting one's ground to others."

But for the architect of the Categorical Imperative, who is
plagued with Cartesian Anxiety,
the quest for moral
certainty follows almost naturally.

Bernstein also argues that while Kantian objectivism is
no longer a live option, neither is giving up the search for
relevant criteria altogether.7
My attempt to develop
Kant's concept of Enlarged Mentality is consistent with

Bernstein's sentiments, but for Kant as he constructs a
metaphysic of morals only something more certain will do.
Like Faust, who Goethe could have modeled upon Kant's
journey for certitude but probably did not,8 Kant swaps
almost everything away for the satisfaction of something
seemingly more grounded and certain.
We will see how
questions that were once important in political philosophy,

such as happiness as extended over a lifetime and what makes

Relativism.
8See Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind: Goethe,
K a n t, and Hegel, (McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York, 1980),
p. 29.
for the fulfilled life, are no longer important to pursue.

What becomes of primary importance is that each individual
can decide alone how to answer these questions and then be
legally protected to do so.
While Kant seeks a compelling first principle for
morality,
it is important to put this Kantian project in its
proper context.
Kant himself is suspicious of metaphysics
and first principles.
In fact, he spends so much of his own
energy and time "impeaching ordinary metaphysics," that it

comes as somewhat of a surprise that he has it in him to
offer his own.
But it is his own frustration with
"ordinary" metaphysics which he finds utterly unworthy and

dogmatic,
that compels him to provide the modern world with
a "truer" metaphysics which promises to get beyond dogma.

Kant tears everything to shreds until he grounds the
universal moral law.
Kant disenchants.
Kant is impatient with arrogant metaphysics whose first

principles he argues cannot withstand the skeptics'
legitimate objections.
For example,
in his Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysics,
he says such things as:
This much is certain: whoever has tasted

critique will be ever after disgusted wich
all dogmatical twaddle which he formerly put
up with because his reason had to have
something and could find nothing better for
its support.
Critique stands in the same
relation to common metaphysics of the schools
21
as chemistry does to alchemy, or as astronomy

to astrology of the fortune teller.9
Kant believes that his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, which I examine below,
superstition is not; though,
is worthy metaphysics whereas
in characteristic undogmatic
fashion, he leaves it up to others to challenge his ideas,

saying that he will deem his "impeachment of ordinary
metaphysics," unjust if any can prove it so.10
For Kant, metaphysical arrogance is a kind of villain.
For him, it is what happens if people fail to respect one
another as if members of a universal kingdom of ends.
Kant
constantly challenges dogmatic claims and i3 frustrated by

metaphysical assumptions that cannot meet the challenges of
doubt.
At one point he says "the world is tired of
metaphysical assertions; what is wanted is the possibility

of this science . . . 1,11
Kant has contempt for any and
all, if their claims cannot bear the scrutiny of criticism,

calling his age the one of criticism to which all things
9Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

That Will Be Able to Come Forward As a Science, Paul Carus,
trans., (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977),
pp. 105-06.
10Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
That Will Be Able to Come Forward As a Science, p. 118.
Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
22
must submit.12
He writes,
He invites others to criticize his works.
"My critique must be accepted or a better one
take its place.
. .1,13
Actually,
Kant himself offers a
replacement that shows itself to be much more compelling,

not duty-impaired, but context-aware.
We will explore this
alternative in the next chapter.

But when Kant goes on his Cartesian quest for moral
certainty,
reason becomes his only guide, but even this
Kant's critical mind will put on trial.
Reason,
through and
through self-critical, will be his only companion.

though placed by Kant in a privileged position,
completely off the hook.
Reason,
is not
It must itself remain self-
suspicious and keep itself from transcending into realms it

cannot know.
And yet, for him, this is what reason desires
more than anything.
But if reason is both his only
companion and is itself on trial,

own pronouncement.
it must also produce its
He believes reason must come to honestly
know its limitations as well as its strengths.
If reason
were to seek to go beyond that which it can know, then the

skeptic would be justified in asking how reason can have
access to that which is beyond its capacity to know.
Even
12Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Pure Reason, Norman

Kemp Smith, trans., (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p.
9.
13Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to An y Future Metaphysics
23
if there is such a realm beyond experience, which Kant

believes there is, we can have no knowledge about it.
Kant
further disenchants.
Kant believes that,
in the end, one must provide a
metaphysic of morals, but only after exposing the flaws of

bogus metaphysics.
He believes that his moral philosophy
provides those first principles that are defensible because

one reaches them through an analysis of pure and practical
reason which makes everyone a member of two w o r l d s .
Membership in Two Worlds
In this section I will discuss Kant's supposition that
there are two worlds to which we all belong.
purposes,
the argument14 can be systematically formulated
as the following:
world is sensible
(noumenal).
We are all members in two worlds.
One
(phenomenal) and the other intelligible
Kant sees the sensible world as full of desires
and inclinations.
The sensible world is where we eat or
feel hunger, love, feel sad or get angry,

friends,
For my
talk to our
take a walk, pursue our interests, or, as we say,
14See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,

especially pp. 257-326.
Here he make the argument that
freedom as an Idea has a priori validity, and is
theoretically possible; See also Kant's Critique of
Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy,
Lewis White Beck, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1949), along with his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals, H. J. Paton, trans., (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)
in which he aims to show how reason can be practical as it
relates to morality in that one can be free and determined
by individual will.
24
experience the world and each other as we live our lives or

are prevented from fulfilling them.
It is the world in
which we, as historically embodied beings, are always

already situated and moving.
Kant supposes that beyond this world of inclination and
desire,
there is yet another world.
membership in this other world?

should believe him?
But what gives us
Why does he think we
For Kant, what gives one and all
membership in the intelligible world is the Idea of freedom.

Kant writes,
"the Idea of freedom makes me a member of an
intelligible world."15
He further argues that although
nobody can have perfect knowledge of this other world,

existence must be presupposed.
According to Kant,
its
if we do
not recognize our membership in the intelligible world, we

could not have moral experiences.
Moral experiences,
he claims, owe their existence to
the Idea of freedom, and without this Idea, we would lack

moral sense, which Kant is quickly confident to acknowledge
we all have.
Kant's whole method begins with the
observation that we have moral experiences.

how they are possible.
to see freedom,
He then asks
Kant believes that it is our ability
in its broken and damaged manifestations,
that allows us moral experiences.
We then judge if
15Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of

Morals, p. 123.
25
situations are either in or out of sync with what we demand

from each other by virtue of being human, and this is mutual
respect.
Without the recognition that freedom is not for some
but for all, Kant believes we would too easily pursue our
own ends to the detriment of others, or be too quick to
dictate to others the kinds of ends that they should pursue.
This is especially true of ends that are based on precisely
those other more ontologically troublesome assumptions -such as some people are more equal than others -- that he is
challenging as morally untenable because he maintains we
could not all will this.
Kant really believes that if we do
not recognize that our membership extends into the

intelligible world via our own realization that the Idea of
freedom has a priori validity,
and therefore is determining,
then we have a tendency for falling into treating others as

only a means and not also always as ends or with requisite
dignity and respect.
Kant posits that our membership in the sensible world
revolves around inclinations,
some of which he sees as
immediately good and admirable and others not, and he claims

that like such "crooked pieces of wood"16 that we are all
made from, we are inclined to overlook what our membership
16Kant, Immanuel, On History, Lewis Beck White, ed.,

(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 17-18.
26
in the intelligible world requires from us in regard to one

another.
To avoid what he believes are the hazards of self
exemption, he argues that we have universal membership in

the intelligible world.
He argues that this brings an
obligatory and mutual sensitivity to each other that goes

beyond the natural bonds of kinship that he assumes we all
feel with those closest to us.
This recognition to include
all others with oneself in the universal kingdom of ends, he

calls "moral feeling"17 which is for him sublime and deeply
abiding.
Mutual recognition is important to Kant and it
takes a form that is broad and abstract.
He argues that
freedom is best approximated when everybody self-legislates

as if a member of a universal kingdom of ends.
What in the world--sensible,
-is awry in this view?
intelligible or otherwise-
Surely a sensitivity to others must
be at the heart of moral sense and practical reasoning.

what is wrong with this view?
So
The problem stems directly
from his two-world metaphysics that he offers to replace all

the others he is questioning as unfounded.
world metaphysics,
Through his two-
Kant is deontologically ripping apart
questions of formal justice from substantive concerns about
17This theme runs through his works from his

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the
Sublime, John T. Goldthwait, trans., (University of
California Press: Berkeley, 1960) to The Critique of
Judgement, James Creed Meredith, trans, (Clarendon Press:
Oxford, 1991).
27
what makes for happiness and the good life.

metaphysics seemingly solidifies into stone
As his
(dogma?), it
does not occur to Kant to extend the moral domain of justice

beyond what he claims mutual respect demands.
However
necessary universal moral respect is, and I believe that it

is, there remains an overriding problem in his view.
Kant believes that the crux of moral sense and
practical reason emerges from an ability to transfer to a
standpoint not one's own.
with him more.
On this point,
I could not agree
But listen to how he puts this. He says:
This better person he believes himself to be

when he transfers himself to the standpoint
of a member of the intelligible world.
He is
involuntarily constrained to do so by the
Idea of freedom--that is, of not being
dependent on determination by causes in the
sensible world; and from this standpoint he
is conscious of possessing a good will which,
on his own admission, constitutes the law for
the bad will belonging to him as a member of
he sensible world--a law whose authority he
is aware even in transgressing it.18
Kant's two-world metaphysics is a problem, not because
he takes steps--even leaps--to argue for universal
freedom and equality or because he endorses universal
moral respect or because he sees that reciprocity is
constitutive for the moral point of view, but for
another reason.
Kant seems never to consider what it
really means for one person to be in concrete

Morals, p. 123.
28
relation19 to another who is not only deserving of

moral respect, but is also and necessarily recognized
as a sensuous,
oneself.20
finite, and affective being like
Moreover, he does not consider that this
person is necessarily shaped by historical and cultural

practices, and moves with or resists what happens in
what Kant calls the "sensible world."
Many of these
insights begin with Hegel's critique of Kant's formal
19For a similar point, see Robert Paul Wolff's The

Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, (Harper & Row: New York, 1973).
Wolff says, "Despite his overriding concern for moral
matters, Kant never seems to have asked himself the
fundamental question, What is it for one man to stand in a
real relation to another man?" (p. 15).
Despite his great
admiration for Kant, Wolff laments that Kant frequently does
not say what Wolff hopes he would.
20I owe these insights to Seyla Benhabib's works.
She
makes these points as she criticizes formal universalisitic
theories that she calls "substitutionalist" if the
conception of self is restricted to one group's experiences,
i.e., white, male, propertied, or at least professional
adult.
Against this, she argues for "interactive
universalism," wherein engaging differences inform what
could be valid for all.
See her "The Generalized and the
Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral
Theory," in Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and
Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, (Routledge: New York,
1992), pp. 149-177.
See also her explanation for why she
pleads for "historically self-conscious universalism," in
her Afterward to The Communicative Ethics Controversy,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) entitled, "Communicative Ethics
and Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy."
She
writes: ". . . 1 would like to plead for a 'historically
self-conscious universalism.'
The principles of universal
respect and egalitarian reciprocity are our philosophical
clarification of the constituents of the moral point of view
from within the normative hermeneutic horizon of modernity."
p. 339.
29
morality,21 and have been further developed by others

beginning with Marx.22
I am informed by and
participate in these criticisms.
Although I join the
company of these critics of Kant's abstract formalism,

I would also like to support the project to retrieve
Kant's "lost legacy", which begins with Hannah
Arendt,23 in order to see what possibilities it might
further open up.
I will return to these themes in the
next chapter.
My battle with Kant in regard to the Categorical
Imperative is not over his supposition that the ideas
21See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T.

M. Knox, trans., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973),
where, in his Introduction, Hegel says, "In every philosophy
of reflection, like Kant's . . . freedom is nothing else but
this empty self-activity" (p. 28). For his distinction
between "morality" and "ethical life," see also p. 36.
But
especially, see Section 135 where Hegel criticizes Kant's
moral formalism as insufficient to the concerns that arise
from and are immanent to any concrete community.
Hegel says
"to adhere to the exclusively moral position, without making
the transition to the conception of ethics, is to reduce
this gain to an empty formalism" (p. 90).
See also his
Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller, trans., (Oxford;
Oxford University Press, 1977), especially "The Ethical
Order," where he says, "the solitary self, is, in fact, an
unreal, impotent self." (p. 292).
22See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of
Right', Joseph O'Malley, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982). See also "The Jewish Question," in
Karl M a r x : Early Writings, (New York: Vintage Books, 1975),
pp. 211-241.
23Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political
Philosophy, Ronald Beiner, ed., (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982) .
30
of freedom and equality represent our own self

clarification for our own normative claims.
And I
would not want to question the claims that seem to

quite naturally follow from this insight which is that
each person has inherent human dignity.
I would only
ever argue to expand this as I recognize this, and then

affirm it, as a necessary precondition for improving
human relations of all kinds.
Neither would I question
his sense of radical egalitarianism.
Rather,
I would
stretch it further so that it would not, as Hegel

claims,
ever only be an empty category, but radicalized
so that it is more substantively meaningful and

practically realized in our own concrete communities
and "ethical life," however historically embodied and
aware we come to know ourselves as being.
I take Kant's "impeachment" of any metaphysics or
life practices that are inegalitarian as normatively
sound, and I would only further build upon these
insights to repudiate any who still argue or act from
suppositions that some people are superior to others as
wholly and completely ontologically unacceptable.
And
while I would not want to regress behind these Kantian

insights,
to further repudiate any claims that one sex
is better than another as morally untenable and

politically disastrous or that one race or one nation
31
is better than another as culturally impoverishing,

cannot accept Kant's substitute metaphysics.
This is
primarily because he recommends a retreat into the

self-legislating world of the cogito.
Politically, the
implications go no further than an endorsement for

external relations and consequently, a very narrow
understanding of the moral domain of justice which
remains highly juridical and insufficiently engaged
with social and political struggles emerging all around
us.
Although many of us would want to question Kant's
two-world metaphysics,
his appeal to human dignity as
normative self-clarification is worth preserving.
Few
political philosophers have emphasized this component

of morality as insistently as Kant.
truly great about him.
This is what is
But even as I find a certain
normative validity to all of this,
I am still
dissatisfied for what it leaves out as Kant takes

flight into the world of the self-legislating cogito.
One can share with Kant a suspicion of dogmatism
and metaphysical arrogance and still continue to
impeach ontological assumptions that some human beings
are better than others as normatively unsound.
Moreover, one can be prepared for a variety of ways in
which to live the good life, find happiness and want to
32
preserve the inevitable plurality and the integrity

that accompanies such a plurality as disclosed24
through life itself, while also claiming that the
Categorical Imperative, and the deontology implicit
within it, cannot satisfy these desires.
A firmer
commitment to cultivate the very conditions beyond the

negative virtues becomes both necessary and attractive
\.f we are
to satisfy all of Kant's demands.
next chapter,
I will try
In the
to show how developing his
conception of enlarged mentality is an all-around

better candidate for achieving all he wants to
accomplish with the categorical imperative, but cannot.
Despite what remains salvageable within it, it is for
the most part a disaster.
In order to see how Kant narrows the moral domain
of justice by deontologiclly removing questions of
happiness and well-being from it, we will need to take
a look at
the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals25.
In the present study,
second critique,
I underplay the
not because I think it irrelevant to
my concerns, but because the Groundwork continues to be

more widely read,
is more accessible and precedes the
24I owe these insights to Hannah Arendt.

See her
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) .
25Hereafter the Groundwork.
33
ed.,
second critique by three years.26
Moreover,
it is
with the Groundwork that Kant set himself the specific

project of developing and defending the Categorical
Imperative, or the Supreme Moral Principle of the Good
Will.
It is where we first get acquainted with the
Categorical Imperative.
The second critique is a
continuation on this theme, and while this work is said

to develop the Groundwork and have its own unique
strengths,27 for the reasons above,
I take the
Groundwork, as better suited for my purposes, which has

the additional bonus of being the smaller of the two.
However,
I refer to other Kantian works where relevant.
Having tried to situate Kant in a context that does not

belittle what he himself was up against--a simultaneous
struggle to both avoid dogma and preserve plurality--,
I now turn my focus specifically to what he says, as he
sets his groundwork for developing the Categorical
Imperative.
Establishing the Supreme Moral Principle

Kant begins his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals,
a work whose "sole aim" is "to seek out and
26See Paton's preface to Immanuel Kant,

the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 8.
Groundwork of
27See Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique

of Practical Reason, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984) .
34
establish the supreme principle of morality"26 with

the following claim:
It is impossible to conceive anything at all
in the world, or even out of it, which can be
taken as good without qualification, except a
good will.29
Upon reading this opening passage, we might think that
Kant is about to begin a discussion about virtue since he
mentions the word good twice and already speaks in such
exalting terms about the good will.
Moreover,
it is not at
all unreasonable to expect that a .moral or political

philosopher might take up the importance of virtue.
Kant is not about to do this.
Rather,
he
But
attempts to
subordinate virtue to what he calls the "Universal Principle

of Justice."
I will discuss the obvious strengths that
accompany this approach,
and then I will focus upon the
incoherence of trying to define the moral domain of justice

as ideally indifferent to questions about
the good
a deontologist, it is his primary goal to
subordinate
life.As
substantive questions of virtue or the good life to

questions of formal justice.
By a good will, Kant is not referring to certain human
traits that we might, like others before us, want to

Morals, p. 60.
Morals, p. 60.
35
associate with virtue.
Wisdom,
temperance, and bravery are
frequently exalted as consistent with virtuous activity.

But this is not quite what Kant has in mind when he speaks
about the good will.
For these human attributes, however
good, are not always and consistently such, and can even be
out of place depending upon circumstances.
is different,
and is never out of place.
But a good will

And while it is
not the only good, Kant says we must see it as the highest
good.
Kant writes:
A good will need not . . . be the sole and
complete good, but it must be the highest
good and the condition of all the rest, even
of all our demands for happiness.30
Kant also says that any talents of the mind

intelligence, wit, or judgement)
temperament
purpose)
(such as courage,
(such as
and any qualities of
resolution, or constancy of
are
without doubt good and desirable in many

respects; but they can also be extremely bad
and hurtful when the will is not good which
has to make use of these gifts of nature.31
His claim is not counterintuitive.
In fact,
it is even
obvious in some respects and extremely familiar.
For
example, one's intelligence could enable one to plan the

Morals, p. 64.
Morals, p. 61.
36
most clever of murders for selfish gain.

is intelligence used for bad purposes,
Predictably,
this
according to Kant.
Or one is brave, but in a situation where empathy is more

appropriate and effective.
One might use one's talents to
grossly mistreat or utterly degrade somebody.
The doctors
in Nazi war camps presumably had their medical training, but

they used their technical expertise for the most horrendous
purposes.
Or, a terrorist who blows himself up in a car
bomb attack, killing hundreds of civilians can be considered

courageous; but this would be courage for bad purposes,
according to Kant.
same point.
Countless other examples would make the
In his own example,
Kant challenges the Greek
virtue of "moderation and sober reflection," saying that

this too, if not accompanied with a good will,
exceedingly bad."
"may become
He says,
the very coolness of a scoundrel makes him,

not merely more dangerous, but also more
immediately abominable in our eyes than we
should have taken him to be without it.32
Although any of these human traits are in many particular
instances morally exemplary,
their very variability leads
Kant to exclude these or any other "virtuous" activities

from playing any significant role in his awesome roject to
ground morality for all times and all places.
He wants to
be indifferent to questions about the good life and what
32Immanuel Kant,
Morals, p. 62.
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of

37
makes for happiness in order that he can clearly attain the

conditions for justice.
Kant is looking for a different
kind of moral excellence whose moral import is beyond

questioning.
Kant is in search of a solid foundation for
the massive structure he is about to build.
What he really
needs is a "determining ground," and he believes he has

found it in the good will.
This, he will argue,
is not a
shaky foundation, and can thus bear the tremendous weight of

his system.
So with his points made that neither intelligence nor
courage nor any other human characteristic is good in
itself, but is conditionally good, Kant seeks to put his
whole moral edifice together.
His view so far actually
reveals an acute sensitivity to circumstances and

situational detail and for context,
but he will overlook all
of this in order to say something more categorical.
With
his acute sensitivity for situational context already in

view, he could have at this point developed a theory of the
Golden Mean.
Like Aristotle33, he could have sought to
show how human responses under the right circumstances in

reference to the right people are appropriate and while in
other occasions they would not be, and that our experience
in the world of particulars helps us to know what is
33See his "Nichomachean Ethics, " in The Basic Works of

Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed., (New York: Random House,
1941), Book Two.
38
appropriate when.
But, Kant instead turns to the Golden
Rule--at least for now, as he fights what he takes to be the

hazards of contingency,
definite.
in order that he might be more
Without a determining ground for morality, he
might turn into the relativist that he does not want to be.
In a discussion of "the good will and its results,"
Kant says that the good will does not need results in order
to be good.
He declares:
A good will is not good because of what it

effects or accomplishes--because of its
fitness for attaining some proposed end: it
is good through its willing alone--that is,
good in itself.34
He asserts that a good will "is to be esteemed beyond
comparison," even "if by its utmost effort it still
accomplishes nothing."
Of what can a good will consist such
that, even if it meets up with resistance and is fruitless,

would "still shine like a jewel for its own sake as
something which has its full value in itself"?
Kant's
answer is to be found in reverence for the moral law.
And
this requires a separation between Duty and Inclination.

In claiming that the good will is somehow separable and
more primary than "all of our demands for happiness," Kant
argues that duty is separate from inclination, but this
34Immanuel Kant,
Morals, p. 62.

39
ushers in some very questionable assumptions for

understanding morality.
Separating Duty From Inclination
Kant distinguishes duty from inclination when he says,
"to help others where one can is a duty," but the action to
help others,
if it springs only from one's inclination to do
such, has no "genuinely moral worth."35
He says,
"its
maxim lacks moral content, namely the performance of such

actions, not from inclination, but from duty."36
What more
exactly does it mean for Kant to do good, not from

inclination, but from duty?
Just as many worthy human traits are variable,
with inclinations.
so too
For Kant, there is no moral import to
the generous act if it springs from an inclination.
To
Kant, what is morally praiseworthy is if one can be generous

despite one's inclination not to be.
Kant recognizes the goodness in inclinations that are
immediately virtuous, but he is more interested in excluding
inclinations that are destructive.
This is instructive, but
if this is the case, why not consider the possibility of

fostering those very inclinations that he himself
acknowledges as virtuous?
He will not, because he does not

Morals, p. 66.
Morals, p. 66.
want to teach virtue, even if he knows it when he sees it.

His business is always justice, and because it is of a
deontological variety,
he must not take up questions of the
good life as a virtuous and happy one as important to

explore.
Kant distinguishes between inclinations he thinks
laudable and those not, but with one fell swoop he brushes
them all aside in favor of the reliable good will.
Kant says he "does not intend to teach virtue, but only
to give an account of what is just."37
One can understand
and appreciate his reluctance at this point.
History is
full of examples of "taught virtues" that have been

intolerant of differing perspectives which Kant wishes to
preserve.
Kant's deontological move shows tolerance and a
respect for plurality and multiple modes of goodness,
and is
liberating in this way. However, his external understanding

of justice and the moral law will not yield substantive
results, beyond the negative virtues.
And if it is true
that a deontologically defined moral domain encourages a

juridical world at the expense of one that engages with our
desires for happiness as more sharable,
then what good is
it?
As Kant develops his Supreme Moral Principle, he seems
to represent an uncomfortable mixture of rigidity and
37Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice,

John Ladd, trans., (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company,
1965), p. 35.
41
openness.
On the one hand, Kant seeks rigid grounding for
an objective moral law.

resists rigidity,
On the other hand, he persistently
to the point of becoming practically
agnostic or unaffected on the question of social struggles,

culture, history and politics in general, and the struggles
that emerge from what he calls the sensible world.
He is
not particularly interested in what or how people will give

meaning to their lives, just that generalizations oblige
each to allow the other to do so.
With Kant's basic intentions and tensions in view and
his methodology outlined, albeit in broad strokes, we can
now turn to the politics of revering the moral law.
The Politics of Revering the Moral Law; What about People?

Kant says reverence for the law is a unique feeling
which is due, not to any stimulus of the sense, but to the
thought that my will is subordinated to such a universal
law.38
He says:
Yet although reverence is a feeling, it is
not a feeling received through outside
influences, but one self-produced by a
rational concept, and therefore specifically
distinct from feelings of the first kind, all
of which can be reduced to inclination or
fear.
What I recognize as immediately law
for me, I recognize with reverence, which
means merely consciousness of the
subordination of my will to a law without the
38Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals, p. 69.
42
mediation of external influences of my

senses.39
For Kant, actions require three things to be considered
moral.
Kant's three propositions are the following:
1)
action should be motivated by duty, 2) an action done from

duty has a formal maxim and 3) duty necessitates reverence
for the law.40
Kant adopts the Rousseauian idea that law
is only legitimate if it is what we prescribe to ourselves

whereas obedience to appetites or inclinations alone would
be slavery.41
Kant gets this idea from Rousseau, but by
placing it in the context of the Categorical Imperative, he

removes the communal and local flavor it has for him.
who never left his hometown of Konigsberg,
more cosmopolitan terms.
Kant,
is thinking in
But for both, the essential
problem is how to put freedom in the company of determinism,

and then still claim that the participants or selflegislators who do this are more free than n o t .
When I
develop the full implications of the Politics of Enlarged

Mentality,
I will show that solidarity and a communal sense

Morals, p. 69.
Morals, pp. 64-69.
41Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and
Discourses, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1988).
Rousseau
says, "for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while
obedience to a law we prescribe to ourselves is liberty." p.
196 .
43
inform it.
We might see this as a meeting place of Rousseau
and Kant.
For Kant, it is pure practical reason that determines
the will.
The Idea of freedom itself commands,
commands are, at the same time,

will to self-prescribed law.
and these
fully determined through
He says:
"The object of
reverence is the law alone--that the law which we impose on

ourselves but yet as necessary in itself."42
At the very minimum,
for Kant, practical reasoning both
commands one to not destroy another, and then enjoins each

to respect another's freedom and autonomy through revering
the moral law.
The analytical strength of Kant's argument
is that through it, one can maintain that everybody is a

free and equal moral being because none would presumably
will one's own ruin by the hands of another,
and that each
should additionally respect one another through revering the

moral law.
autonomy.
And that if this is granted,
then each has
But all of these gains for freedom and autonomy
exact very high costs that put reverence for the moral law
itself in a more questionable light and thus makes it worth
reconsidering.
Each is now free to define happiness
individually, but is all alone.-
This raises fundamental
concerns about how truly desirable this kind of protection

Morals, p. 69.
44
for self-defined happiness can be.
Happiness,
if it is to
be sustained over a lifetime, and not only fleeting,

requires sharing and solidarity, not merely gains for
juridical standing in society and formal recognition from
one another.
If the moral law and the Categorical Imperative bring
an obligation of universal moral respect,
it is the politics
of enlarged mentality that enjoins us to better care about

and cultivate all that we can normatively recognize we are
obligated not to destroy.
Now Kant's more public sense will
show itself as more internally related, and it points to a

highly politically context-sensitive approach, without being
morally unprincipled.
But this will have to wait because
now we still are concerned to show the limits of the

politics contained in revering the moral law.
As Kant now
defines the moral domain of justice, he removes any

questions of happiness from the determining grounds of
morality.
On the one hand, Kant has an important point to
make in regard to happiness and this concerns its

indeterminism.
Kant says:
the conceptst of happiness is so

indeterminate a concept that although every
man wants to attain happiness, he can never
say definitely and in unison with himself
what it really is that he wants and wills.
The reason for this is that all the elements
which belong to the concept of happiness are
45
without exception empirical--that is they

must be borrowed from experience . . .43
But the problem is that in revering the moral law
alone,
Kant cannot at this point move beyond freedom as
externally defined.
indeterminate,
While happiness itself is
an enlarged conception of the moral domain of
justice would not so thoroughly seek to privatize it.

Instead,
the point becomes to put greater focus upon
addressing substantive concerns for addressing our social

struggles and cultural crises.
This disposition ushers in a
politics of engaged and committed reflection informing

social actions, not a politics of juridicalism that
privatizes social an cultural crises away from the moral
domain of justice.
An enlarged moral domain of justice, by definition,
is
not juridically blind, but validates the necessity to

address societal problems where action itself is unfolding
and struggles erupting.
domain,
Kant, at this point, narrows the
rendering it blind to any social, cultural and
historical context.
Such an approach, cannot but displace

Morals, p. 85
46
politics by way of "agonistic" and lively exchanges44 right

out of the moral domain of justice.
Through revering the law itself with little or no
regard for actual people as situated amidst,
it is quite
possible to forget about ourselves and other people who are

not only deserving of respect but have needs, hopes and
desires that an engaging politics would want to better
address.
We should not de-politicize away through an overly
juridicalized conception of the self as one who is deserving

of autonomy and legal protection to pursue happiness so
individually, but which may well produce a very unhappy
populace.
External Relations
Heeding what Kant stipulates is "the moral law within"
means confirming external freedom for all others who are
also enjoined to self-legislate.
With duty and the moral
44See Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the

Displacement of Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993).
Honig pits "virtue" theorists against "virtu"
theorists.
In the former camp, Kant is joined by Rawls and
Sandel. Despite the differences in these theorists, she
claims they all tend towards closure because they seek
virtue, leaving ruptures unattended to, creating
"remainders."
In the virtu camp, she puts Arendt along with
Nietzsche and Machiavelli.
She favors thevirtu theorists
as not seeking to displace politics from political life.
With these theorists, she argues, the agon,
which she wishes
to defend, stays more open.
47
law figuring so prominently,
it comes as little surprise
that Kant says the Universal Principle of Justice is:

act externally in such a way that the free
use of your will is compatible with the
freedom of everyone according to a universal
law. "45
This is, as Kant quite plainly states, an external
definition of freedom, and it leaves a lot to be desired.
As we have now seen, what makes for the good life and shared
happiness does not matter.
These concerns are all
sequestered into the privacy of one's own life.
Kant
destroys these Ancient preoccupations about asking what

makes for happiness as sustained over a lifetime, and in
community with others in order that he might speak more
categorically about the demands for individual freedom.
But
this deonotological approach to defining the moral domain of

justice only seems to limit it unjustifiably.
We have
already seen how Kant, when he speaks of the moral law,

becomes duty-impaired,
and context-insensitive.
we look at his enlarged mentality perspective,
Only when
does he
become more attentive to the integrity of particular

content, while not losing his radical egalitarianism for it.
But, according to the Universal Principle of Justice,
which so jealously guards protection for legal autonomy for
each and all but in the process contributes to the
45Kant,
p . 35 .
Immanuel,
The Metaphysical Elements of Justice,

48
deterioration of poor quality inter-relations,

to be stuck.
Kant appears
If our own cultural and social actions might
affect others beyond legal infringement,
this is not
important to pursue, but is placed outside of the moral

domain of justice.
This arrangement, while it has the
virtues of Liberal freedoms,46 remains limited by external

relations.
It promotes a proliferation of juridical
personalities, but does little to cultivate civic spirit and

more solidaristically-oriented public institutions.
The
logical result is no shared sense of general well-being, but

a lot of protection to pursue happiness alone.
If it
remains the overriding and precise purpose to define the

moral domain of justice without virtue,
it should then
surprise no one that a conception of justice, and the

institutions that align themselves with such a conception,
will be unvirtuous.
This is the deontological bargain, but
it is neither a good, nor is it a wise one.
I will try to
show that Kant takes steps to retract it; if however

incipiently,
he opens up another path.
the moral law in sight,
But whenever only
Kant exchanges substantive concern
for formalized freedom that is external and necessitates

reverence for the moral law, but really could not much care
46Steven Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue

and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990).
See also Will Kymlicka's
Liberalism, Community, and Culture, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989) .
49
about people who are simply left to enjoy their own

autonomy.
With reverence for the moral law itself, but so
little concern for people, each self legislating cogito is

enjoined to not encroach upon others.
Through respecting each and all through reverence for
the moral law, freedom is attained by sacrificing happiness
as a more sharable political concern.
externally defined,
When respect is only
it is quite probable to forget about
concrete concern for others, but who now all have the legal
rights procured for them by a deontological system of
justice that commits to principles of law but not to people
especially.
Only when we are enjoined to "shift ground to others,"
more particularly and go beyond what Kantian formalism
requires, and what the politics of enlarged mentality
encourages is the moral domain of justice no longer
juridically blind and the contours of political commitment
broadened so that politics itself is not rendered contextimpervious and socially and politically disengaged from our
own civil and social strife which needs to be at the center
of our attention, not relegated to the margins.
Kant shows us that negative freedom need not be defined
along Hobbesian47 possessive individualist48 or Lockian49
47See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (New York: Penguin

Books, 1980), where Hobbes says, " Liberty, or freedom,
signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by
50
acquisitional lines.
Against these canonical rivals, one
can define negative freedom as Kant does, and it loses its

bitter edge.
But even in this,
its more enlightened
version, negative freedom is still about external

relations.50
As such,
it deflects our attention away from
our shared and historical struggles that the politics of

enlarged mentality enjoins us to see as more internally
connected.
Any individual always reveals and embodies the
residue of a life lived within a larger societal whole.
Any
individual contains within oneself the institutional

markings of a life situated in a larger social whole,
showing the place each occupies within it51 which is only
comprehensible relationally and internally.
General well
Opposition, I mean external Impediments of motion;)",

XXI, p. 261.
Chap.
4BI follow C. B. MacPherson's interpretation of Hobbes

and Locke.
See his The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
49See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, (New
York: Mentor Books, 1963), particularly Book II, Chap. V "Of
Property" for his labor theory of property.
50For an alternative understanding to external
relations, from a Marxist perspective, see Bertell Oilman,
Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society,
Second Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), Chapter Three, entitled "The Philosophy of Internal
Relations," pp. 26-4 0.
51Benhabib takes up similar themes, and I am indebted
to her work for helping me to clarify my position in regard
to the tensions in this relationship.
See Seyla Benhabib,
Critique, Norm, and Utopia, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), especially Chapter Eight.
51
being, through context-attentiveness to cultural and

societal crises, becomes a second-rate concern.
As long as
public personalities are structured and maintained through a

deontologically narrowed understanding of the moral domain
of justice, substantive concerns are subordinated to formal
questions of legalistic justice which leaves each free and
equal formally, but substantively ignored and disengaged.
In the last analysis,
the self-legislating cogito retreats
from the political world with all its conflicts in order to

rise above the social melee, and life itself, rather than
reflectively engaging with it and socially acting,
participating in order to get beyond our own cultural
crises.
Some have argued that all Kant ever sought to achieve
with his conception of morality is the argument for
formalized universal freedom and equality, and have then
asked is not Kant really only saying with his conception of
freedom and equality the minimum about the basic standards
for morality?52
Is not the declaration for free and equal
moral status for all necessarily a normative prohibition of
52See, for example, H. J. Paton's "Analysis of the

Argument," in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals.
Paton says, "Yet is not Kant merely saying the
minimum that can and must be said about morality? A man is
morally good, not as seeking to satisfy his own desires or
to attain his own happiness (though he may do both these
things), but as seeking to obey a law valid for all men and
to follow an objective standard not determined by his own
desires." p . 22.
52
any actions to the contrary such that hierarchical social

orderings are on their face illegitimate while it is also
illegitimate to prescribe for others what they should be or
do more particularly?
Kant addresses these problems with
more compelling force in his alternative political

philosophy.
With the deontological ethic limiting the moral domain
of justice,
radical egalitarianism can only be negative.
But to fail to move beyond this minimalism contained in

negative freedom is at the very root of the problem.
If all
we gain from formal justice is our duty to leave each other

apart and alone to self-legislate, we might from pure
reverence for the moral law quite possibly overlook the
needs and desires of others' or suppress our own from
emerging.
Kant says,"
"All reverence for a person is
properly only reverence for the law."53

While I maintain that the moral domain of justice
cannot do without the virtues of negativity by way of
universal moral respect,
this is highly insufficient.54
And it would be shallow to insist that this external

definition of freedom, while necessary,
53Kant,
p. 69.
Immanuel,
exhausts the moral
The Metaphysical Elements of Justice,
54See Isaiah Berlin's classic "Two Concepts of Liberty"

essay in Four Essays on Liberty, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969), pp. 118-172.
Berlin makes the argument that
negative freedom is necessary for positive freedom.
53
domain of justice, or that it alone grasps it most

intelligibly.
Kant begins to move beyond these narrow
spheres of deontology when he switches to his position

contained in his competing concept of enlarged mentality.
What lives on is Kant's moral law is the normative claim
that none is anybody's superior, that all humans qua humans
are intrinsically equal by virtue of being human.
However
much we can acknowledge what remains vital within Kantian

morality,
these are regulative ideas, and there can be no
replacement for making final use of this insight.
An
engaged politics that begins by shifting our ground to

others more particularly -- and not only abstractly or
regulatively but concretely and substantively -- is one way
to begin to make final use of these insights.
engaging with substantive content,
This requires
the failure of which
leads to a degeneration into blind juridicalism.

A more de-deontologized conception of the moral domain
of justice could not support this radical a rupture in
questions of justice and those of the good life, public
standing in democratic society and private well-being,
freedom and happiness, but try to bring these together more,
not insist upon pulling them apart.
Kant wants to overcome a politics of self-interest, but
with the moral domain so
externally constructed and
understood, he opts for other-indifference in regard to
54
substantive questions.
Juridicalism is the obvious
institutionalized form this insight takes, even if Kant

might not intend this.
Taking all his cues from pure
practical reason and the moral position that through this

unites will with freedom, he overlooks the fact that each
person is already always affected and historically situated
within an inherited context and that struggles surfacing in
these realms deserve more substantive attention.
In
recommending reverence for the moral law, Kant retreats into

the illusory world of the self-legislating cogito.
The Illusions of the Self-legislating Coqito

Whenever Kant speaks of consciousness itself rather
than embodied beings who have consciousness,
the standpoint of a fiction.
he argues from
Any individual personality
always necessarily reveals the imprints of an inherited

social and cultural life of which each is a paic, and the
place one occupies in the social whole discloses itself
through inter-action and resistance.
Ignoring these voices
of resistance is a mistake and a broadened moral domain of

justice would not be juridically blind, but more othersensitive to concrete struggles for recognition.
For Kant,
each self-legislator thinks and stands all alone,
above and
apart from the social and political world,
in order to
better appreciate and tolerate differences emerging from

within it.
Liberal tolerance, we might say, nas certain
55
strengths.
But through invoking a self-legislating cogito,
none can ever really come to "practically" know what any

differences might be, because varying and actual
perspectives are a priori blocked from one's vision.
The
politics of the self-legislating cogito is ultimately

perspectiveless, unlike the politics of enlarged mentality
which we will see, thrives upon insights gained through
shifting one's ground to as many perspectives as is
possible.
And, through doing so in the concrete world of
our inter-actions enjoins each to find the "universal when

only the particular is given."
As Kantian moral agents are enjoined to self-legislate,
they do so to preserve their autonomy and to recognize that
all other moral agents have like autonomy.
Such moral
agents are indeed enjoined to put themselves in the place of

others55 with whom they share the world, but their wholly
55There is a rich and inter-disciplinary literature in

moral psychology that also takes its bearings from the
importance that role-playing with others is at the heart of
morality.
See, for example, Lawrence Kohlberg, "Moral
Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental
Approach," in Thomas Lickona, ed., Moral Development and
Behavior: Theory, Research and Social Issues, (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976).
The current controversy,
in large part sparked by Carol Gilligan's work, is about who
"the other" is and what assumptions accompany "the self" who
role plays with "the others."
For her findings that
Kohlberg's research design is not only gendered, in the
sense that it reflects the experiences of the male in AngloAmerican society, but also punitive in its judging of
competing moral orientations that tend to be more
representative of young women's experiences, who respond to
the same hypothetical dilemmas more contextually, see her
56
disassociated and idealized aloneness brings into question

if they really have a grip on what it means to share the
world--the sensible one--or know how to or either care to
live in it well and with each other.
Everything is always already settled and done with via
pure consciousness itself, political life deflected away
from any who appeal to pure consciousness.
Social and
political struggles are not acknowledged as important to

care about in any more sharable way than through realizing
negative freedom for each.
If we self-legislate,
as Kant
recommends, we rely solely on the purity of consciousness,

but as we see this cannot but be a fiction. Consciousness
itself is always historically and culturally influenced.
In the end, the argument for self-legislation,
by
definition, means we refrain from engaging with each others'

needs and desires for happiness and welfare as part of the
very project of democracy.
legislating cogito,
As Kant resorts to the self-
it is crystal clear that he believes
that the crux of moral sense and practical reason emerges

from an ability and a willingness to transfer one's own
standpoint to that of another.
About this I quite agree.
Transferring one's ground to another, however, only begins
book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's

Development, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) .
What makes Kant a fascinating figure to research in light of
the current controversies is that his works represent both
moral orientations.
57
to have substantive value when we are willing to do this

beyond what Kant argues pure practical reason demands and
extend this willingness into the concrete world of our and
others'
social struggles and cultural crises.
Kant begins
to shift his own position only when he switches to his

alternative of Enlarged Mentality.
However, according to the categorical imperative, one
need not transfer one's standpoint to that of a real person
caught up in a life history which is defining whoever she or
he is, but rather to a member of a realm beyond appearances,
which politically translates into the external relations of
his Universal Principle of Justice.
The problem is that
this ability to shift places goes no further than in one's

own solitary and disengaged reflections, extending to
another disengaged and "disembodied" cogito.
legislating cogito is thus an illusion.
The self-
Again,
only in the
Politics of Enlarged Mentality does he open up better

possibilities to be both context-aware, but not without
losing his democratic intent.
I will now turn to Kant's specific formulation of the
Categorical Imperative so that we might then examine the
illustrations to see what he thinks the Categorical
Imperative might accomplish if any try to live by its
dictates.
58
Kant's Categorical Imperative(s)

At one point, Kant says the categorical imperative has
one form, but he gives three different formulations of it,
and some Kantian scholars debate whether or not there are
really five.56
I am not so much interested really in the
various formulations Kant gives to the categorical

imperative,
although this is interesting.
I am more
concerned with what happens when Kant puts the categorical

imperative in positive terms.
I am interested in this
because I do not think that the categorical imperative can

yield anything positive.
This is not to say that it lacks
value, but its value is in its negativity which is how Kant

first expresses it.
The kindest thing we can say about the
categorical imperative is that it is negative.

The fact that Kant first presents the categorical
imperative in its negative form (this is not considered one
of the three main forms)
is something that I think is rather
important, despite the fact that he then goes on to claim

that the one true form is positive,
others.
and then adds the two
It would have been better if Kant stopped talking
about the categorical imperative as soon as he gave it its

admittedly negative form, and then launched into developing
his conception of enlarged mentality.
But, of course,
this
superimposes onto his inquiries the benefits of
56See Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, p. 110.

59
retrospection, which he did not have.
The way to transform
his argument is to claim that we have an obligation not to

ruin one another and that this is normative self
clarification.
Now, we have more energy to better address
what is desirable for us all if we want to better understand

one another and be concerned with our concrete collective
well-being.
If he had done this, we never would have
encountered his three famous formulations, and Kant would

have spared himself much embarrassment that seems to have
stemmed from his need to have certainty which,
others,
springs from his fear of relativism.
I concur with
Of course, we
know he did not take this path, but instead considered the
categorical imperative the Supreme Moral Principle,
from
which something more positive could emerge. He not only went

on to give the categorical imperative different
formulations, but also increasingly invested in the
categorical imperative, even though his attempts to portray
its strengths fall apart whenever he tried to illustrate how
it could help in any concrete scenario.
The results of
going down this road are disastrous and many of Kant's

greatest admirers and most benevolent critics just cannot
deny this fact.57
His more hostile critics miss no
57See, for example, Robert Paul Wolff's The Autonomy of

Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic
of Morals, (Harper & Row: New York, 1973).
60
opportunity to poke fun at his miserable examples, but this

does not much help matters and can be misleading.
My position, unlike Beck White's for example,
is that
we need to remind ourselves about how plainly inappropriate

the categorical imperative is for defining the moral domain
of justice.
And the easiest way to do this is to look at
the illustrations.
Yet we need not impoverish Kant's
overall contributions in the process.
Beck tires of the
constant barrage of attacks upon Kant's examples,
that in
his view,
I speculate, bankrupt Kant and without giving Kant
his due.
But we need not ignore Kant's greater
contributions by showing how inadequate his illustrations

are.
We can instead suggest that when Kant moved beyond the
Categorical Imperative, he would not have given us these

examples.
But none of these insights alleviate the
responsibility to show the inadequacies.
The need to do so
is all the more important since many political and social

and educational theorists so frequently and consistently
take their moral bearings from the Categorical Imperative,
rather than trying to engage with the Politics of Enlarged
Mentality.
Before examining how plainly inappropriate the
categorical imperative must be if we expect anything but the
virtues of negativity from it, it will help to see the
61
various forms he gives the categorical imperative.
Kant
introduces the categorical imperative by saying:

Since I have robbed the will of every
inducement that might arise for it as a
consequence of obeying any particular law,
nothing is left but the conformity of actions
to universal law as such, and this alone must
serve the will as its principle.
That is to
say, I ought never to act except in such a
way that I can alone will that m y maxim
should become a universal law.58
This is the first time we meet the categorical
imperative,
and Kant gives it an overtly negative
formulation.
Its message is to refrain from destroying one
another because none of us would presumably will our own

destruction by the hands of another.
this is a lot.
On the other hand,
It offers no more, but
it is not enough on which
to build a theory of justice that we could call virtuous,

except negatively so.
Kant's mistake was to try to ask more
from the Categorical Imperative than it could give.

design,
it is negative.
By
Kant constructed it this way.
Whenever Kant tries to get positively concrete with it, all

its inadequacies come rushing to the surface.
My thesis is
that his maxim of Enlarged Mentality better addresses what

he wants to accomplish with the categorical imperative, but
cannot.
And this because he put his understanding of
justice together all so negatively,
58Immanuel Kant,
Morals, p. 70.
so impersonally and so

62
entirely externally, and ultimately unvirtuously.
But this,
as I have shown, is the logical result of strong deontology.

Yet, the next three times we meet the categorical
imperative, he casts it in more positive molds.
Although
this will not work, Kant's attempt to make it so already

reveals that he wants to get beyond the virtues of
negativity.
But this cannot happen via the Supreme Moral
Principle of the good will and the Categorical Imperative,

but has a better chance if we develop the politics of
enlarged mentality.
If we want any help from him in regard
to getting closer to positive freedom, we need to get beyond

the limits of the categorical imperative.
something better to say.
Kant has
But for now we need to remind
ourselves about what he does say as he speaks about the

positive in the categorical imperative.
Then we will see
what really happens or fails to happen when we try to take

positive instruction from the categorical imperative.
This
means laying out the three major formulations, all stated

positively.
Then we are positioned to look at his
illustrations,
or his examples for how to put the
Categorical Imperative to positive use.

Each of the three major formulations of the categorical
imperative has a slightly different focus, but the
connecting thread weaving itself through all of them is a
negative understanding of freedom.
63
So, why does Kant put a
positive spin on the next three formulations of it, after

first presenting it negatively?
Putting the Categorical
Imperative in positive terms is still about negative

freedom.
Kant says,
There is therefore only a single categorical

imperative and it is this: ' Act only on that
maxim through which you can at the same time
will that it should become a universal
l a w .59
This is generally the way people quote Kant's Supreme
Moral Principle, and for good reason.
Kant says there is
"only a single categorical imperative and it is this."
But
with only one sentence in between, he then goes on to

express it a bit differently.
Close to the previous form,
it is sometimes seen as a correlate, and sometimes not.
It
rea d s :
Act as if the maxim of your action were to
become through your will a universal law of
n a ture.60
The next time Kant formulates the categorical
imperative, he gives it a slightly different form.
He puts
it this way:
Act in such a way that you always treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in
the person of any other, never simply as a

Morals, p. 88.
Morals, p. 89.
64
means, but always at the same time as an

end.61
Finally, Kant offers what is often regarded as the
third formulation of the categorical imperative.
He says,
From this there now follows our third

practical principle for the will--as the
supreme condition of the will's conformity
with universal practical reason--namely, the
Idea of the will of every rational being as a
will which wakes universal law.62
Each individual moral agent is enjoined to be a moral
geometer.
We next need to look at his illustrations where he
attempts to show how the categorical imperative can be
applied to concrete situations.
His illustrations are easy
enough to imagine as real-life scenarios.
I have two
specific reasons for spending some time with his

illustrations.
First,
it is helpful to know how he thought
his conceptual apparatus could concretely and positively

apply in any of our moral or political dilemmas. Second,
want to use these same examples and then ask what

possibilities open up for us once we switch to an Enlarged
Mentality perspective.
For one, the principle of no n
contradiction is not important when we look at these

situations from an expanded perspective.
What matters is
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of

Morals, p. 96.
Morals, p. 98.
our willingness to try and see any situation from another's

point of view in order to engage with others, understand
others, and finally make peace with others rather than only
refrain from waging war.
Kant's Illustrations
In order to show how the categorical imperative can
help in an actual situation Kant develops four examples.
Kant infrequently uses examples to make his points.
It is
refreshing to think that he might get a little concrete,

that is, until we see the consequences.
After seeing what
happens there is little wonder as to why he stays away from

examples.
Kaufmann believes that Kant is afraid of clarity,
lest he let his own mind fully develop in all directions.63

Keeping company with abstractions and conceptual schemata
allows Kant an opportunity to stay aloof from the world of
hard moral and political dilemmas, Kaufmann implies.
Although I quite agree with Kaufmann that the examples fully
reveal the disastrous inadequacies of the Categorical
Imperative,
I would not put the point in these terms, but
would instead argue that Kant's thinking can be seen as

coming to fruition when we develop the politics of enlarged
mentality.
His maxim of Enlarged Mentality allows him to
show a way to retain the commitment to all of humanity, and
Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the M i n d , Part Three.
66
to be context-sensitive at the same time.
This will be
clearer the more we develop his alternative political

philosophy.
But for now, we focus upon his failures of
trying to positively apply the categorical imperative to

particular situations.
Kant's first example is about suicide.
He introduces a
familiar enough scene of a man growing weary of life.
He
writes,
A man feels sick of life as the result of a
series of misfortunes that has mounted to the
point of despair, but he is still so far in
possession of his reason as to ask himself
whether taking his own life may not be
contrary to his duty to himself.64
Kant tells us that the man of reason would ask himself,
"can the maxim of my action really become a universal law of
nature?"
His maxim, or his subjective disposition,
says would be the following:
Kant
"From self-love I make it my
principle to shorten my life if its continuance threatens

more evil than it promises pleasure."65
Kant
then adds,
"The only further question to ask is whether this principle

of self-love can become a universal lav/ of nature."
concludes that
Kant
this suffering man should not take his life
because "it is seen at once" that

Morals, p. 89.
Morals, p. 89.
67
a system of nature by whose law the very same

feeling whose function is to stimulate the
furtherance of life should actually destroy
life would contradict itself and consequently
could not subsist as a system of nature.66
Kant concludes his example by saying "Hence this maxim
cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and is
therefore entirely opposed to the supreme principle of all
duty.1,67
And so, like a geometrical proof for Euclid to figure,
Kant provides a solution for any who are deeply troubled
about life based on the principle of non-contradiction.
trying to use the Categorical Imperative positively,
shows it cannot be done.
In
Kant
But he does not seem to see the
failure in giving the categorical imperative positive

formulation,
at least not yet.
He has invested so much in
it he is going to make it work, even if it cannot.

For the purposes of illustrations,
Kant creates an
imaginary man who he tells us is suffering tremendously.
We
recognize this man as someone we might imagine knowing, but

it is difficult to resist asking if Kant is painting a selfportrait.
Kant reaches out to this man
(himself?) with the
categorical imperative. But this man is not about to destroy

Morals, p. 89.
Morals, p. 89.
68
somebody else.
Were this the case, then the categorical
imperative would show its usefulness.
Presumably none would
will his or her own destruction by the hands of another.

This can be universalized and it follows quite logically
from Kant's practical reasoning.
As soon as Kant tries to
give the categorical imperative positive form, he flounders.

The categorical imperative can give no positive guidance and
will be wholly out of place if any try to derive something
more positive from it.
negativity.
It can only have the virtues of
And while we have noted that this is quite a
lot and a necessary condition too, it is not enough for a

theory of justice.
For a greater understanding of positive
freedom, we must unearth Kant's alternative political

philosophy in order that we might develop it further.
For
now we return to Kant's imaginary subject who has hit rock

bottom.
What this man in Kant's first example needs is a few
friends, a welcoming community,
understanding.
Are his problems financial?
over a lost family member?

one?
some support and some
His lover?
Is he grieving
Or has he never had
Has he returned from a war with fewer limbs than he
had when he left?
Kant does not allow us to know any of the
factors that are contributing to this man's great despair,

which could allow us to better know how to help him pick
himself back up again.
Moral self-legislators do not need
69
anybody as long as they have their reason.
Although Kant is
even stingy with this, once we recall that any moral agent
must know what cannot be known and this includes reason.
They only ever gets a glimmer of it.
Moral agents only
presuppose it so they can better interact with others,

"rightly."
This man needs everything Kant is prepared to give him
when he switches to his alternative political philosophy,
and then we take it a few steps further.
But what is
pushing this man in Kant's example to the edge we do not

know.
It does not even seem to matter.
the above.
It may some of the above.
It may be all of
It may be none.
All
Kant says is that he has suffered a series of misfortunes.

But with the categorical imperative in his head he need no
longer despair.
Kant's second example involves a man "driven to
borrowing money because of need."
additional problem.
But there is an
The man not only desperately needs the
money, but he also knows he cannot make good on the loan if

he is ever lucky enough to get it.
money, which we are told he needs,
So, if he wants the

he must promise his
prospective lender that he will pay it back "within a fixed

time" even though he knows this is probably not going to
happen.
70
Kant goes on to say that this man "is inclined to make

such a promise; but he still has enough conscience to ask
'Is it not unlawful and contrary to duty to get out of
difficulties in this way?'"68
continues,
But let's suppose,
Kant
that this needy man follows his inclinations and
makes the promise in order to procure the loan.

would his maxim be?
What then
Kant says it would run as follows:
"'Whenever I believe myself short of money,

money and promise to pay it back,
I will borrow
though I know that this
will never be done.'"
Kant describes this principle as one
of self-love and asks:
"Is it right?"
To provide an answer,
he universalizes his maxim in order to re-frame the

question.
Kant speaks for this needy man through his
categorical imperative and asks,
"'How would things stand if
my maxim became a universal law?'"
Kant concludes:
I then see straight away that this maxim can

never rank as a universal law of nature and
be self-consistent, but must necessarily
contradict itself.
For a universality of a
law that everyone believing himself to be in
need can make any promise he pleases with the
intention not to keep it would make
promising, and the very purpose of promising,
itself impossible since no one would believe
he was being promised anything, but would
laugh at utterances of this kind as empty
shams.69

Morals, p. 89.
69Immanuel Kant,
Morals, p. 90.

71
And so concludes the second of Kant's illustrations.

Like the prior example,
Kant himself again shows how
ineffective the categorical imperative is if one attempts to

derive anything substantive from it.
Only when we shift to
an Enlarged Mentality perspective are we enjoined to ask

what it might really be like to be this needy man.
the world look from his particular perspective,
How does
and why is
the focus upon promising in this case just not relevant, but
an attempt to engage with this man's needs is?
Hegel will attack Kant for this example arguing that it
only contains a contradiction if we bring other
institutional and political assumptions into it that
legitimize material inequities to begin with.70
Why does
anyone have to borrow in the first place, often at high

interest rates,
from institutions that operate wholly above
our heads and frequently against our wills?

were more shared,
If property
the conflict is overcome for then none
would need to make loans or worry about paying them back.

This is to take a more institutional view.
We might also look at the matter another way.
But Kant
again tells us very little about the particulars of his

example.
This is because he is more concerned with showing
the positive effects of the categorical imperative rather
70G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans., T. M. Knox,

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p.
77.
72
than developing his other conception.
Kant would have been
better off just saying he did not think suicide was right
and that he thought that is good to develop our talents.
But if we look to his alternative political philosophy, we
would be encouraged to see this particular man's
perspective, whatever it might be.
Part of the problem is
that Kant gives so little in his examples.
The "whatever it
might be" he dismisses as unimportant to know.
If Kant
would only share with us the particulars of the situation.

Does this man need the money for food and shelter?
medicine for his ailing child?
And who is the lender?
why does this man need the money?
Just
If he manages to borrow
it from his equally struggling mother with the intent of

recklessly gambling with it as he did last week and the week
before that, knowing that she cannot now pay the rent,
the status of the "need" changes.
then
If Kant gave us more to
work with, and here developed his concept of Enlarged

Mentality,
he might have given up trying to argue that the
categorical imperative can have positive impact.
But that
trying to see a situation from many perspectives helps

arrive at what is in the general well-being.
Trying to see a situation from another's perspective is
at the core of Kant's maxim of Enlarged Mentality.
If we
develop the politics implicit within it, we see that this

requires engaging both reflectively and in action with real
73
life problems and situations and guides far more positively

than the categorical imperative could ever hope to.
But
this is really not to denigrate what is best in the

positive value.
obligatory.
just to argue that it can have no
Its negative merits are truly great and
And they bring an obligation not to ruin, but
to mutually respect each other.
But for an engaging
politics, we would not look to the Categorical Imperative,

but only try to go far beyond it, the way I am suggesting
Kant began to.
For Enlarged Mentality to be effective, we must already
recognize that we have an obligation not to destroy.
absorbed, how do we live well with one another?
This
For this,
really see a willingness to appreciate the perspectival as

important to engage.
We do this by allowing
ourselves to
step into the worlds of others, more, shift our ground to to

others more, and then ask ourselves what is compelling for
all.
Only then are we moving closer to positive freedom.

For negative freedom,
there probably can be no
improvement over Kant's categorical imperative.

negative way,
In its
its message could not be more straightforward:
Do not destroy one another because none would presumably

will this for themselves.
But, if we believe that this is
not enough on which to base a theory of justice, and that if

we leave it at this, a proliferation of juridical
74
personalities is the likely result,
each will be legally
protected to make the most of one's autonomy.
But no
efforts to cultivate solidaristic institutions will follow

from it.
Sublating the Categorical Imperative means we will
look beyond the Categorical Imperative, not expecting to

squeeze anything more positive out of it.
Appreciating Kant
is to uncover his lost legacy and to engage with this

alternative political philosophy.
It is an Enlarged
Mentality that helps us to n.t/re genuinely resolve our

political and moral and personal difficulties.
And beyond
this, practicing enlarged mentality helps to show how these

all interconnect.
Kant's third example is about a man who
has unique talents and capacities "whose cultivation would

make him a useful man for all sorts of purposes," but he
"prefers to give himself up to pleasure rather than to
bother about increasing and improving his fortunate natural
aptitudes."
Kantian scholars overwhelmingly seem to agree
that this example is notoriously bad and so I will skip over

it.71
Kant's fourth example is disappointing.
Kant describes
a "flourishing" man who:

sees others who have to struggle with great
hardships (and whom he could easily help);
and he thinks 'What does it matter to me?
71See, for example, Robert Paul Wolff, The Autonomy of

Reason and Walter Kaufman, Discovering the Mind: Goethe,
Kant, and Hegel (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1980).
75
Let every one be as happy as Heaven wills or

as he can make himself;
I won't deprive him
of anything; I won't even envy him; only I
have no wish to contribute anything to his
well-being or to his support in distress!72
Kant then claims that if "such an attitude were a
universal law of nature, mankind could get on perfectly
well--better no doubt than if everybody prates about
sympathy and goodwill, and even takes pains, on occasion,
to
practice them, but on the other hand cheats where he can,

traffics in human rights, or violates them in other ways."
Claiming that "it is possible that a universal law of nature
could subsist in harmony with this maxim," Kant continues,
"it is impossible to will that such a principle should hold
everywhere as a law of nature."
Kant concludes the
following:
For a will which decided in this way would be
in conflict with itself, since many a
situation might arise in which the man needed
love and sympathy from others, and in which,
by such a law of nature sprung from his own
will, he would rob himself of all hope of the
help he wants for himself.73
Kant makes a mockery of love in this passage.
I will
love because I might need love in return debases what love

is.
He turns this sentiment into some kind of a strategy
that in the end comes back to self-interest.
But love, as

Morals, p. 90-91.
Morals, p. 91.
76
we all know,
is beyond self-interest.
We will see Rawls
argue very closely along these lines when he develops his

theory of justice which he roots in the assumptions of
"mutual disinterest and limited altruism."
Despite Kant's
derision of sympathy in this example, his concept of

Enlarged Mentality cannot be developed without it, although
it is not only about sympathy.
I conclude this section on Kant's illustrations with
the claim that Kant's categorical imperative cannot go
beyond the virtues of negativity.
I have shown that Kant's
attempts to derive anything more substantive from what I

posit can only have negative virtue fails via his own
attempts to illustrate through examples its more substantive
and positive impact.
I have also shown what possibilities
open up when we engage with his alternative to his more

famous legacy and begin to taste the full flavor as we now
shift to the Politics of Enlarged Mentality in the next
chapter.
Frustrated with Kant's retreat into the selflegislating cogito, and reverence for the moral law rather
than for people, which deflects attention away from
substantive issues,
lost legacy.
I support the project to re-work his
With Enlarged Mentality Kant opens up a more
genuine way in which to be sensitive to others that moves

beyond external relations and formalism.
77
With Enlarged
Mentality developed to its logical conclusion, we cannot be

the self-legislating cogitios his supposed intelligible
world tries to make us.
We cannot disengage from what he
calls the sensible world and all that happens in it or is

disclosed from it.
Even if we try to use the best
intentions when we set out to universalize our own maxims

making others present to our minds only as deserving of
autonomy, but not confirmed in their particularity,
and make
our actions conform to the test of whether or not we could

make use of subjective disposition fitting for a more public
world, we will fumble as Kant does.
The categorical
imperative is bound to show its inadequacies at the most

critical points.
78
Chapter III
The Politics of Enlarged Mentality: Sublating the
Categorical Imperative
Overview
In this chapter,
I shift my focus to Kant's concept of
Enlarged Mentality which I claim offers a more authentic way

through which to resolve the tension between justice and the
good life.
In this section,
I will portray Kant's concept
of Enlarged Mentality as a kind of sublation of the

showing how it absorbs that which
remains compelling in this Kantian inheritance, without

falling prey to universality that remains abstract and
formal.
In other words,
Enlarged Mentality never enjoins
any to question the inherent worth of each and every human

being, and in this way shares the same theme motivating the
Categorical Imperative, but it goes beyond this.
The radical egalitarian, moral, and political intent of
the Categorical Imperative is not up for grabs, but no
longer are moral agents enjoined to universalize their
subjective maxims through consultation with the "purity" of
their consciousness.
Rather,
each is encouraged to shift
one's ground to others, more particularly.
Only after this
process is ignited can it make sense to speak of what it

79
means to cultivate a compelling generalized view,
and not
before.
Once it is clear that negative freedom has its virtues,
but that these virtues, precisely because negative, cannot
exhaust the moral domain of justice, or even grasp it most
intelligibly, we are confronted with how do we better
understand and care about that which the Categorical
Imperative obliges us not to ruin.
We have witnessed how
the Categorical Imperative, via its negativity,
says a lot
about what we are obligated to refrain from doing in

relation to one another.
If there are normative violations,
talk of injustice seems to quite naturally roll off our

tongues.
Still, Kant's Categorical Imperative is a negative
guide and we flounder,
just as he did,
squeeze anything more out of it.
if we attempt to
It is a negative device.
It cannot provide any positive guidance.
But this does not
mean that Kant himself did not point towards something that
might.
Positive freedom?
For this Kant's Categorical
Imperative cannot help, but his concept of Enlarged

Mentality is worth developing for this purpose.
I will organize this section as follows: First,
look at Kant's definition of Enlarged Mentality,
also calls "the second maxim of taste."
I will
or what he
As I do this,
will incorporate Hannah Arendt's insights with Kant's in

order to develop the moral and political significance of
80
this alternative perspective.
Second,
I will look at Kant's
distinction between "determinant" and "reflective" judgement

in order to develop my own claim that re-working Kant's
alternative political philosophy is best seen as a sublation
of the Categorical Imperative.
By the end, what I hope to
have demonstrated is that Kant's concept of Enlarged

Mentality represents a potential way in which to see how
justice and the good life may not be all that far apart
after all.
If we accept the merits of what is politically
implied by the Enlarged Mentality perspective, we must leave

most of the Categorical Imperative behind, most particularly
its deontological understanding of justice that remains
context-insensitive to substantive struggles and cultural
crises.
Re-working Kant's Concept of Enlarged Mentality

In re-working Kant's concept of Enlarged Mentality,
am building upon Arendt's insights on this matter.1
I have
followed her quip that the key to Kant's political

philosophy is hidden in his third Critique,2 The Critique
H a n n a h Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political

Chicago Press, 1982).
2In a letter to Karl Jaspers, dated August 29, 1957,
she writes,
At the moment I'm reading the Kritik der
Urteilskraft with increasing fascination. There,
and not in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, is
where Kant's real political philosophy is hidden.
His praise for 'common sense,' which is so often
81
of Judgement.
Unfortunately, Arendt did not live to write
what would have presumably been her full extrapolation of

Kant's critique of judgement.
All that she ever wrote was
the title page of her book-to-be Judging, which was found in

her typewriter, discovered after she died.3
If, as Arendt claims, Kant's true political philosophy
is hidden in his third critique,
then we need to make it
stand out more so that we might appreciate an alternative

Kantian reading.
Books abound about Kant's Categorical
Imperative, many containing this phrase in their titles,4

and many contemporary theories limit themselves to re
working this great legacy.5
Comparatively little has been
scorned; the phenomenon of taste taken seriously

as the basic phenomenon of judgement . . . the
'expanded mode of thought' that is part and parcel
of judgement, so that one can think from someone
else's point of view.
The demand for
communicativeness.
These incorporate the
experiences young Kant had in society, and then
the old man made them come to life again."
See Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969,
Lotte Kohler & Hans Saner, eds., (New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1992), p. 318.
3See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political
Chicago Press, 1982), opposite title page.
4See, for example, H. J. Paton, The Categorical
Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1948).
5Although this dissertation confines itself to how John
Rawls and Jurgen Habermas re-work Kant's categorical
imperative, many other influential theories take their
bearings from Kant's categorical imperative.
See, for
82
done to retrieve his other legacy which is, in fact,
far
greater.
While Arendt never wrote a major text on this subject,
we still have some of her other works, particularly her "The
Crisis in Culture"6 piece which we can consult.
Additionally,
Ronald Beiner has assembled a series of her
lectures on Kantian political philosophy which she delivered

at Chicago and the New School during 1965-66.7
Through
these works, we have an opportunity to gain access to at

least some of what she might have further developed.
Beiner notes,
As
the task of following Arendt in these matters
is "doubly elusive" because she never wrote what she claimed

Kant never fully developed.8
But, as he suggests,
this
sense of drama in some ways heightens the responsibility to
example, George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, & Society: from

the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist Vol. 1, Works of
George Herbert Mead, ed., Charles W. Morris; and Lawrence
Kohlberg, "Moral Stages and Moralization: The CognitiveDevelopmental Approach," in T. Lickona, ed, Moral
Development and Behavior: Theory, Research and Social Issues
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976).
6See Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture," in Between
Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought,
(Penguin Books: New York, 1968).
7See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political
Chicago Press, 1982)
8See Beiner's "Interpretive Essay" in Hannah Arendt,
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, p. 91.
83
probe further.9
If she is right, we cannot continue to
look at Kant in the traditional way.
At the very least, we
must admit there are really two Kantian strains of political

thinking.10
Then we can ask ourselves which is the more
fruitful to develop for getting our own bearings about the

moral domain of justice.
What belongs in it and how do we
judge are questions that are more creatively addressed

through re-working Kant's alternative.
Arendt's insights
will prove to be very much worth pursuing.

Some have acknowledged the creativity of Arendt's
Kantian appropriations, only then to claim that in them lie
9See Beiner's "Interpretive Essay," p. 91.

10,I:.ere is some irony in this claim, and one might ask,
bemusedly, what happened to the actual political writings
Kant did write, such as "Perpetual Peace."
See Kant's
Political Writings, ed., Hans Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970) for a collection of Kant's
reflections on politics.
It was Arendt's conviction that
Kant's political writings were of comparatively little value
as compared to his epistemology or his moral theory or his
aesthetics.
She dismisses the outwardly political works, in
order to address the politics as revealed in his other, more
critical, works.
See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's
Political Philosophy, ed., Ronald Beiner, (Chicago:
Here, Arendt,
describing Kant's own evaluation of his political works,
says, "Kant himself called some of them a mere 'play with
ideas' or a 'mere pleasure trip.'" And the ironical tone of
Perpetual Peace, by far the most important of them, shows
clearly that Kant himself did not take them too seriously,"
(pp. 7-8)
Like Arendt, I have not focused upon Kant's more
blatantly political works, but at this point, I make no
judgement about their worth.
84
distortions that she does not recognize.11
But Arendt is
upfront about being more concerned with the political

philosophy Kant could have written had certain of his ideas
been developed systematically.12
written,
And as Beiner has
"There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about
such a procedure so long as one is clear that the enterprise

is not purely exegetical."13
Moreover, Arendt can only
distort Kant if we have a one-dimensional view of him to

begin with.
If we widen our own view of Kant, as Arendt
herself is willing to do, new perspectives are bound to open

up.
It is more advantageous to see that Arendt develops
what Kant did not, but might have.
Since Kant never fully
delivered on developing his own insights,

necessarily bequeathed to others,
this task was
and it is Arendt who first
throws light on this concept of Enlarged Mentality.
So it
is with her we must begin in our efforts to re-work Kant's

alternative political philosophy.
Naturally, we first
examine what Kant himself says.
xlSee, for example, Lisa J. Disch, "More truth than

Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings
of Hannah Arendt," in Political Theory, November, 1993.
pp.
686-687.
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 142.
13Hannah Arendt,
Philosophy, p. 142.
Lectures on Kant's Political

85
Kant's Maxim of Enlarged Mentality: Shifting to the

Standpoint of Others
In Book Two of Kant's third Critique entitled the
"Analytic of the Sublime," Kant has a section called "Taste
as akind of sensus
person
communis." It is here that he defines
of "enlarged mind" as one who can shift "his ground
to the standpoint of others."14
It is precisely this point
that Arendt further politicizes and which I wish to pursue.

As I do this,
I shall build upon Seyla Benhabib's insights
in order to further develop what I will call the "Politics

of Enlarged Mentality."
Kant says:
by the name sensus communis is to be

understood the idea of a public sense, i. e.,
a critical faculty which in its reflective
act takes account (a p r i o r i ) of the mode of
representation of every one else, in order,
as it were, to weigh its judgement with the
collective reason of mankind, and thereby
avoid the illusion arising from subjective
and personal conditions which could readily
be taken for objective, an illusion that
would exert a prejudicial influence upon
judgement.
This is accomplished by weighing
the judgement, not so much with actual, as
rather with the merely possible, judgments of
others, and by putting ourselves in the
position of every one else, as the result of
a mere abstraction from the limitations which
contingently affect our own estimate.15
14Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, James

Creed Meredith, trans., (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1991), p.
151.
15Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, James Creed
Meredith, trans., (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1991), p. 151.
86
Suspecting that his own portrayal of how best to put

ourselves in the position of everyone else will meet with
resistance, Kant says:
Now it may seem that this operation of
reflection is too artificial to be attributed
to the faculty which we call common sense.
But this is an appearance due only to its
expression in abstract formulae. In itself
nothing is more natural than to abstract from
charm and emotion where one is looking for a
judgement intended to serve as a universal
law.16
I contest Kant's "repressed psychology" that downgrades
the emotional components involved in moral judging, and
without which his own theory cannot be rendered coherent.
At the same time,
I shall preserve his meaning that
liberation from excessive self-interest is necessary for

shifting one's ground to another.
Kant next defines his three maxims of taste.
(1) to think for oneself;
of every one else; and
They are
(2) to think from the standpoint
(3) always to think consistently.17
He then names "the second that of enlarged thought," and it

is with this that I am specifically concerned in re-working.
Kant says,
As to the second maxim belonging to our
habits of thought, we have quite got into the
way of calling a man narrow (narrow, as
opposed to being of enlarged mind) whose

Meredith, trans., (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1991), p. 152.
17Immanuel Kant,
The Critique of Judgement, p. 152.

87
talents fall short of what is required for

employment upon work of any magnitude
(especially that involving intensity).18
"But," he continues,
"the question here is not one of the
faculty of cognition, but of the mental habit of making a

final use of it."19
He then says:
This, however small the range and degree to

which a man's natural endowments extend,
still indicates a man of enlarged mind: if he
detaches himself from the subjective personal
conditions of his judgement, which cramp the
minds of so many others, and reflects upon
his own judgement from a universal standpoint
(which he can only determine by shifting his
ground to the standpoint of the others) .20
There are various ways in which any of us might
interpret these passages.
some ways,
How we interpret them will,
in
reflect what we bring to them, what we discard,
and then where we want to take what we see as valuable.

Quite possibly, Rawls might want to claim that his Veil of
Ignorance, which we will review in the next chapter,
consistent with the maxim of Enlarged Mentality.21
18Immanuel Kant,
is
That
19Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 153.

Italics indicate Kant's emphasis, the boldface indicates
mine.
20Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 153.
Italics indicate Kant's emphasis, the boldface indicates
mine.
21This is a speculative claim.
I have not come across
any reference to Kant's concept of Enlarged Mentality in
Rawls's writings.
He consistently talks about offering a
"procedural reinterpretation of the Categorical Imperative,"
retaining the emphasis upon autonomy which gives rise to his
88
is, Rawls might contend that he, like Kant,
is emphasizing
detachment from one's own interests in order to derive a

compelling generalized view.
Surely he does say this when
he credits Kant's Categorical Imperative and the notion of

autonomy for helping him develop the Original Position.
However,
lines,
I would like to suggest along more Arendtian
that the point worth developing from Kant's second
maxim of taste is not to detach from oneself or from others,

but to liberate oneself from overriding self-interest in
order to shift one's ground to another.
This is a crucial
point for appreciating what I am positing is Kant's

alternative to the Categorical Imperative, and what is left
undeveloped by many neo-Kantian theories.
when we turn to Rawls,
As we will see
the whole purpose of going behind the
Veil is to settle what belongs in the moral domain of

justice "once and for all."
For Rawls, we will see,
it is
not necessary to shift our ground to the standpoint of

others but once,
(and for all) and when we are guided on how
to do this, we are asked to assume that everyone is selfinterested or ought to be, and,
in any case, will be legally
protected to be and acculturated to be.

My point now is that Rawls, who draws from Kant, does
not ask us to think beyond self-interest, but Kant does.
deontologically defined conception of justice.

Four.
89
See Chapter
Arendt sees this and she wants to develop it.
For her, Kant
is talking about how we might go beyond self-interest, not

justify it.
To do this, she draws out the political
significance of what it would mean to shift one's ground to

the standpoint of others.
For her, this is profoundly moral
and deeply political, as it no doubt is for Kant as well.

What Arendt sees in Kant's alternative is not a selfcentered understanding of moral subjectivity, but an other
conscious and other-sensitive approach to political thinking
that we arrive at by representing to ourselves the worlds of
others.
She recognizes that we may not succeed in
representing the world of others to ourselves in exactly the

way others themselves experience it, and others may not be
able to do the same on our behalf.
But Arendt sees the
effort itself as moving us beyond a merely subjective view.

What others might see, hope for, feel, and struggle for in
this world that we share is what Arendt in picking up on as
important to develop.
The Delphic Oracle that reads Know
thyself is replaced with a new motto to know the other

m o r e .22
22I borrow this point from Alessandro Ferrara, varying

it slightly.
He uses it to describe what he sees is the
"shift of emphasis under way in our times."
I use it to
show how Arendt, taking her cues from Kantian Enlarged
Mentality, stresses this context-sensitivity to others as an
important part of political judgement.
Alessandro Ferrara,
"Postmodern Eudaimania," Praxis International, vol. 11, no.
4 (January 1992), p. 393.)
90
Kant is showing a way to move beyond the narrow

deontological spheres that beleaguer the Categorical
Imperative, and Arendt grasps this.
She says:
In the Critique of Judgement, . . . Kant

insisted upon a different way of thinking,
for which it would not be enough to be in
agreement with one's own self, but which
consisted of being able to "think in the
place of everybody else" and which he
therefore called an 'enlarged mentality.'
(eine erweiterte Denkungsart) .23
Whereas Kant's Categorical Imperative enjoins each
individual to ask oneself alone what of one's subjective
maxims are worthy of universalization,
his concept of
Enlarged Mentality is now pointing to a more consciously

public and shared understanding of politics.
In some
important ways, we will see Habermas launching his project

from these Kantian grounds, but he does not overcome the
traditional bias of a strongly construed deontological
understanding of justice that is more closely linked with
the Categorical Imperative.
Creatively reformulate the
Categorical Imperative, he certainly will.
But move beyond
the justice-good life divide, he will not show a way.

Habermas will ultimately banish discussion about what makes
for the good life and happiness from the moral domain of
justice.
In his language,
communicative action must limit
23Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight

Exercises in Political Thought, (Penguin Books, New York,
1968), p. 220.
The literal translation of this phrase is
"enlarged thought."
91
itself to "moral-practical", and not "aesthetic-expressive"

concerns.
Benhabib will become my model here and I shall
maintain that her approach to "construct Habermas from

within" steers his project away from strong deontology.
This new understanding demands an enlarged moral domain of
justice in which the politics of engagement is the desirable
and necessary next step, not only the promise for abstract
universal moral respect.
Kant is moving away from the Categorical Imperative,
and so in re-interpreting his legacy,
it might be better to
begin more where he left off, rather than where he began and
then got stuck, or at least badly stumbled.
His own
intellectual flux can instruct us as to where he is most

compelling and where least for our concerns about democratic
theory and practice today.
In his third critique,
his
political questions revolve more around the role of judgment

and what he calls "moral taste" rather than with cognition
proper.
Kant is recognizing that it is not enough to merely ask
ourselves alone what is right.
Arendt is developing the
idea that self-legislation through appeal to one's

consciousness is out of place and that even no matter how
good the intention of one's inner conscience, politics
requires more engaged reflection and ultimately a
participatory public sphere--if not always in fact, at least
92
virtually.
An Enlarged Mentality perspective can help at
this point,
although it cannot be a substitute for an actual
participatory democracy.
Arendt stresses Kant's communicativeness and his
public sense that is now coming through more strongly than
it did in the Groundwork or the prior two Critical writings,
although at least one of his pre-Critical works,
Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime,
The
resonates
strongly with some parts of the last critique.24
One
Kantian scholar is convinced Kant must have had the earlier

work close by, maybe even open in front of him, when he
composed the last critique.25
As Kant speaks about Enlarged Mentality, he is less
duty-impaired and more sensitive to the integrity of
contextual particulars.
As he suggests that Enlarged
Mentality requires shifting one's ground to others,
rather
than universalizing one's subjective maxim for all, he is

far more engaging.
This is the gem in his theory,
and it
24This is a point Arendt often stressed in her lectures

in order to dispel the suspicion that Kant was slipping
intellectually when he composed the last critique.
See
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy,
Ronald Beiner, ed., (Chicago University Press: Chicago,
1982).
But more like a good wine, Kant is getting better
with age because the basic ingredients where there from the
beginning.
25See translator's introduction in Immanuel Kant,
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,
trans., John T. Goldthwait, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1960).
93
sparkles much more brightly and in many more directions than

his Categorical Imperative ever could have hoped to.
By
viewing Enlarged Mentality as a sublation of the categorical

imperative,
the regulative ideal of human dignity does not
evaporate into thin air, but now we are enjoined to expand

our own vantage points26 to see each other,
we identify with,
or the groups
in our most radically phenomenal light,
which is to say in our relationships with each other.
We
may not get it right, as Arendt will say, but the

willingness to appreciate the integrity of another's life
position and all that it contains within it, rather that
only externally respect others through appeal to the moral
law, is much more compelling.
According to both Kant and Arendt, we need our
imaginations to make final use of cognition,
so that we
might represent to ourselves how others experience the

world.
For Arendt,
"to think with an Enlarged Mentality
means that one trains one's imagination to go visiting."27

An Enlarged Mentality perspective is for her "closely
connected with particulars, with the particular conditions
26For a very concise discussion on abstraction by level

of generality, vantage point, and extension see Bertell
Oilman's Dialectical Investigations, (Routledge: New York,
1993), Part Two.
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43.
94
of the standpoints one has to go through in order to arrive

at one's own 'general standpoint.'"28
She also says:
Political Thought is representative.

I form
an opinion by considering a given issue from
different viewpoints, by making present to my
mind the standpoints of those who are absent;
that is, I represent them.
This process of
representation does not blindly adopt the
actual views of those who stand somewhere
else, and hence look upon the world from a
different perspective; this is a question
neither of empathy, as though I tried to be
or feel like somebody else, nor of counting
noses and joining a majority but of being and
thinking in my own identity where actually I
am not.
The more people's standpoints I have
present in my mind while I am pondering a
given issue, and the better I can imagine how
I would feel and think in their place, the
stronger will be my capacity for
representative thinking and the more valid my
final conclusions, my opinion.29
Representative thinking,
for Arendt, makes us more
competent in our political judgements.
If we try to think
from the standpoint of more rather than fewer perspectives,

our judgement is less likely to suffer from intractable
partiality, or be over-burdened by self-interest.
Arendt is
here developing Kant's concept that we try to "avoid the

illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions
which could readily be taken for objective," and

Philosophy, p. 44.
Exercises in Political Thought, p. 241.
95
recommending that we "weigh the judgements of others" by

"putting ourselves in the position of every one else."
Again extrapolating how Kant's sense of politics is
shifting from the loneliness of the philosophy of
consciousness itself, which enjoins each to self-legislate,
to a more public and shared understanding, Arendt puts it
this way:
The power of judgement rests on a potential
agreement with others, and the thinking
process which is active in judging something
is not, like the thought process of pure
reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself,
but finds itself always and primarily, even
if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in
an anticipated communication with others with
whom I know I must finally come to some
agreement.30
If we interpret Kant in this more liberating way, he is
not suggesting that we lose sight of ourselves, but that we
try to appreciate the positions of others more.
We do not
detach from each other, but rather through releasing

ourselves from the limits of self-interest, we are enabled
to think about all others more.
In order to flesh out what she has in mind, Arendt puts
the point this way, through giving an example:
Suppose I look at a specific slum dwelling
and I perceive in this particular building
the general notion which it does not exhibit
directly, the motion of poverty and misery. I

Exercises in Political Thought, (Penguin Books, New York,
1968), p. 241.
96
arrive at this notion by representing to

myself how I would feel if I had to live
there, that is, I try to think in the place
of the slum-dweller. The judgement I shall
come up with will by no means necessarily be
the same as that of the inhabitants, whom
time and hopelessness may have dulled to the
outrage of their condition, but it will
become for my further judging of these
matters an outstanding example to which I
ref e r ...31
With this example, Arendt puts Kant's Enlarged
Mentality to use.
She shows how to shift ground to another,
and that while what she experiences as a result of doing

this may not correspond precisely with those she tries to
put herself in the place of, her judgment is "no longer
subjective either."
More specifically,
she says,
Furthermore, while I take into account others

when judging, this does not mean that I
conform in my judgement to those of others, I
still speak with my own voice and I do not
count noses in order to arrive at what I
think is right.
But my judgement is no
longer subjective either.32
Arendt's point about not counting noses is important
for developing the politics of Enlarged Mentality.
It is
not the point to swap or tally views, but rather to think

from the standpoint of all concerned, as best one can.
we only swap views, we might just end up exchanging
prejudices.
Unless it is clear that it is our political

Exercises in Political Thought, p. 107-8.
97
If
point to cultivate the most compelling generalized view we

can, we will not.
The politics of reflective engagement
does not mean that we just recognize everyone as having a

position or being a number and then add everything up,
although we do want to confirm the integrity of each in the
process of deriving a more valid generalized standpoint.
As
Arendt says it is through our willingness to engage, both

reflectively and in action,
that matters.
For then we seek
more genuine solutions to our problems, which we are

prepared to acknowledge as shared and more relational.
For the politics of Enlarged Mentality,
needs to be this additional step.
there is and
When we look at what
makes for a good relationship between two people,
it is
frequently this willingness on both sides to get to know,

through representing to oneself what the other is getting at
so that a more authentic attempt to reconcile differences
can be made.
It is not a question of one having victory
over the other or one humiliating the other into

acquiescence.
not ends.
At this point, the relationship weakens,
if
According to the politics of Enlarged Mentality,
it is a]ways the point to get beyond self-interested

assumptions, to move beyond a politics that promotes and
exploits self-interest in order to attain something greater,
more to the benefit of all involved in any given set of
circumstances.
98
When we do not claim to know a priori what is in our

best interests, but it instead becomes our willingness to
engage and contest that really matters, we might then more
truly come to know.
Contesting and engaging,
though,
is
regulated by our own recognition that promoting human

dignity is our own normative self-clarification for social
criticism.
In the last chapter,
I mentioned that some of Kant's
edifice might be worth keeping.
Without letting this pillar
stand, our engagement and contestation will quickly

deteriorate.
But if we only speak of human dignity,
and
then do not follow through with attempts to try and put

ourselves in the place of others, except formally, we will
have empty ideals and a very limited understanding of
justice, probably one that does not go beyond juridiacalism.
We will revert back to a celebration of the negative
virtues, but fail to enlarge the moral domain of justice
itself.
If Enlarged Mentality is best seen as a sublation
of the Categorical Imperative, then it points to more

consciously developing and cultivating a way of life that
values committed reflection and participatory politics,
regulated by human dignity.
With human dignity as what we all could will, a
politics of engagement and contestation can thrive.
Arendt's understanding of politics is lively and contesting,
99
not but not without principles.
From Kant's sense of
Enlarged Mentality, she sees a liberating model for

politics.
When we enlarge our mentalities, we resist pr e
judging prior to participating, but we enter our engagements

fully presupposing and aware of our regulative ideas
nonetheless.
Detaching from private interests is not about
giving up what most intimately defines us and what matters

to us, although there can be no question that it does mean
liberating oneself from excessive self-interest.
We will
not be able to "put ourselves in the position of others",

try to see what others might as important and valued,
are too bogged down by excessive self-interest.
if we
We will not
see other perspectives if we cannot move beyond our own.
We
are not then equipped to engage in the spirit required by

democracy.
If there is to be any hope for developing a more
personalized moral domain of justice that yields a more
authentic generalized view--one that is context-sensitive,
but not without principle--it will have greater affinity
with Kant's Enlarged Mentality perspective and less to do
with the Categorical Imperative.
The politics of Enlarged
Mentality, as I envision it, does not ask us to forfeit

ourselves, but rather to expand our own perspectives,
whenever possible for us, so that we do not mistake our own
interests for what could be in everyone's.
100
The politics of
Enlarged Mentality involves more flexibility, openness, and

empathetic understanding on how to define the moral domain
of justice with all in mind.
To do this, requires political
and moral vision not juridical blindness.

Now that it is clear what Kant himself says about
Enlarged Mentality,
and how Arendt seeks to develop its
political implications,
I turn to Kant's distinction between
Determinant and Reflective Judgements in more detail.

Arendt says,
"Judging is one,
if not the most,
When
important
activity in which this sharing-of the-world-with-others

comes to pass,"33 she is moving in sync with Kant's
understanding of "reflective judging."
Where previously in the Groundwork,
Kant relied upon
cognition proper to get his moral bearings which culminated

with the Categorical Imperative, now he is arguing that the
point of cognition "is to make final use of it."
argued,
As I have
for this he becomes far more context-sensitive and
less duty-impaired.
He does not now speak as one so taken
in by his transcendental deductions, but more as somebody

who is aware of how the world of particulars is by
definition lacking in determinate rules to guide actual
actions and situations.
And while he now claims there can
be no proofs for the world of particularity,
which evades

101
logical deductions, he still claims that "the universal has

to be found for the particular."
What is he getting at?
hope to show what is still important in this Kantian

distinction and what it has to do with developing the
Politics of Enlarged Mentality.
Determinant and Reflective Judgements

In the Third Critique, Kant draws a distinction between
two types of judgements.
It is useful to retrieve this
distinction in order to further develop what I am calling

the politics of Enlarged Mentality.
distinction,
In making his
Kant directs his attention to the following
problem: the world of particulars is not determined a priori

by transcendental deductions, and thus evades rules of
cognitive proofs, yet we still need to get our moral
bearings in this world that we share and will experience
differently.
With inderderminacies all around us, and the
realization that there are lots of good ways of living--and

that it would be dogmatic to pronounce once and for all what
is the good--how do we judge anything well?
Sticking closer
to Kant's language, how do we find the universal for the

particular, when "only the particular is given?"
Kant says Determinant judgements subsume the particular
under the universal, but for reflective judgements there can
be no such subsumption.
Kant writes:
Judgement in general is the faculty of

thinking the particular as contained under
102
the universal.
If the universal (the rule,
principle, or law) is given, then the
judgement which subsumes the particular under
it is determinant.34
He a d d s :
The determinant judgement determines under
universal transcendental laws furnished by
understanding and is subsumptive only: the
law is marked out for it a priori, and it has
no need to devise a law for its own guidance
to enable it to subordinate the particular in
nature to the universal.35
But this is not the whole of judging for Kant.
And,
in
fact, reflective judging is his more interesting and richer

concept of the two because,
like Enlarged Mentality in
relation to the Categorical Imperative,
it goes beyond
Determinant Judging while nonetheless still absorbing its

indispensable commitment to human dignity.
Kant says,
"If,
. . . only the particular is given and the universal to be

found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective.36
Kant seems to be understating the importance of
reflective judgements in regard to determinant judgements.
This is because he still gives conceptual primacy to the
negative virtues and the moral law, or what he is now
developing into Determinant Judgements.
If, however, we see

Meredith, trans., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 18.
35Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement James Creed
36Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement James Creed
103
the politics of Enlarged Mentality as a sublation of the

Categorical Imperative as I suggest is a useful way to r e
interpret Kant's political philosophy,
determinism of the negative virtues.
then we accept the

If we approach Kant
more through his conception of Enlarged Mentality,
then his
accompanying idea of reflective judging becomes much more

relevant to pursue for both moral and political actions.
Its role for orienting our interactions in all of our
specificities and particularities is that much more
important to develop.
As Kant makes his distinction between determinant and
reflective judging, he stresses the integrity of particular
circumstances and events in a way that he did not
previously.
He maintains that such events are not
subsumable under any universal deductions "just like that,"

but are in need of our judging anyway.
judgments,
then what more particularly?
positively and substantively?
For Kant,
If not determinant
What more
it is now a
question of reflective judging, which calls upon a different

set of mental faculties than cognition proper.
For Kant,
reflective judging requires imagination and what he calls

"moral taste."
While Kant believes the moral law compels in
general, he is nevertheless now backing off from expecting

the Categorical Imperative to give any more substantive
meaning.
104
We might summarize this way:
For Kant, determinant
judgments regulate our interactions in general.

judgements apply to everybody.
Determinant
By definition, we cannot
support human dignity for some and not others, without

violating what it is we have clarified as our own normative
ideas.
This does not mean there will not be violations of
human dignity.
But when they occur, we necessarily speak of
moral failing.
We resort back to our own normative
presuppositions of human dignity as the basis for social

criticism.
And while we need not get so metaphysical
(a point I
share with Rawls) and follow Kant by supposing an

intelligible world in order to then derive equal membership
for all a priori, we can figure out that human dignity is
our own regulative idea.
It is enough to get clear about
our normative grounds for social criticism that are not

reducible to a mere preference.37
Human dignity seems to
be our normative presuppositions for our own social and

political critiques that are not akin to m y liking for fresh
maple syrup or yours for a deep-bodied red wine.
tastes are what Kant calls "agreeable"38
These
(or disagreeable)
37See Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social

Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas, (Albany: State
University of New York, 1992) who argues these points in
compelling fashion.
38Immanuel Kant,

105
tastes, and they either do or do not please us immediately.

While the same food is too spicy for me, it is just right
for you, but this kind of taste is not equivalent to claims
that my neighbor does not mind social prejudice and I do or
that we think it permissible to allow hate speech, but they
do not.
As Kant says,
it would be folly to attempt to
convince one another that we ought to agree in matters where

we freely let the immediacy of our palates decide for us.
But "moral taste" is different.
In regard to moral taste,
Kant believes "we are suitors for agreement from everyone

el s e .1,39
But if this is true, we need to know what others strive
for, hope for, need, and try ourselves to see from more than
our own perspective.
This would allow our "public sense" of
justice to take full account of who each of us is more

historically, without losing sight of the bigger societal
picture that necessitates thinking from everyone's
perspective.
At the same time, it would be with the
knowledge that we do so contingently and with historical

consciousness,
and not with a more purified kind.
As Arendt
reminds us, the politics of Enlarged Mentality is not a

question of nose counting.
Or as Rousseau, who Kant at last
vindicates, would put it, we are not concerned with merely

tallying all the particular wills, but in pursuit of what we
39Immanuel Kant,

106
could, with more confidence, call the General Will.
But
such a will only has a chance if we strive to be what

Benhabib calls more "interactive" in our approach to
defining the moral domain of justice,
rather than
"substitutionalist."40
Interactive v. SubBtitutionalist UniversaliBm

In this section I will build upon Benhabib's
distinction between a universalism that is
"substitutionalist" and one that is "interactive"41 in
order to further pursue what the politics of Enlarged
Mentality entails.
Benhabib is critical of a universalism
that remains abstract and formal or merely seeks only to

"substitute" a deeply entrenched understanding of what one
group has experienced as an exemplary model for all others.
She writes:
Universalistic moral theories in the Western
tradition from Hobbes to Rawls are
substitutionalist, in the sense that the
universalism they defend is defined
surreptitiously by identifying the
experiences of a specific group of subjects
as the paradigmatic case of the human as
such.
These subjects are invariably white,
40For a further explanation of this distinction, see

"The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The KohlbergGilligan Controversy and Moral Theory," in Situating the
Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics, (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 148-177.
41Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete
Other" especially pp. 252-153 and 164-170.
107
male, adults who are propertied or at least

professional .42
She claims that one social group, particularly if this group
is privileged, cannot simply substitute its selfidentifications for those of another.
To do so, deflects
attention away from the whole spirit of what it really means

to cultivate a truer generalized view.
Extending a juridicalized conception of the person to
all others in society whose own situations are not brought
more fully out into the open will only bring the very same
formalistic rights and privileges to those whose needs and
desires cannot be grasped or satisfied through winning legal
standing in society.
Enlarging the moral domain of justice
involves personalizing justice through cultivating civic

virtue and more solidarity in regard to one another.
To
fail to do so, will continuously promote a proliferation of

juridical personalities without cultivating a sense of
responsibility for or to each other beyond juridical
equality.
This itself stifles and impoverishes culture and
public virtue as well as reveals a deeply rooted prejudice

contained in this conception of the self who seeks more
autonomy, but is not other-aware,
except juridically.
An
"interactive" approach proceeds more from the ground up, and

does not deny our embodied and embedded

Other," especially p. 153.
108
identity, but aims at developing moral

attitudes and encouraging political
transformations that can yield a point of
view acceptable to all.
Universality is not
the ideal consensus of fictiously defined
selves, but the concrete process in politics
and morals of the struggle of concrete,
embodied selves. . .43
In this passage, Benhabib makes a case for an "interactive"
sense of universalism which proceeds more from recognizing
social struggles and, through a more solidaristic
understanding of the moral domain of justice.
Substitutionalist universalism, of which deontological
Liberalism is a good example, does not take seriously the
"concrete" dimension of our very existence as profoundly
important to engage, both reflectively and in our political
and civic actions.
"Substitutionalist" universalism seeks
to extend a single body of rights that has been historically

enjoyed by a minority of privileged people to a broader
segment of the population, without seeing that a gain in
juridical standing gives the newly enfranchised a public
personality, but little else.
Politics by substitution
fails to make any further attempt to engage with social

differences, which if pursued, might really lead to what
could be more authentically generalizable.
Its supporters
fail to recognize social differences among various groups as

important from the point of view of an enlarged conception

Other," especially p. 153.
109
of justice which cannot be one size fits all, but requires

cultivation through greater empathetic understanding of
others.
Concrete recognition of social differences is the
starting point for an "interactive" universalism, which

bases its moral claims on a commonality among members of
society, while acknowledging unique situations of each
social group.
Benhabib's approach to the justice-good life quandary
is illuminating, and it is along these lines, that I argue
with her that it is both necessary and desirable to not
abandon universalizability, yet important to avoid naive
formalism in the process.
For this she advocates a
"historically self-conscious universalism" to avoid the

illusions of "substituting" notions of the self that remain
disengaged from political life.
There are very practical
implications to her approach for re-defining "universalism"

to be interactive and not substitutionalist.
She writes:
The gap between the demands of justice, as it

articulates the morally right, and the
demands of virtue, as it defines the quality
of our relations to others in the everyday
lifeworld, can be bridged by cultivating
qualities of civic friendship and solidarity.
These moral attitudes of civic friendship and
solidarity involve the extension of the
sympathy and affection we naturally feel
toward those closest to us unto larger human
groups and thus personalize justice.44
44Seyla Benhabib, "Judgement and the Moral Foundations

of Politics in Hannah Arendt's Thought," in Situating The
Self, p. 140.
110
Benhabib adds,
Whereas it is customary particularly from a
Kantian perspective to see a rupture here
between the public virtue of impersonal
justice and the private virtue of goodness,
it is possible to envisage not their identity
but their mediation.45
From this point of view,
it would be highly
insufficient to simply extend public standing to a single

mother struggling in today's society; a wider understanding
of social justice would require a greater degree of
empathetic understanding.
Building further upon Kant's
Enlarged Mentality perspective compels us to be more othersensitive,
and all-around more committed politically.
Or
think of the many young people living in our inner cities,

who would benefit more from better schools and creative
surroundings from which they might emerge with more hope for
their futures.
It is precisely these kinds of committed
reflections that inform actions that are needed for

developing a greater sense of engaging political life and
civic virtue,
regulated by human dignity.
To develop Kant's alternative political philosophy is

to move in these directions.
It takes one away from
external relations and moves concrete needs and desires for

happiness and shared concern for others to the center of our
45Seyla Benhabib, "Judgement and the Moral Foundations

of Politics in Hannah Arendt's Thought," in Situating The
Self, p. 140.
Ill
politics.
This is both to move with Kant and then take
steps beyond him.
Drawing from his Categorical Imperative
tends to bring a "substitutionalist" approach which leaves

the moral domain of justice extremely narrowly defined.
In the next chapter, we will see how perfect a
candidate Rawls's theory is for "substitutionalist
universalism."
net broadly,
Rawls is indeed inclusive, and casts his
inviting everybody to accompany him on his
abstract thought experiment.
But we will see how he
"substitutes" one model of the self for all others.
His
emerging sense of universalization is limited by the scope

of Kantian deontology, which cannot much move beyond
juridical acculturation.
He will ignore, through use of a
metaphorical veil, all of our most deeply felt and

experienced political, social and cultural crises as not
important to address directly, but deflect away or ignore.
We will also see how much more engaging Habermas is,
but also how he too,
beginning,
in the end, or maybe even from the
invokes deontological categories where questions
about the good life are a priori parcelled off from

questions of justice.
Both will fail to endorse what
Benhabib shows is both necessary and desirable if we strive

for a more authentic, because "interactive", universalism
which goes beyond the narrow spheres of deontological
substitution, promoting solidarity instead.
112
Both Rawls and Habermas draw from Kant, and yet, one
can find within Kant's Enlarged Mentality perspective the
incipient beginnings for getting beyond the narrow spheres
of deontologically defined moral domain of justice.
Arendt
spots this and then Benhabib takes it even further by

promoting an "interactive" conception of universality which
repudiates the politics contained in substituting
categories as itself contrary to the spirit of cultivating a
more valid generalized view.
The point in Benhabib's conception of "interactive"
Universalism is to seek out ways so as to not silence a
dialogue of needs, but to be attentive to them.
The
critical point is to unmask ways in which some members of

our societies continue to be ignored and how mere
"substitutionalist" attempts at universalizing do very
little to recognize what Kant,
I believe,
thought could be
developed through an Enlarged Mentality perspective where we

shift our ground to others, more.
Without shifting our
ground in this way, voices go unheard and needs ignored.

Universalizing by substitution disguises a politics of selfinterest and masks inequalities rather than helps us to
think beyond them.
Universalizing by substitution takes the
life out of what it means to cultivate a more authentic

generalized view through committed and reflective engagement
via a politics of Enlarged Mentality.
113
Kant as a Radical Pluralist with Principles

Kant recognizes the infinite and radical pluralism that
makes the world of particulars what it is--vast, varied,
in motion.
and
But as he speaks of Enlarged Mentality and
reflective judging, he now backs off from talk of cognitive

proofs and rule-like transcendental deductions.
He
maintains they cannot much help because

there are such manifold forms of nature, so
many modifications, as it were...left
undetermined by the laws furnished by pure
understanding a priori.*6
Yet, his radical pluralism does not leave him unprincipled.
As he develops his understanding of Judgement,
his
recognition of vast plurality keeps him away from deductive

logic; but if he now moves more inductively,
he does so
asking what could be more valid for everybody in any given

situation.
He says that when only the particular is given,
we still look for the universal.
But for this there are no
determinant judgements which means we have to cultivate our

own way of life in light of each others' needs.
This
requires that we try to better understand all perspectives

more, but without losing sight of what can be compelling for
all through doing so.
The politics of Enlarged Mentality is
still about trying to think in these expanded ways which he

continues to regard as the crux of moral sense and political
46Immanuel Kant,

114
commitment, but now Kant acknowledges the inevitable

situatedness in which we try to do this.
He therefore
speaks less of transcendental and logical proofs and is no

longer duty-impaired.
He becomes much more attentive to
context, but he does not lose his sense of radical

egalitarianism for his induction.
He says,
The reflective judgement which is compelled

to ascend from the particular in nature to
the universal, stands, therefore, in need of
a principle.47
But, he continues, such a
transcendental principle . .
judgement can only give as a
itself.
It cannot derive it
quarter (as it would then be
judgement) .48
. the reflective
law from and to
from any other
a determinant
If we reinterpret Enlarged Mentality as a sublation of

the Categorical Imperative, we retain, as Kant is beginning
to suggest,
the commitment to humanity as our own regulative
ideal, while also being sensitive to context.
Now we can
see more what Kant might have been trying to be all along--a
radical pluralist with principles, a radical egalitarian
with a sense of goodness, but whose sense of justice makes
him refrain from sketching "the good" out in any detail,
because he really believes it is for us to define it for
ourselves, but always more relationally in light of one
47Immanuel Kant,
48Immanuel Kant,
The Critique of Judgement, p. 18-19.

115
another's life conditions.
And although he will not
prescribe what the good should be, his suggestion that we

enlarge our mentalities by appreciating all perspectives
more cannot help but to already endorse an approach to
politics in which justice and the good life nevertheless
correspond more than they do repel each o t h e r .
The more we
pursue the politics contained in an Enlarged Mentality

approach to the world and to one another,
the more his
deontological claims unravel.

Kant says,
"we cannot get this logical objective
necessity where the principles are merely empirical."49

For Kant, the art of reflective judgements requires more
than cognition which he believes is sufficient for
Determinant Judgements.
We now need our imaginations, moral
taste, more sensitivity to everything around us, and yet for

Kant there are no determined judgements, but only a
willingness to try to see what others might, more.
Reflective Judging is for Kant the tougher of the
judgements because it was rather clear to him that
determinant judgements are of a primarily cognitive type and
that their observance can be easily universalized.
But, how
do we make use of our judgement beyond recognizing the

determinant judgement that brings obligations of only a
49Immanuel Kant,

116
formal kind?
No doubt, there are many ways.
We surely owe
much to experience and to others with more knowledge on any

occasions where we are wanting, but there is no replacement
for an Enlarged Mentality perspective.
He recommends an
Enlarged Mentality perspective in getting one's bearings

about any given situation where there can be no formulas and
no rule-like imperatives apply, but only the desire to think
from the standpoint of all involved and to engage
reflectively and take action from this basis.
There can be no categorical imperatives on how to live
the good life, but only not to ruin it, yet the world of
particulars forces us to make judgements without pr e
determined rules all the time.
Through endorsing an
Enlarged Mentality perspective, we do not put the regulative

idea of universal moral respect into question because we
recognize this as our own self-clarification for normative
critique.
It is now a question of superseding this
realization so that we acknowledge ourselves as participants

and engaged moral and political agents who can only ever
better judge our situations and what they call for through
greater context-sensitivity to one another.
At last Kant's more compelling response to his
question: What should I do? is answered.
The answer is we
try to enlarge our mentalities by shifting our ground to

others more, liberating ourselves from excessive self
117
interest so we move beyond negative freedom and get a taste

of positive freedom.
Kant does not sketch out utopias, and we can be
grateful to him for not doing so, but he gives good
practical advise that is beginning to sound an awful lot
like Aristotelian phronesis,
except within the framework of
radical egalitarianism where human dignity regulates in

general and ontological arguments that some human beings are
superior to others is withering away.
The Kant-Aristotle Debate: A Brief Encounter
It is a central question for moral and political
philosophy to ask how we get our bearings on how to judge
anything in the particularity of our lives.
Aristotle50
called this ability phronesis or practical wisdom and for

him it consists in knowing how to handle particular
situations, knowing if one situation requires more outrage
and less timidity,
sympathy.
or another less courage and more
Is thriftiness in one situation admirable, but in
another selfish,
stingy and out of place?
And how do we
50Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics," in The Basic Works

of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, ed., (New York: Random House),
1941, pp. 959.
Aristotle says, "both fear and confidence
and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and
pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both
cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with
reference to the right objects, towards the right people,
with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both
intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of
virtue."
118
tell the differences?
These were questions that were
important to Aristotle and they have meaning for Kant as

well.
This attentiveness to situational detail was emphasized
by Kant early on in the Groundwork.
But recall how he
overlooked his own eye for detail, his own judgment to make
these distinctions so that he might say something more
categorical.
But now with reflective judgements and the
politics of Enlarged Mentality,
he returns to the
inevitability that in our lives we live in particular

places, with certain circumstances and historical
inheritances of all kinds shaping our own unique situations
as we mutually constitute and affect one another.
Kant is frequently seen as having no corresponding
conception of Aristotelian practical wisdom, but this is
really only true if we focus exclusively upon his conception
of the categorical imperative which of course is the
tendency,
since it was Kant's as well.
But if we follow
Arendt's lead that hidden in the third critique is Kant's

true political philosophy,
then it is tougher to attack Kant
on grounds that he is insensitive to situational context

when his understanding of reflective judging is
extraordinarily contingent and context-sensitive.
If we develop the politics of Enlarged Mentality by
following Arendt's lead and move further with Benhabib's
119
insights,
then we draw the following conclusions.
Beyond
recognizing the "Generalized Other" as one who, like

ourselves,
is "worthy of respect and dignity" the Politics
of Enlarged Mentality enjoins us to see that "every

generalized other is also a concrete other."
In respecting
the Generalized other,

the norms of our actions are primarily public
and institutional ones . . . the moral
categories that accompany such interactions
are those of right, obligation, and
entitlement, and the corresponding moral
feelings are those of respect, duty,
worthiness and dignity.51
But for the politics of Enlarged Mentality there is and
needs to be the additional step of confirming each
Generalized Other as a being
with a concrete history, identity, and
affective-emotional constitution.
In
assuming this standpoint, we abstract from
what constitutes our commonality, and focus
on individuality.
We seek to comprehend the
needs of the other, his or her motivations,
what s/he searches for, and what s/he
desires.
Our relationship to the other is
governed by the norms of equity and
complementary reciprocity: each is entitled
to expect and to assume from the other forms
of behavior through which the other feels
recognized and confirmed as a concrete,
individual being with specific needs, talents
and capacities . . . The moral categories
that accompany such interactions are those of
responsibility, bonding and sharing.
The
51Seyla Benhabib,
Other,"_p. 159.
"The Generalized and the Concrete
120
corresponding moral feelings are those of

love, care and sympathy and solidarity.'52
The politics of Enlarged Mentality makes this
transformative move beyond deontology, validating the
Generalized Other as a Concrete Other,
political and human concern.
personal as political",
seeing this as a
Without validating "the
the moral domain of justice will
remain formal and juridical,
failing to move substantive
questions about happiness into our public engagements.

With this mindset, we can cultivate a more compelling
and personalized moral domain of justice that strives to
engage with our social and cultural problems through
cultivating greater understanding for what others seek to be
and strive for, what others in their concreteness are up
against, and how we ourselves might find greater fulfillment
beyond what kind of a life Liberal deontology generates for
us.
Sensitivity to one moral orientation reinforces the
other, and while proximity will influence to what degree we
can promote the interests and desires of the "concrete"
others, and while our sense of responsibility will be more
intense for those closest to us who are family and friends,
our sense of enlarged mentality compels us to expand the
very moral domain of justice and to develop a public sense
52Seyla Benhabib,
Other,"_p. 159.
"The Generalized and the Concrete
121
that blurs the deontological assumptions Kant began with

when he constructed the Categorical Imperative.
From these conceptions of reflective judging and
Enlarged Mentality, Kant is revealing a sensitivity to
particulars as acute as Aristotle's, with the added
advantage that such practical wisdom in not divorced from
radical egalitarianism which we know Aristotle did not,
perhaps could not, endorse.
Thus, by emphasizing Kant's
Enlarged Mentality approach,
the claim that all human beings
have intrinsic worth is brought together with the Ancient

virtues frequently attributed to Aristotle's more contextual
approach to ethics that emphasizes moral character as
exemplary and which takes its moral bearings from the world
of experience and particularity.
While neo-Aristotelians argue convincingly about the
deficiencies in Kant's categorical imperative for not
knowing its ends or purposes,53 these attacks on Kant lose
their merits when we switch to Kant's alternative political
philosophy,
and creatively engage with it.
Kant's
conception of Enlarged Mentality has all the advantages
53I find MacIntyre's critique of Kantian morality

persuasive as long as I confine my understanding of Kant to
the Categorical Imperative.
Others, though, for example
Onora O'Neill (Constructions of Reason: Explorations of
Kant's Practical Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989], argue that MacIntyre's account is "selective
and simplified."
See Alasdair Maclntrye "Postscript to the
Second Edition," in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory,
(University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1984), p. 271.
122
wrapped into one.
It is both moral and political,
deep, universal and particular,
just and good.
neither wholly deductive nor only inductive,

dogma, but remains principled.
broad and
It is
and it avoids
Perhaps this is why Arendt,
a great admirer of both Aristotle and Kant, sought to

further develop the full implications for political thinking
behind Kant's conception of Enlarged Mentality and why she
was able to make linkages that frequently go unnoticed by
others who turn their attention to exhibiting the great
differences between Aristotelian phronesis and Kantian
procedural morality which comes easy.
Perhaps this too is
why Arendt saw something worth developing in Kant's

alternative concept of Enlarged Mentality.
For she, as an integrated thinker, values both and
realizes it is not so much a question of making a choice
between either justice or the good life, but one of
realizing how deeply implicated they really are.
them apart has grave consequences.
Ripping
The moral domain of
justice will be narrowed and it will ignore our desires for

happiness and general well-being.
In the case of
deontological Liberalism this means we are legally protected

to define happiness individualistically without taking
responsibility for a greater and committed politics.
If we
have only justice, we are juridically blind; if we have only

the good in mind, but not justice too, we might get overly
123
particularized and dispense with the radical egalitarianism

inherent in democracy.
If the Categorical Imperative gives negative
instruction,
it is the politics of Enlarged Mentality that
might help us navigate our way through the vast and varied
world where we are constantly confronted with conflicts, but
have no categorical rules at our disposal, but only the
willingness to engage with all we might otherwise be tempted
to deflect away as unpolitical or outside of the moral
domain of justice.
Were we to only take our moral bearings
from the Categorical Imperative, we would make separations

between justice and the good life before we even give
ourselves the opportunities to define these and negotiate
our understandings more in light of each others' needs,
hopes, and desires.
In the prior chapter, we saw how Kant's Categorical
Imperative separates justice and the good life, but with his
Enlarged Mentality perspective more developed, he shows a
way to bring them back together.
With the politics of
Enlarged Mentality more fully defined,
they are moving
together more than they are parting ways.
Universal moral
respect determines but now we make final use of this

normative insight as we seek to engage with each other more
as we are, appreciating each others'
struggles and searching
for understanding--a politics beyond the loneliness of self-
124
legislation or the logic of individualism and promote

instead a politics of engaged reflection and social
commitment.
Kant himself seems to have put the logic of his own
great legacy into question.
We might follow him on this and
develop his alternative even further.
To keep justice and
the good life together, we need "imagination" and engaged

politics,
around us.
"moral taste" and greater care for everything

Or, as Kant prefers,
the purpose of Enlarged
Mentality is to "make final use of cognition" through

"shifting our ground to others."
Kant leaves us with two answers to his initial
question: what should I do?
positive.
One categorical,
One is negative and one is

the other more engaging.
With
the categorical imperative, as I have interpreted it, it is

more proper to say he answers what we should refrain from
doing;
with Enlarged mentality, as I have attempted to
interpret it, he gives a more substantive answer, although

we could not expect him to sketch out anything in more
detail if he really is as contextual as one who supports an
Enlarged Perspective would need to be.
He envisions that
something greater is achieved by trying to put ourselves in

another's position rather than to universalize maxims as we
try to find the "universal when only the particular is
125
given."
For this we always need to better develop our
relations.
The categorical imperative helps me to know what I
should refrain from doing, but it gives no guidance on how
to live life more fully, more enjoyably, more
solidaristically with others.
For this I need imagination
and caring, and a willingness to release myself from

excessive self-interest so that I really can try to shift my
ground to others more.
For this,
I need a public sense,
an
Enlarged Mentality that responds to an inclination to takes

me "beyond the narrow spheres" of deontologically defined
justice which puts shared happiness at the center of its
domain,
margins.
rather than relegating these life concerns to the

Kant's concept of Enlarged Mentality lays a
different groundwork than the one he originally and

initially sought to develop,
Enlarged Mentality,
and it is this, his sense of
that we can claim is his alternative
political philosophy as we seek to develop it even further.
126
PART II
127
Chapter IV
Rawls: Going Behind the Veil of Ignorance through a
Procedural Re-interpretation of the Categorical Imperative
In Part I, I thematized two interpretations of Kantian
moral philosophy, by demonstrating the vast differences
between the logic of the categorical imperative versus that
of enlarged mentality.
This stylized contrast enabled me to
speak of two different Kants.
I showed that while various
reincarnations of the categorical imperative have long

occupied a privileged position in both contemporary theories
of justice and moral psychology,
relatively little has been
done to retrieve Kant's concept of enlarged mentality.
Yet,
asking what light, if any, a revival of this lost legacy

might shed on the difficult relationship between morality
and the socio-political world has proved fruitful.
asked this question in the previous chapter,
Having
I concluded
that this less familiar Kantian concept of enlarged

mentality is the more compelling for democratic theory,
in
that it does not simply replace the categorical imperative

as much as it does supersede i t .
I suggested that it might be helpful if we think of the
practice of enlarging mentality as a kind of sublation of
the categorical imperative.
This means that we cannot help

128
but to confirm the universal commitment to humanity as an

indispensable regulative ideal, but we must reject the
belief that this commitment can avoid engagement with our
concrete struggles for recognition.
I claimed that
developing the theoretical and practical implications of

Kant's concept of enlarged mentality promotes a type of
concern that would need to be as deep for each as it would
be broad for all.
I further maintained that this dual
commitment is internally related and that to view either of

these components in rigid abstraction from the other is a
temptation worth resisting.
join, rather than exploit,
I tried to show how efforts to

the tensions implicit in these
poles points to the desirability of cultivating ongoing,

communicative attempts to seek justice free from systemic
blindness, and the good life free from dogmatic
prescriptions.1
Finally,
I interpreted Kant's concept of
enlarged mentality as quite possibly his attempt, not only a

more palatable way in which to read him today,
to get beyond
the problems of abstract formalism which besets his

competing concept of the categorical imperative.
1For some recent and various viewpoints relating to

these'concerns, see Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed.,
Nancy Rosenblum, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989).
See also Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia:
A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986) and William A. Galston,
Justice and the Human Good, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980) as well as Charles E. Larmore Patterns of Moral
Complexity, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987).
129
Overview
In this chapter,
I will offer an immanent critique of
Rawls's theory of justice as it relates to my thesis.

Drawing upon insights garnered from feminism and critical
theory,
I will challenge Rawls's core assumption about the
nature of the self and his endorsement of the deontological

ethic.
While Rawls has various and numerous critics,2 I
2The following sample of Rawls's critics is incomplete.

This list represents some of the more influential voices on
the subject that have, in one way or another, influenced my
thinking.
Those who tend to resist Rawls on communitarian
grounds include Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A
Defense of Pluralism and Equality, (New York: Basic Books,
1983) and "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism" in
Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 1990).
In
addition to Walzer, who says that the communitarian critique
"would not recur if it were not capable of engaging our
minds and feelings," (ibid, p. 7) other major critics who
have voiced opposition to Rawls's re-fashioned Liberal
paradigm from a communitarian perspective include Michael J.
Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
For their
detailed objections, see Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits
of Justice, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences Philosophical
Papers 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), and in addition
MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, (Notre
Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
For a
different and more recent set of objections that draw from
feminist insights, see Seyla Benhabib's influential essay
entitled "The Generalized and the Concrete Other," in her
Situating the Self, (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Other
prominent voices, who also draw upon feminism in critiquing
various aspects of Rawls's theory, include Nancy Frazer and
Iris Young.
For their objections, see Frazer, Unruly
Practices: Power, Discourse in Late-Capitalist Social
Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989) and
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991). For a more sympathetic,
though still critical analysis of Rawls, see Susan Okin,
"Justice and Gender," in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol.
130
will take Rawls's own stated desire for a compelling

generalized viewpoint as my focus, and then seek to show how
his assumptions of autonomy and mutual disinterest as well
as his methodology sabotage the pursuit.
I will not critique
his turn to the abstract thought experiment as inherently

faulty, but will emphasize the distinction between
abstractions and idealizations of abstractions.3
I will
conclude that Rawls's idealization of the self is not

equipped to meet the challenge of cultivating a compelling
generalized view.
In brief,
I will not question Rawls's
emphasis on the need for a compelling generalized view, but

only how he thinks it best conceptualized and attained.
I shall also conjecture how Rawls's theory might have
been far more engaging had he attempted to reinterpret
Kant's concept of enlarged mentality.
allowed him to remain a
This move could have
Kantian, but a far more
sociologically sensitive one.
Had Rawls attempted to build
from this Kantian legacy, which has for so long lived in the
16, 1987) but more especially her "Reason and Feeling in

Thinking About Justice" in Feminism and Political Theory for
an alternative interpretation of the original position that
stresses how empathetic one must really be to step behind
the veil of ignorance.
For an interesting contestation of
Rawls, from the point of view of deconstruction, see Bonnie
Honig's Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics,
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Ch. 5.
3For further clarification on the virtues of making
this distinction, see Onora O'Neill, Constructions of
Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy,
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989). pp. 208-213.
131
shadow of its more celebrated counterpart, he just might

have been convinced to enlarge the moral domain of justice.
As I shall try to show, expanding the moral domain of
justice would first and foremost entail a break with the
deontological ethic that Rawls seeks to advance.
For this
serves to so rigidly subordinate our most existential

concerns about actual needs, hopes, and desires to those of
principles of right that the status of the principles
embracing such a hierarchy must itself remain
questionable.4
As an alternative way in which we might get beyond the
real tensions generated by broad concern for all and deep
concern for each,
I try to develop the possibilities opened
up by Kant's concept of enlarged mentality which retains the

commitment to universalizability, but without forgetting
that every generalized other is also a "concrete other"
(Benhabib).
This requires emphasizing the need to cultivate
4Sandel makes a similar point.

After conceding the
obvious by saying " [if] the good is nothing more than the
indiscriminate satisfaction of arbitrarily-given
preferences, regardless of worth, it is not difficult to
imagine that the right (and for that matter a good many
other sorts of claims) must outweigh it." (Liberalism and
the Limits of Justice, p. 168).
He then critiques the
deontological ethic saying "the morally diminished status of
the good must inevitably call into question the status of
justice as well.
For once it is conceded that our
conceptions of the good are morally arbitrary, it becomes
difficult to see why the highest of all (social) virtues
should be the one that enables us to pursue these arbitrary
conceptions 'as fully as circumstances permit.'" (ibid).
132
greater empathy and compassion for concrete others rather

than committing only to generalized others through
categorical imperatives.
This chapter is organized as follows: First,
I will
look closely at Rawls's attempt to recast the social

contract.
Here I confirm Rawls's question, but challenge
his procedure as the most fruitful way in which to address

it.
Second,
I examine the Kant-Rawls connection.
Here I
show how Rawls both does and does not follow the legendary
Kant, but more importantly show how he uncritically accepts
the deontological ethic and the politics that necessarily
accompanies it.
Third,
I discuss the politics of Rawls's
"the original position," (maintaining that it is at once too

empty and too full).
Last,
call "feminist objections."
I pursue what I shall simply

Throughout,
I keep Rawls's
rigid deontology in question as well the autonomous nature

of the self it presupposes.
An Attempt to Recast the Social Contract
Rawls has attempted to recast the social contract via
an abstract thought experiment that he names the original
position.
He does not claim that such a social contract
ever really did exist
(Locke), nor does he see the social
contract as a lamentable second best solution to the more

desirable and uncorrupted
state of nature which might have
continued had the emergence of civil society not irrevocably
133
tarnished human nature in the first place
(Rousseau).
Rawls
works within the social contract tradition because he

accepts its modern vocabulary of fairness and equality and
because he believes it accords with "our convictions about
the priority of justice as on the whole sound."5
But,
unlike his predecessors, whose differences he does not much

address, Rawls proceeds counterfactually.
social contract model,
He describes his
in which he substitutes the original
position for the state of nature as follows:

in justice as fairness the original position
of equality corresponds to the state of
nature in the traditional theory of the
social contract.
This original position is
not, of course, thought of as an actual
historical state of affairs, much less as a
primitive condition of culture.
It is
understood as a purely hypothetical situation
characterized so as to lead to a certain
conception of justice.6
What does Rawls mean by a certain conception of
justice?
And, how does the original position of equality,
for which Rawls makes a case, play a role in contributing to

this certain conception of justice, and not others?
Asked
in another way, does Rawls seek to convey that this certain

conception of justice, once he expounds it, is meant somehow
to achieve an ahistorical stance in that its certainty is in
some sense irrefutable and unchanging, or can we view this
5John Rawls, A Theory of Justice,

University Press: 1971), p. 28.
(Cambridge: Harvard
6John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, my emphasis, p. 12.

134
certain conception of justice, as we watch Rawls develop it,

as deeply informed by the liberal, democratic experience
that also exemplifies norms more closely associated with men
in these societies than with women?
Can Rawls accommodate
the challenges that his theory is gendered?
And even if he
cannot, do feminists want to affirm the validity of his

question,
arguing its importance for women's emancipation
and all marginalized groups, but not participate in Rawls's

conclusions?
debates,
These are questions circulating in current
and my attempt will be to highlight that there is
value for all oppressed groups in not dispensing with

Rawls's question, while at the same time show how his
procedure jeopardizes the whole endeavor.
Rawls argues that through his hypothetical thought
experiment, which he maintains needs careful construction
through abstraction, we may all gain greater clarity about
how to work through a compelling generalized view,
if we
ever find ourselves struggling with such questions.
He
confidently asserts that we would all accept both the

principles of justice that he thinks would emerge from his
idealized design as well as the legitimacy of the original
position7 as the proper -place from which to think through
7While Rawls has revised his theory in some ways, he

has not abandoned the original position as a privileged
perspective from which to ascertain principles of justice
and its accompanying suppression of concrete identity.
He
has sought to give these concepts greater weight and
135
justice,
if not at first then, at least, upon due
reflection.
Before considering his procedure of abstraction more
fully, and the idealization of the self that it adopts,
it
is helpful to make a brief detour to give some attention to

what Rawls particularly means by due reflection to which he
gives the fancy name "reflective equilibrium."
While Rawls
uses this term interchangeably with due reflection,

specific meaning in his thought.
it has a
And it is quite clear he
intends it to play a prominent role in his theory.
Rawls
refers to this concept throughout his work,8 but one of its

formulations that remains most acute is captured in the
following quotes.
Rawls says,
From the standpoint of moral philosophy, the

best account of a person's sense of justice
is not the one which fits his judgements
prior to his examining any conception of
clarity.
For example, see Political Liberalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), pp 22-40 in which one
finds Rawls re-clarifying his position of the original
position as much as referring the reader back to the
original conception as he portrayed it in A Theory of
Justice.
8I am not attempting to systematically compare all of
Rawls's works. Rather, I am focusing on those aspects and
assumptions in his theory that have remained constant in
regard to what he considers the appropriate moral domain of
justice.
In doing this, I will refer to his two major
books, A Theory of Justice, and Political Liberalism; and
his two major articles, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral
Theory" in The Journal of Philosophy (Vol. lxxvii, No. 9,
September 1980) and "Justice as Fairness: Political not
Metaphysical" in Philosophy and Public Affairs, (Vol. 14,
No. 3, Summer 1985).
136
justice, but rather the one that matches

judgements in reflective equilibrium.9
his
Further elaborating this concept, Rawls continues,

[m]oral philosophy is Socratic: we may want
to change our present considered judgements
once their regulative principles are brought
to light.10
This concept of reflective equilibrium at once seems
very useful and potentially rich.
It seems to contain much
of what the Kant who stresses the importance of enlarged

mentality encourages,
and undogmatic.
in that it is fluid, communicative,
But whether or not Rawls's theory can make
fullest use of this concept of reflective equilibrium is

worth looking at more closely.
For Rawls, we will see,
omits from our vision so much of what is desirable to

include in our deliberations about justice, that it is
immediately questionable to what degree Rawls's best
insights can be made most fruitful.
I will return to these
points in more detail when I explore feminist objections.

For in order to make such objections cogent,
it is first
necessary to see what Rawls is claiming and why.
This
requires trying to lay out Rawls's essential project,
the
questions that seem most to be motivating his intentions,

and the process of inclusion and exclusion he seeks to
defend in "a theory of justice."
9John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 48-49.

10John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 49.
137
With his concept of reflective equilibrium, Rawls at

first appears to adopt a healthy suspicion of any
definitions of justice whose inquirers have not wrestled
with other conceptions in addition to recognizing its own
inner contradictions,
if there are any.
By pointing to what
he finds to be a virtue in Socratic questioning and re

questioning,
Rawls also seems to exhibit requisite comfort
with the provisional,
holding dogma at bay.
He does not
want hegemonic notions of the good to ascend unjustifiably

as appears to be so often the case, both historically and
currently.
The turn to Nature, Reason, and Divine Law and
the hierarchies they too frequently bring in their wake can

understandably lead one for a craving to be more open.
For
we can see how each of the above mentioned turns has left a
thick residue which continues to influence and define many
of our most important struggles and resistances today.
kind of openness,
The
then, which Rawls at least initially
endorses seems essential to any discussion or deliberation

about justice.
This much is not difficult to grant Rawls.
But how true Rawls's theory can remain to his own best
insights becomes dubious as soon as he begins to restrict
the moral domain of justice in ways that do not allow for
the kind of fluidity and shifting for which he himself has
made a good case.
As we watch certain aspects of his theory
unfold, we see Rawls abandon his best insights about this
138
process he names reflective equilibrium.
And this because
he places unjustifiable constraints upon what can be

discussed,
seen, and most important listened to should we
attempt to go behind the veil of ignorance, one of the most

important features of his hypothetical.
Bringing this brief detour to a pause, we can now
continue to examine other aspects of Rawls's procedure for
how to ascertain a compelling generalized view.
This
requires that we return to Rawls's attempt to revive the

social contract model as a way in which to think through the
most essential elements of justice.
If Rawls can convince
that all are likely to "choose" as he describes we should

from what he contends he has constructed for our benefit as
"a well-defined initial situation," and that the choice is
consistent with broad concern for all, then he can
approximate the requirement for consent that is emphasized
by the contractarian tradition which he is attempting to
revitalize.
If he cannot so convince,
seriously flawed,
then his theory is
for this remains its major purpose.
Rawls posits that the way we can better understand what

principles of justice would be most fair, according to our
own standards upon due reflection
(or in reflective
equilibrium), is to think of ourselves as if we had the

choice to bring them into practice from a condition we might
imagine is equal.
Rawls asks if we could but so choose, how
139
would we?
There are many drawbacks in posing questions of
this nature, mainly because such questions tend to deflect

attention away from the fact that there never really can be
any such ideal original position.
On such matters, we never
get the chance to start from the beginning,

beginning that is equal,
let alone a
so why pretend that we do?
It is
more truthful to acknowledge that we always find ourselves

ensconced somewhere in what is more accurately described as
the middle.
But Rawls believes there are good reasons for
not beginning in the middle.
The middle is drenched with
inequalities and thoroughly soaked with inevitable

partiality, made heavy and heavier by various historical
events and parochial acculturation.
For Rawls,
to begin in the middle would necessarily
mean that insurmountable differences and partiality for

one's own individual or group defined preferences would
greatly inhibit,
and probably impede, any attempts to
discern what might approximate to a compelling generalized

view.
Having always been a Hatfield, Rawls seems to assume,
one cannot possibly think from the vantage point of the

McCoys and vice versa.
But,
the real challenge,
at least
from the perspective of Kantian enlarged mentality,
is
precisely for Hatfields to at least attempt to understand

how McCoys might view their world and vice versa.
argues that too much partiality,
140
But Rawls
and too many profoundly
different world views imparted historically would not only

prevent such clear thinking about what could possibly be
compelling for all, but would also be downright
inflammatory.
Thus, according to Rawls's logic which
emphasizes the virtues of simplicity,
to proceed more
inclusively is to doom the clarification of what defines

justice from the beginning, and makes impossible the
derivation of a generalized view.
openness begins to close.
The initial pleas for
For Rawls, defining justice
involves a process of exclusion.
Rawls says,
we cannot have a coherent and manageable

theory if we must take such a multiplicity of
positions into account.
The assessment of so
many competing claims is impossible."11
In order to avoid the potential problems of partiality,
Rawls seeks to develop a procedure which "ensures that no
one is advantaged or disadvantaged by the outcome of natural
chance or the contingency of social circumstances."12
Since inequality and differences define our world, yet Rawls
seeks to emphasize equality and sameness,
somewhere other than the actual.
he must look
He wants a condition that
is not so drenched by inequalities, believing that only from

such a condition can one gain clarity about what all could
conceivably consent to.
Knowing that prevailing conditions
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 96.

141
so often position us in direct opposition to how Rawls

thinks we best imagine ourselves in order to get our proper
bearings on matters that apply to us all, Rawls has to look
elsewhere for the symmetrical conditions that he believes he
needs to support his argument.
The desire for conditions of
equality in an unequal world causes him to make use of a

hypothetical thought experiment which, as we saw, he names
the original position.
Through this privileged spot, with
its defining feature of the veil of ignorance, Rawls wages

that we could all agree to the principles of justice that he
argues will emerge upon simulation.
Rawls says the following about his hypothetical thought
experiment:
"since all are similarly situated and no one is
able to design principles to favor his particular condition,

the principles of
justice are the result
of a fair agreement
or bargain."13
further maintains that
the original
He
position, with its device

"prevents us from
of the veil of
ignorance,
shaping our moral view
own particular attachments and interests."14
to accord with our

In praise of
the veil of ignorance, Rawls continues,

We do not look at the social order from our
situation but take up a point of view that
everyone can adopt on an equal footing.
In
this sense, we look at our society and our
place in it objectively: we share a common

142
standpoint along with others and do not make

our judgements from a personal slant.
Thus
our moral principles and convictions are
objective to the extent that they have been
arrived at and tested by assuming this
general standpoint and by assessing the
arguments for them by the restrictions
expressed by the conception of the original
position.
The juridical virtues such as
impartiality and considerateness are the
excellences of intellect and sensibility that
enable us to do these things well.15
While Rawls is aware of the problems and paradoxes of
political origins,
and that his original position can never
be anything but hypothetical,

stock in his approach.
he nonetheless puts great
He says,
I have emphasized that this original position

is purely hypothetical.
It is natural to ask
why, if this agreement is never actually
entered into, we should take any interest in
these principles, moral or otherwise.
The
answer is that the conditions embodied in the
description of the original position are ones
that we do in fact accept.
Or if we do not,
then perhaps we can be persuaded to do so by
philosophical reflections.16
I will attempt to go along with Rawls's hypothetical,
despite its dangers of deflection noted above, to see what
it might offer and what it takes away.
how
it
I shall try toshow
is less his turn to an abstract thought experiment as
a potentially useful expository device, and more his

idealization of the self that accompanies his experiment
that deserves close scrutiny.
I contend that this remains
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 515-516.

143
the crucial point of focus.
It is for this reason that I do
not consider it necessary to take up in any great detail the

actual principles that Rawls argues are likely to emerge.
There is a wealth of literature on this aspect of Rawls's
project already.
Fewer studies have openly legitimized
Rawls's question while critically questioning his approach.

My focus is always on Rawls's dilemma, which I share, and
the approach he offers to solve it, which I question.
Part of the reason for going as far as one can with
Rawls is because his emphasis upon the need for a compelling
generalized viewpoint continues to be of value.
Without it,
"the war of all against all," "natural hierarchy," or "might

makes right" are real possibilities.
More accurately
stated, they are prevailing realities.
At the same time,
will suggest that we need to depart from Rawls because he

idealizes a self that is not ultimately equipped to meet the
challenge of thinking either broadly or deeply about a
compelling generalized view.
With Rawls, we can concur that without the turn to
broad concern for all, one faces the dangers of potentially
aggressive particularities or harmful parochialism that
cannot be open to other points of view.
Rawls persuades
best when he questions rigid teleological theories or

practices if their espousers claim to know "the good" in
advance of "the right."
Rawls is helpful as he reminds us
144
of the horrors committed in the name of dogmatic

prescriptions for the good life that are not sufficiently
attentive to alternate ways of being.
But whether or not
Rawls's theory can avoid the problems of teleological hubris

without creating new violences of its own is a point very
much worth pursuing.
For in wishing to avoid all the
pitfalls of rigid teleology, Rawls is led to argue for an

equally untenable position that relies too heavily upon the
deontological ethic.
Well,
just what is all the fuss about
over the deontological ethic?
What is it generally, what
use does Rawls want to make of it particularly?

wager that we would "choose" it worth it?
Is his
Even possible?
Is it somehow a wager men in our society are more likely to

cash in on?
In order to begin addressing these questions,
turn my focus upon Rawls's Kantian debts.

The Kant-Rawls Connection
As will be recalled from the prior chapter, deontology
is an ethic that rigidly and antecedently sets boundaries
between formal questions of justice and those of the good
life.
The faith that promoters of deontology have in the
"neutrality" of justice upon this view allows them to

believe that justice always trumps goodness.
The
deontologically-inclined claim that this kind of definition

of justice allows each individual to pursue his or her own
conception of the good life, allowing all others the same.
145
Those who adopt a deontological conception of justice,
then,
argue that the ultimate goal is to regulate rather than p r e

define these "individualized"
"choices."
To be sure, my
punctuation here is purposely intended to raise questions.

And that I have serious doubts about the claims that
deontological justice can be neutral, or that choices about
one's life plan can be so individualized as deontologists
claim ought to be clear.
That this is even a desirable
ideal, or something worth striving towards, radically

challenged.
My critiques must be deferred,
though, until we
are sufficiently clear about the essence of Rawls's position

and the particular way in which he makes use of Kant.
Rawls defines the essence of deontology very simply
when he says,
the good."17
"the concept of the right is prior to that of

He claims that his theory is superior to
rival teleological theories which, as we saw, he argues are

prone to dogma.
Rawls also claims that his deontological
theory of justice is superior to Kant's original.

does challenge Kant in one primary way.
So Rawls
But Rawls's
challenge to Kant has nothing to do with questioning the

separation between justice and the good life itself.
Rawls
wants only to avoid Kant's metaphysics and his

transcendental appeals to the realm of noumena.
I think
most of us would recognize this as a good move.
Rawls

146
claims to offer a more recognizably "political not

metaphysical" conception of deontology where Kant did
n o t .18
But I claim that Rawls would have provided a richer
conception of democracy itself by broadening the very domain
of the political.
Purging the categorical imperative of its
metaphysics was never really the problem.
I maintain that
challenging Kant's deontology itself remains the more

compelling path to follow.
Whether or not Kant really did
move beyond deontology is, of course, a question many are

sure to contest.
But if my interpretation that his concept
of enlarged mentality,
if not Kant himself,
is a compelling
one for further developing democratic theory,
then there can
be no rigid separation between questions of justice and the

good life.
And if this is conceded,
then the deontological
ethic cannot be endorsed--neither when offered by Kant in

his role as the grand architect nor by Rawls as his
contemporary archeologist.
One might say that Kant himself
took steps to deconstruct his grand design once he saw its

structural flaws.
If true, he did not need a later
generation to do it for him.19
But this is to open another
18For this argument, see his article "Political not

Metaphysical," as well as his recent Political Liberalism.
19Here I mean to probe whether or not Foucault's wellknown attacks upon Kant, for example, lose some of their
vitality once we appreciate Kant's lost legacy.
See, for
example, Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?" in Donald F.
147
debate.
I thus return to Rawls's reconstructed deontology.
Elevating what he takes to be strengths inherent in the

deontological ethic Rawls says,
teleological theories,
"in contrast with
something is good only if it fits
into ways of life consistent with the principles of right

already on hand."20
It is important to see that one can
question rigid teleology if its espousers dogmatically

prescribe the good, without in the process, being led into a
defense of rigid deontology.
fails to do this.
I attempt to show how Rawls
Formulated in question form,
I ask: can
Rawls's cure for a problem well-diagnosed not create others

along the way?
Answers to these questions are more likely
to emerge when we look at the troubling politics that engulf

The Politics of the Original Position: Too Empty or Too

Full?
In this section,
I will discuss two possible
interpretations of the Rawlsian original position.

interpretations will be portrayed as objections,
Both
although
depending upon how one sees the original position, the

objections are quite different.
Either way, however,
the
objections point to the flaws of an approach that
Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected

Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
1977) .
148
systematically seeks broad concern in abstraction from deep

concern,
justice without goodness,
reason without desire,
and freedom at the expense of happiness.

The first interpretation aims to show that the original
position is too empty,
the second that it is too full.
For
those who will view the original position as too empty,

which is one plausible interpretation,
the claim that it is
left vulnerable to charges of mere formalism will be

stressed.
Just as Hegel never tired of attacking Kant's
categorical imperative for being too empty, one could

similarly critique Rawls's original position, which he
defines as a procedural reinterpretation of the categorical
imperative,21 for also being unable to generate much
content.
Supporters of this interpretation will note that
whatever strengths Rawls finds in Kantian formalism, he also

inherits its greatest liabilities.
experiment,
silently.
For Rawls's thought
like Kant's categorical imperative, proceeds

The hypothetical choosers are mute, attempting to
catch a glimpse of what social justice might entail "from

afar."
According to this interpretation, which I shall call
the "exclusionary objection," Rawls simply omits too much
21See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (p. 256) , where

he says: "The original position may be viewed . . . as a
procedural interpretation of Kant's conception of autonomy
and the categorical imperative."
149
concrete and historical information from those we try to

creatively imagine in an initial symmetrical position.
The
hypothetical choosers are not credibly enabled to consider

how to reach any kind of understanding with each other about
what could and could not be truly generalizable.
for two reasons.
First,
they lack sufficient knowledge
about themselves and others,

epistemological deficit.
information underload.
And this
so they are operating with an
We might say they suffer from

Second, Rawlsian selves are
idealized as mutually disinterested.
So even if we were
asked to restore their memories, which Rawls has asked us to

permanently repress whenever we consider what marks the
moral domain of justice,
these hypothetical choosers are
best idealized by Rawls as not particularly caring about

others.
Rawls, we will see, not only assumes mutual
disinterest for achieving a worthy generalized view, but he

considers it a desirable prerequisite. He claims it brings
advantages that benevolence cannot.
Let's look first at how
Rawls can be viewed as emptying the original position of

vital information,
and then how he morally depletes its
occupants as well.
In an effort to preempt the dangers of aggressive
partiality, Rawls too thoroughly denudes his hypothetical
choosers as he places them in what he hopes can serve as a
"well-defined initial situation."
150
This situation "ensures
that no one is advantaged in the choice of principles by the

outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social
circumstances."22
It attempts to similarly situate each so
that "no one is able to design principles to favor his

particular condition," and one that seeks to make sure that
"the principles of justice are the result of a fair
agreement or bargain."23
Here one appreciates that while
Rawls is grappling with how best to counteract aggressive

partiality,
human.
his solution renders the choosers unrecognizably
Going behind the veil means ignoring a deeper
inquiry into our ongoing social and political struggles.

Because such existential concerns go unspoken and
unaddressed,
it is hard to see that any insights about their
possible sources can be gathered.
If not rounded up and
then addressed, how can they possibly be overcome?
And,
isn't it desirable that we at least try to recognize their

potential sources so that we might get beyond them?
famous passage in which Rawls describes the original
position, he says:
Among the essential features of this
situation is that no one knows his place in
society, his class position or social status,
nor does anyone know his fortune in the
distribution of natural assets and abilities,
his intelligence, strength, and the like.
I
shall even assume that the parties do not

151
In a
know their conceptions of the good or their

special psychological propensities.
The
principles of justice are chosen from behind
a veil of ignorance.24
According to the "exclusionary objection," the critical
questions revolve around identity erasure.
Idealized as not
knowing who we are or what matters most to us, not given the
chance to get acquainted with what most matters to others,
how can we, if we take our bearings from Rawls's procedural
reinterpretation of the Kantian categorical imperative,
creatively engage together in an ongoing attempt to discern
what could be our common political domain of justice?
would not we need to do it together,
And
at least on frequent
enough occasions than what Rawls sees fit, were we not to

fall prey to a new kind of partiality,
say, that of the
Liberalism he endorses, albeit with changes?
How can one
argue for what one believes should be deemed generalizable

without also knowing who one is?
And how can one come to
understand what might be important to others, not allowing

or considering it morally significant to ever find out in
the first place?
With this possibility denied, how do we
ever find out what is important to others with whom we might

compose the generalizable,
together,
continuously?
Agreement on all matters may be difficult,
even impossible,
or maybe not even necessary or appealing.
However,

152
to
obstruct the possibility for engaging, discussing,

reflecting, and deliberating from the beginning, makes it
difficult to ever know what all could plausibly find
compelling and what not.
Upon these grounds, Rawls's theory
has been challenged as being "epistemically incoherent"

(Benhabib).
Rawls denies the hypothetical choosers
(and us, if we
simulate his experiment) vital information, which needs to

be considered,
if, in fact, cultivating a perspective which
can be compelling for all is to remain valuable.
Any chance
for cultivating such a view is prevented from the beginning,

yet we know that generating a generalized view is Rawls's
greatest hope.
Rawls has a troubling quandary.
The primary objection to the original position,

according to this "exclusionary interpretation," is that
precisely the information that is most needed to concentrate
upon in order to discern what could or could not be
generalizable is forever closed off.
The very information
that might lead to important societal and political

connections gets systematically and procedurally blocked
from the beginning.
For example, knowing one's social
class, and knowing one's likes and dislikes and the effects
these might have upon others with whom we share our
political and cultural spaces is not up for discovery
through ongoing discussion and socially engaged reflection.
153
According to this interpretation,
this blockage is
radically put into question and understood as debilitating,

rather than enabling,
generalized view.
for the cultivation of a compelling
According to this interpretation,
this
kind of existential information is both essential and

appropriate, rather than "too many distracting details" as
Rawls never ceases of characterizing such information.
It
thus remains difficult for us to imagine, once we appreciate

the "exclusionary interpretation," that such selves can
perform the task Rawls sets for them.
Rawls gives his
hypothetical choosers an extraordinary and important task,

but then denies them much of what they would need to know in
order to stand a chance of succeeding.
Those who are given
the task to decide are without the resources, both by lack

of sheer information and also by how they are idealized,
impervious to others'
needs, hopes, and desires.
The first
gap is like trying to bake a cake with no ingredients,

second with the wrong ingredients.
the
Without this vital
information, and with mutual disinterest seen as a virtue,

Rawls leaves many who attempt to gain insights from his
abstract thought experiment, utterly frustrated.
conditions of identity erasure,
Under
the desired results for
attaining a generalized view cannot be met without "false

victory."
(Sandel)
While one can appreciate Rawls's desire to get beyond
154
the threats and realities of aggressive partiality,

"exclusionary
the
objection" points out that Rawls's approach,
which sees virtue in blindness, seriously jeopardizes,

not wholly undermines, the desire.
Rawls does not allow his
hypothetical first choosers to be much of anything,

these nameless,
and yet
faceless, and bodiless entities are supposed
to choose principles of justice for everyone,

more,
if
and what is
they are to do so "in advance" and "once and for all"
as well as "from afar."

How far can we go before we cease to see more clearly
what it is that opposes us?
Getting a greater perspective
on such struggles is not best espied from afar, but needs to

be seen as closely as possible, without forgetting about
broad concern. Focusing in on particulars and the concrete
may not always bring the insights we hope for, but to deny
their place in a theory that attempts to conceptualize what
can be generalizable is like trying to make rules before we
have decided what game we are going to play.
While it is
understandable that Rawls is afraid of aggressive

partiality,
it is far from clear that such real and
potential threats are best dealt with by systematically

trying to preempt their eruption, which for Rawls so often
seems to be hovering around the volcanic.
the potentially volcanic,
But along with
so goes the more nurturing
attempts to discuss their possible sources.
155
If these are
made clearer, we might then at least be more credibly

enabled as we seek to develop a more motivating generalized
stance.
Rawls would no doubt see this as expecting too much to
ask from a theory of justice.
He is very clear that the
self is best idealized as not taking too much interest in

each others'
interests.
This brings me to the second way in
which Rawls depletes the original position.
But this time
not through removal or blockage of vital information, but

rather through emptying the choosers of any character they
might have.
In addition to an epistemological deficit,
then, there is also a moral one.
With Rawls's assumption of
mutual disinterest and limited altruism, character is not

considered a prerequisite for selves who would attempt to
cultivate a generalized view.
But if Rawls's device is to have sufficient motivating
force,
it ought to be occupied by beings,
albeit in
abstraction, with whom we can all nonetheless comfortably

identify as capable of generating a worthy generalized view.
That is, they would need to have a certain kind of
character,
rather than another.
this desired disposition virtue.
Maybe we would want to call

This would require that we
see certain characteristics as strengths and others as

weaknesses.
For example, we might consider it essential
that any who attempts to cultivate a generalized view be
156
capable of listening to each other and caring about each

others'
concerns, and who encourages mutual recognition as
part of the very process of achieving a generalized view.

Open and sympathetic would be among the adjectives used to
describe the activity that took place whenever the
generalized good was the issue.
Such deliberation and
activity would be carried out by those who would be ready to

understand,
less inclined to criticize and more prepared to
engage with another's situation, before concluding what

could be good for all.
This would not require an
abstracting away of the other, but attempts to reach out to

others in his or her particular situations.
Those
deliberating about a generalized view would want a kind of

friendly quality so that justice itself was wrapped up in
realizing another's good.
But this is to mix justice and
the good life and brings the deontological hierarchy itself

into question.
A willingness to listen and encouragement for others to
do the same, as well as a readiness to try to understand
others in their more particular concerns is not only
difficult to see in Rawls's original position,
no place.
it really has
His deontology, which requires him to subordinate
questions of goodness to those of justice, means he must

resist their integration or their re-solution.
Rawls's
solution is meant to be a "once and for all" solution,
157
not
an attempt for ongoing re-solutions that seek to combine

justice and the good life more fully.
If Rawls moved beyond
deontology, he would endorse a different kind of politics,

one that would need to confirm the very emphasis on
benevolence which he spurns.
For Rawls,
justice ought not
be virtuous, even though he calls it the first virtue.

Having explored the emptiness of the original position in
both its epistemological and moral dimensions,
I shall now
look to what I term the "inclusionary objection" which

allows us to see the original position as too full.
According to a second interpretation,
position is too full.
objection."
the original
I will call this the "inclusionary
Whereas the "exclusionary objection" stresses
how the hypothetical choosers are idealized as not knowing

any defining characteristics of either themselves or anybody
else, the inclusionary objection sees the hypothetical
choosers as concrete "litigants in civil society."
Here,
bourgeois interests are taken as primary in Rawls's abstract

thought experiment.
Those who go
behind the veil are
individuals who are encouraged to
pursue their own life
plans in a mutually disinterested
way.
do so with very little particular
regard for others, except
They are expected
to
to confirm free and equal status for each and all to do the
same.
Whereas according to the first interpretation, we do
158
not know anybody like the hypothetical choosers, according

to the second one, almost everyone we interact with is
compelled to conform to these Rawlsian selves when
interacting in civil society.
The selves we encounter and
the self we disintegrate into becoming bear strong

resemblances to Rawls's ideal.
They embody in very real and
strongly felt ways all that Rawls has idealized about the
self in his hypothetical situation.
only too well,
We know Rawlsian selves
interacting with and counteracting them daily
in our societal, political, and cultural lives.
If the
second interpretation convinces us that we now know the

content,
not.
it is no more compelling than before when we did
Through the lens of the second interpretation, we are
not left in the dark.
To more fully appreciate this second
interpretation, we need to look closely at the politics

contained in Rawls's abstraction.
Rawls argues away many contingencies from his
hypothetical experiment as "too many distracting details,"
whose presumable presence would be nothing but contentious,
while other contingencies remain.
others?
But why some and not
These matters deserve careful discussion.
For
although at first it appears all contingencies must be

removed by abstraction,
they are not.
It thus becomes
exceedingly important to know what is removed and what

remains, and what consequences ensue.
159
Rawls's method of
inclusion and exclusion has grave political consequences and

much is at stake in his highly selective removal of
contingencies.
This is most clear in his list of primary
goods which all are assumed to want whatever else they want.
Those things that all are assumed to want whatever else they
(we) want are described and listed in descending
significance as follows:
For simplicity, assume that the chief primary
goods at the disposition of society are
rights and liberties, powers and
opportunities, income and wealth."25
Rawls continues,
Imagine, then, a hypothetical initial
arrangement in which all the social primary
goods are equally distributed: everyone has
similar rights and duties, and income and
wealth are evenly shared. This state of
affairs provides a benchmark for judging
improvements.
If certain inequalities of
wealth and organizational powers would make
everyone better off than in this hypothetical
starting point, then they accord with the
general conception.1,26
Rawls defines primary goods as "things that it is rational
to want whatever else one wants," and the difference
principle allows for disparities if "everyone benefits from
economic and social inequalities."27 But despite the
attempt to more fairly distribute goods, wanting as many of
25John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice, p. 62.
26John Rawls,
27John Rawls,

160
them as possible is taken for granted.
Rawls continues,
given human nature, wanting them (primary

goods) is part of being rational; and while
each is presumed to have some conception of
the good, nothing is known about his final
ends.
The preference for primary goods is
derived, then, from only the most general
assumptions about rationality and the
conditions of human life. To act from the
principles of justice is to act from
categorical imperatives in the sense that
they apply to us whatever in particular our
aims are.
This simply reflects that no such
contingencies appear as premises in their
derivation,28
Do no contingencies appear as premises?
Here, those
partial to the inclusionary interpretation would argue that

contingencies
have been allowed into, and are everywhere
evident in Rawls's abstract thought experiment.

so philosophically pure,
It is not
impervious to the contingent, but
very much reflective of and the product of a commodious

lifestyle that is institutionally and culturally sustained.
Those who want more rather than fewer primary goods want
them because they have been acculturated to want them,
critics would stress.
these
That wanting more primary goods is a
general fact of human nature--rather than reflective of a

bourgeois way of life whose societal offspring values more
rather than fewer primary goods--is not convincing according
to this interpretation.
It may be that a whole society has
come to want more of what Rawls defines as primary goods,
28John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 253, my emphasis.

161
but these collective desires,
if that is what they are, are
more consistent with a particular way of life, than with a

claim about what is most essential about human nature.
Wanting them does not necessarily adhere with ascertaining a
compelling generalized view, but may be part of the reason
why it remains difficult to think more generally and more
magnanimously in the first place.
Rawls also claims that "these goods normally have a use
whatever a person's rational plan of life." Granted, but
this only follows if we take embourgeoisment as what the
primary goods are to aid.29
He says "whatever one's system
of ends, primary goods are necessary means."30
He adds,
"while the persons in the original position do not know

their conception of the good, they do know,
I assume, that
they prefer more rather than less primary goods."31

says,
Rawls
"Everyone is assured an equal liberty to pursue
whatever plan of life he pleases as long as it does not

violate what justice demands."32
But what justice demands
is that each regard one another from a distance.

distance,
From a
how do we know when we have violated what might be
important to somebody?
From too far a distance we are
29John Rawls,
30John Rawls,
31John Rawls,
32John Rawls,

162
rendered incapable of seeing what others with whom we share

our cultural and political spaces find intrusive,
and humiliating.
hurtful,
We cannot know what is experienced as
hurtful if de-sensitized and consistently placed at a

distance.
Interpreting the original position as too full, replete
with bourgeois assumptions,
is equally plausible,
interpreting it as utterly devoid,

assumptions.
as is
free of any concrete
The objection, when looked at from a
perspective that stresses its fullness,
is that the original
position fails to envision other ways of being with each

other that gets us beyond the very aggressive partiality
that Rawls wants most to put into question as inherently
destructive.
If we simulate Rawls's original position, we are not
encouraged to expand our moral boundaries to such a degree
that we consider it worthy of asking what the world might
look like from somebody else's "particular" and "radically
situated perspective."
For example, a white person, middle
aged and living in the suburbs is not encouraged to ask what

it might be like to be black,
inner city of New York.
18, male, and living in the
Neither are any who simulate the
original position compelled to think, as best they can, from

the perspective of being a single mother, on welfare and
living in the slums.
Or, from the perspective of a middle-
163
aged man with three children, who loses his job as his
employer, be it Sears or McDonnell-Douglas,
him right out of it.
"restructures"
And neither are we encouraged,
we take our cues from the original position,
should
to make more
vivid to ourselves the vantage point of those many homeless

people who pick through society's garbage in search of their
next meal or as they try to collect enough returnable
bottles to procure a new one they hope to fill with whiskey.
But we can only be asked not to see these kinds of
"particular" things if they are already deeply defining or
destroying our relations and creating our politics in some
way.
To see these things and consider them worthy of our
deliberation about justice is to enlarge one's mentality.

This requires humbling one's own pretenses about wherein the
just lies, and leads one to yield to a more participatory
process.
Such a process confirms all as members,
and then
points to the desirability of an ongoing discussion of needs

that does not a priori claim to decipher the just in
abstraction from the good and vice versa.
More on the Politics of Rawlsian Abstraction

Rawls is insistent that no "particular facts," which
he usually portrays as more rather than less threatening,
can make their way into the original position.
permits what he calls general facts.
But he
Although he separates
general from particular facts, without implying the need for
164
participants themselves to have more of a say about how they

see fit to draw these boundaries, his procedure and his
assumptions can be viewed as highly particular and
contingent indeed.
While he argues relentlessly that
particular facts must be suppressed as far as possible,

order to achieve an initial state of equality,
in
"general
facts" do not disappear along with the particular facts.

Rawls says:
As far as possible, then, the only particular
facts which the parties know is that their
society is subject to the circumstances of
justice and whatever this implies.
It is
taken for granted, however, that they know
the general facts about human society.
They
understand political affairs and the
principles of economic theory; they know the
basis of social organization and the laws of
human psychology.
Indeed, the parties are
presumed to know whatever general facts
affect the choice of the principles of
justice.
There are no limitations on general
information, that is, on general laws and
theories, since conceptions of justice must
be adjusted to the characteristics of the
systems of social cooperation which they are
to regulate, and there is no reason to rule
out these facts.33
Yet, if the parties can have knowledge of the
principles of economic theory (by which Rawls means laissezfaire or traditional economics),34 why can the parties also

34He says, "I assume moderate scarcity and competing
claims."(Theory of Justice, p. 257) and "I assume . . . that
the economy is roughly a free market system, although the
means of production may or may not be privately owned,"
165
not have knowledge of various critiques of traditional

economic theory,
various strands?
kind?
say, Marxist political economy in its

Why is there virtue in ignorance of this
Why cannot the parties,
"our representative men,"
consider many rival paradigms if they are really interested

in what can be most compelling from all perspectives?
The same applies to Rawls's assumptions about human
psychology.
Are we ready to generalize moral psychology
before we see what possible varieties it may come in?
Rawls
says that those who simulate his original position will

retain their knowledge concerning the general laws of
psychology.
But what does he mean by this?
While Rawls
does not use the language of rigid ego boundaries,

clear that this is his assumption.
it seems
His many allusions to
the value of autonomy would support this claim.
As would
the assumption of mutual disinterest which he hails as more

compelling for a theory of justice than benevolence.
Even if we grant to Rawls that the parties can have
knowledge of the general laws of human psychology
(primarily
experienced in terms of rational self-interest), why can the

hypothetical choosers not also have knowledge of competing
theories that challenge the self as self-contained and
circumscribed, rationally driven and seemingly without
emotional components?
Given that psychologists themselves
Theory of Justice, p. 66) .

166
are not clear on what constitutes human psychology,
it is
probably wise to proceed more prudently, and to resist

appeal to a generalized psychology,
competing conceptions.
when there are
It is in this context of what
defines moral psychology that I would like to offer some

feminist objections to Rawls's assumptions of autonomy.
Feminist Objections
Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice has become so
important a text that no discussion of moral psychology can
afford to do without it.
There are important political
implications opened up by her research,
as it compares to
the prevailing politics contained within strongly defined

deontological frameworks represented most recently by such
theorists as Rawls.
At the heart of Gilligan's research is a challenge to a
morality based upon an autonomous actor whose moral
vocabulary is rights and justice only.35
As is well-known,
Gilligan has thematized a very compelling and neglected

moral voice that is preponderant in girls and women as
compared to boys and men, at least in Anglo-American
culture.
voices.
As such, her research suggests at least two moral

What she terms "a different voice" emphasizes the
35Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological

Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982) .
167
primacy of relationships as enabling rather than threatening

for determining one's moral psychology.
What makes her research valuable is that this
"different voice," which affirms response-ability to
concrete others through socially engaged reflection,
has
typically been shut out from the democratic process.
I see
this different voice as both akin to re-working Kant's

understanding of enlarged mentality which enjoins each to
think from another's particularized context,
enriching for democratic theory.
as well as
But, ever an abstracting
away of relational and contextual thinking and an

acculturation of a more rules-oriented approach has
dominated modern conceptions of justice.
Although Gilligan
herself does not seek to debunk the need for justice,
she
claims justice needs care and empathy.

An important and recurring theme that animates much
feminist theory is the challenge to the autonomous
conception of the self.
Because Rawls idealizes the "just"
self as autonomous and mutually disinterested,
it is not
surprising that many feminists have questioned Rawls's

project.
That Rawls works with this assumption is, of
course, well-known, but that he idealizes it so thoroughly

is best remembered when we look at the boldness with which
he makes his assertions.
I will point to a couple of key
passages for illustrative purposes in an effort to make
168
plain how Rawlsian selves are thoroughly idealized as

autonomous.
Rawls says,
"moral education is education for
autonomy. 1,36
This conception of autonomy, he continues is
"fitting for human beings,"37 and that

acting autonomously is acting from principles
that we would consent to as free and equal
rational beings, and that we are to
understand in this way.
Also, these
principles are objective.
They are the
principles that we would want everyone
(including ourselves) to follow were we to
take up together the appropriate general
point of view.
The original position defines
this perspective, and its conditions also
embody those of objectivity: its stipulations
express the restrictions on arguments that
force us to consider the choice of principles
unencumbered by the singularities of the
circumstances in which we find ourselves.3B
There are two points worth pursuing.
First,
the
original position is not a place from which we ask ourselves

how "to take up together the appropriate general point of
view."
Rawls turns the "we" into an aggregation of self-
contained "I's," over-appreciating historical struggles for

more self-defined projects at the expense of making the
connection that sympathetic communities are most likely ones
that can promote self-fulfillment for all.
As we follow
Rawls through on his attempt to discern a generalized
36John Rawls,
37John Rawls,
38John Rawls,
emphasis.
A Theory of Justice, p. 516, my points of

169
standpoint,
it is not a "we" who works together to ascertain
democratically what might constitute a compelling

generalized view, but rather an aggregation of segregated
selves who are alone and in perpetual pieces.
From behind
the metaphorical device of the veil of ignorance,
these
selves try to determine in silence what all others, who are

assumed to be like-minded, would want for themselves.
But
this requires that such selves see themselves as prior to

their ends and purposes.
Michael Sandel has critiqued Rawls's conception of the
self as misguided,
for no self can be prior to its ends.39
This brings me to the second point.
While I accept Sandel's
arguments that we are all "radically situated selves," and

for this reason cannot go behind Rawls's veil, Gilligan
shows how women's "encumbrances" seem to lead to an emphasis
upon connection with, rather than separation from, others.
If Sandel shows how none of us can go behind the veil
without distortion,
it is through Gilligan's research that
we see how women seem to be less tempted into trying.

If we are all encouraged to see how the world looks
from another's concrete perspective, and everywhere
cultivate reciprocation, we do not want a veil.
the way.
It gets in
Once we see that this "different voice" can be
39See Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of

Justice, pp. 19-24.
170
enabling for a theory of justice, our boundaries can be more

fluid and open, and the poles that Rawls in his role as
deontologist seeks to keep apart are confirmed as
interrelated.
That only women can think from the
perspective of concrete others is dispelled once we

appreciate that Gilligan's different voice is Kant's
enlarged one.
In this section I shall probe only two further
questions.
First,
is Rawls's original position completely
inimical to feminist ideals of empathy and care?
And
second, even if it is, can feminists stop asking Rawls's

question about the need for a generalized view?
One might
expect consensus on the first question, but Susan Okin has

recently claimed that Rawls's original position can be seen
as consistent with such feminist ideals.
reading of Rawls's original position,
In her alternative
she argues that any
who step behind the veil must require an extraordinary

amount of empathy.
To support this claim,
she describes
what she sees as the rather demanding activities that must

go on behind Rawls's veil by saying such things like the
following:
It is not easy for an essentially
nonreligious person, trying to imagine heror himself in the original position, to adopt
the standpoint of a fundamentalist believer;
nor is it easy for a devoutly religious
person to imagine the situation of a
nonbeliever in a highly religious society.
To do either requires, at the very least,
171
both strong empathy and a preparedness to

listen carefully to the very different points
of view of others.40
She argues that once Rawls's theory is purged of its
rationalism, simulating the original position requires
benevolence and sympathy with others.
This is a very
interesting argument, and a kind of vindication of Rawls on

the part of Okin.
end.
And it is worth following through to the
But I believe she changes many of Rawls's assumptions.
In place of mutual disinterest,

benevolence.
she puts sympathy and
With this qualitative change,
the original
position no longer looks like the original, original

position.
Whether scholars will argue she does or does not change
Rawls's assumptions,
though,
is less interesting,
in many
ways, than that it was a feminist who found a way in which

to recast his project to make it consistent with feminist
ideals.
Okin removes assumptions that Rawls is clear about
making until, at last, we have a very different picture of

If Rawls is clear about anything it
is that benevolence and caring and empathy are inferior

motivational assumptions than are mutual disinterest and
40Susan Okin, "Reason and Feeling in Thinking about

Justice," in Cass R. Sunstein, e d . , Feminism and Political
Theory, p. 31.
172
limited altruism41 for thinking through what is required

for a theory of justice.
Rawls castigates Hume's emphasis upon benevolence.42
Mutual disinterest, he claims, will bring the benefits
without the problems he believes accompany benevolence.
Still, Rawls wants a certain minimalist degree of concern
for others, but not in the way feminists typically pursue
this connection with greater care and empathy.
The role-
playing that women often excel at emanates from an ability

to put oneself in the direct context of another person's
situation.43
Rawls never allows this possibility.
The
41Rawls says, "In the original position . . . the

parties are mutually disinterested rather than sympathetic;
but lacking knowledge of their natural assets or social
situation, they are forced to view their arrangements in a
general way."
(A Theory of Justice, p. 187) . He also
writes, "A love of mankind that wishes to preserve the
distinction of persons, to recognize the separateness of
life and experiences, will use the two principles of justice
to determine its aims when the many goods it cherishes are
in opposition.
This is simply to say that this love is
guided by what individuals themselves would consent to in a
fair initial situation which gives them equal representation
as moral persons.
We now see why nothing would have been
gained by attributing benevolence to the parties in the
original position." (A Theory of Justice, p. 191).
42John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 183-192.
43Gilligan's findings are persuasive that girls and
women tend to make their moral judgements and form their
moral personalities through a more contextualized, rather
than abstract, form of moral reasoning.
Each of her case
studies provide rich and illuminating examples for how girls
and women "enlarge their mentalities" with relative ease by
asking how others would be affected directly by their or
others' actions.
Much of this different voice as enlarged
perspective is evident through responses to hypothetical
173
veil prevents it.
Where Rawls sees this kind of behavior,
he trivializes it as "supererogatory, 1,44 and simply beyond

a theory of justice.
It is an inability to be more caring
that ushers in a theory of justice.
However, a feminist
theory of justice validates these acts of empathy as a

necessary ingredient for a cogent theory of justice.
of empathy are not saintly, but human.
Acts
From a feminist
theory of justice, what Rawls asks us to become is more

inhuman than what we see ourselves as capable of being and
potentially becoming.
By mixing justice with empathy, a
feminist theory does the unpardonable,
at least from a
strongly construed deontological point of view as it has

recently been presented by Rawls.
Conclusion
In this chapter,
I showed the limits of using the
categorical imperative and the politics of deontology it

adopts in developing a theory of justice.
I tried to expose the internal contradictions in
Rawls's conception of "justice as fairness."
Using immanent
moral dilemmas designed by Lawrence Kohlberg.

Consistent
low scoring on the part of girls and women led Gilligan,
Kohlberg's assistant, to further explore possible causes for
the prevailing gender gap.
Once we appreciate the responses
from girls and women as voices of moral strength and
character, then it is the tester, not the tested, who is
deficient.
See Gilligan, In a Different Voice.
44John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 116,
43 8 and 550.
174
191, 33 9,
critique,
I accepted Rawls's position that a compelling
generalized viewpoint remains desirable,
that only this can
be fair, and that one cannot be unduly concerned with one's

own interests and still speak of social justice.
I showed
that Rawls persuades best when he points to the flaws in any

teleological theories or practices,
if their espousers claim
to know "the good" prior to conceptualizing "the right" or

act in systematic disregard of it. I further maintained that
Rawls's discussions on the flaws inherent in any rigid
teleological theories are more convincing than his own
attempt to overcome their well-portrayed shortcomings.
I tried to show how Rawls isolates only one pole of
what would be desirable to view as a more connected, albeit
tense, relationship.
That is, I tried to demonstrate how
Rawls attempts to separate "the right" from "the good" more

rigidly than what would make sense if we were to truly speak
of a worthy generalized view.
And that Rawls's attempt to
sustain such a rigid separation turns his solution, despite

intentions for considerable distributive parity,
into a new
moral hierarchy with violences uniquely its own.

I also attempted to confirm Rawls's question about the
need for a generalized view.
Since his theory of justice
makes an effort to provide one,

abstract thought experiment.
I followed him along on his
As I did this,
dangers of deflection along the way.
175
I noted the
Nonetheless,
considered what his theory might teach us about how to

answer his question, which I thought worth asking.
same time,
At the
I have shown that Rawls is ultimately
unsuccessful precisely because he draws too heavily upon the

formalism of the categorical imperative.
By neglecting the
role that empathy and benevolence must play in any

universalizability procedure,
cannot be virtuous.
his theory may be just, but it
It is here that I suggested he could
have maintained his Kantian ideals, while moving beyond

formal pleas for equality.
This would require r e
interpreting Kant's lost legacy of enlarged mentality.

I conclude that Rawls's question remains valuable and I
doubt I will stop asking it.
But because Rawls's solution
strives so much to be a once-and-for-all kind of solution

rather than a perpetual re-solution,
insufficient guide.
I find his project an
He too thoroughly subordinates
substantive questions of the good life to those of formal

justice,
leaving us questioning the status of this kind of
justice that does not further pursue the very kind of

individualized "goodness" we each are protected to pursue.
While Rawls helps to remind us of the problems that
accompany any dogmatic prescriptions for the good life, his
solution succumbs to a new dogmatism and an unjustifiable
narrowing of the moral domain of justice.
Although he calls
justice the first virtue, his conception of justice itself
176
never seeks to be such.
His proposed solution,
for all its
insights on the problems of aggressive partiality,
cannot
ultimately rectify the difficulties it seeks to overcome.

What,
if anything,
can?
With this question still unresolved,
but having
suggested the virtues of communicative action over Rawls's

original position,
I turn to Habermas, yet another neo-
Kantian who also takes his cues from Kant's concept of the
categorical imperative, but does something very different
with it from what we have seen when in Rawls's hands.
177
Chapter Five
Habermas: Going Public with the Categorical Imperative
Through Communicative Action
In the previous chapter,
I showed how Rawls's
assumptions of rigid autonomy and mutual disinterest

undercut his attempt to discern a compelling vantage point
for best capturing generalized interests.
I shared Rawls's
emphasis upon the need to recognize and promote generalized

interests as indispensable for democratic theory, but
revealed how his "procedural reinterpretation of the
categorical imperative" creates obstacles for any
substantive success.
For through his suggested procedure, Rawls argues that
we, who live in Liberal, democratic regimes can dispense
with addressing the very historical struggles we find
ourselves in.
The result is indeed a generalized view, but
one too minimal to address our worst problems because they

are all deflected away.
While mindful of the force Rawls's argument for sheerly
generalized mutual acknowledgement evinces,
I showed that
encouraging concrete mutual recognition is at the heart and

is the soul of democratic life.
178
Overview
This chapter examines Habermas's approach to how we
might best generate a compelling generalized view.
Actually, Habermas does not ask this question as much as he
consistently brings attention to how various systemic
imperatives and institutional arrangements can and often do
suppress generalized interests from emerging.1
But if
Habermas is concerned "with revealing and thereby indicting

the suppression of generalized interests,"2 then perhaps we
can find guidance from him for how to address the difficult
question of what we would need to see
(and do)
in order to
better generate a more compelling generalized view in the

first place.
This chapter is organized as follows:
first,
I will
situate Habermass alternative conception of communicative

reason as he distinguishes it from Weber's instrumental
definition; second,
I will examine Habermas's reformulation
of the categorical imperative as it compares to the Rawlsian

reconstruction.
Then I shall show how Habermas's revised
Kantianism suffers from deontological blindness and

methodological monochrome.
I will suggest that a creative
!For these points, see, for example, Jurgen Habermas,

Legitimation Crisis, Thomas McCarthy, trans, (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1973), pp. 111-117.
2Jurgen Habermas, "A Reply to my Critics" in Habermas:
Critical Debates, eds., John B. Thompson and David Held, p.
221.
179
re-engagement with Kant's alternative political philosophy

might strengthen his project.
Throughout,
I will be
concerned to show what we can learn from Habermas, and what

is gained when we look beyond some of his categorical
distinctions.
Communicative v . Instrumental Reason

Habermas does not treat reason monolithically.
most things, reason comes in different varieties.
Like
This
outlook allows Habermas to become a great critic of reason

as well as remain one of its fiercest defenders.
Habermas,
For
it is always a matter of making distinctions.
When he challenges reason,
it is its instrumental or
strategic forms that he means to put on trial.
When he
defends reason, he speaks of its communicative version.

This position is visible in his critique of Weber.3
Through remembering Weber's concept of reason, without in
the process submitting to it, Habermas's alternative
conception of reason comes more clearly into view.
Much of Habermas's critique of Weber represents his
discomfort with limiting rationality to its instrumentalized
3Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action:

Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Volume One,
trans., Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp.
143-243.
180
version.4
It is not so much that he disagrees with Weber's
diagnosis of modern times.
In fact, Habermas rather agrees
with Weber that we live in a near wholly administered

society, one that increasingly disenchants in large part
because it so nearly instrumentalizes.
But Habermas claims
this is a one-sided account of rationality nevertheless.
He
is just not willing to say that this Weberian conception of

reason comprises the whole of rationality.
this represents a distortion.
For Habermas,
And so unlike his
intellectual forebears in the Frankfurt School,5

particularly Horkheimer and Adorno, who Habermas depicts as
having succumbed to this Weberian thesis, Habermas moves in
another direction.
Rather than himself cave into the "dialectic of
enlightenment thesis"6 in which reason is said to have not
liberated but increasingly enslaved, Habermas seeks a
creative re-enchantment through shifting the focus upon the
4See Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action:

Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Vol. 1, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984), Vol. 1, pp. 143-243.
5For two excellent books on the history of the
Frankfurt School, see David Held, Introduction to Critical
Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980) and Martin Jay, The Dialectical
Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1973).
6Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodore, Dialectic of
Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
181
redemptive power that he sees in reason, but in its

specifically communicative version.
In opposition to
instrumental reason, which is calculative or strategic

reason which is nonsocial, Habermas stresses reaching
understanding as the defining feature of a kind of reason he
calls communicative.
We might say that for Habermas,
if the
ascent of instrumental reason helped to build an iron cage

of bureaucracy that disenchants, communicative reason might
hold the key to its unlocking.
According to Habermas,
then,
the Weberian picture of modernity, which culminates in the

bureaucratic state, represents reason in its most
instrumental form, rather than reason in its only or most
desirable form.
So against Weber, Habermas claims that reason has its
communicative side, and it is upon this alternative to Weber
that Habermas seeks to develop his conception of
communicative action.
Communicative action is to be
distinguished from instrumental action in that the former

exists whenever action is oriented towards reaching
understanding whereas its instrumental form is goaloriented.
Now, of course, communicative action too has a
goal, Habermas acknowledges, but its goal is always to reach

understanding.
There is something very fluid and desirable
in his alternative conception of reason that does not appear

to be enslaving, but that we might see as truly liberating.
182
Habermas argues that Communicative Action begins with

and relies for its very being upon inter-subjective
exchanges.
Without such exchanges,
actions.
there can be no
Not so for instrumental or strategic
Instrumental action relies upon calculative reason
where goal-setting, not geared towards understanding,

preempts the very recognition of which Habermas speaks,
necessary for communicative understanding and which is for
him at its base reflective of a democratic process.
Thus,
there is a primary distinction between communicative and

instrumental reason, and for Habermas the former is
emancipatory whereas the other forms enslave,
and make for
poor human relationships.

Habermas says,
. . . the concept of communicative action
refers to the interaction of at least two
subjects capable of speech and action who
establish interpersonal relations (whether by
verbal or by extra verbal mea n s ) . The actors
seek to reach an understanding about the
action situation and their plans of action in
order to coordinate their actions by way of
agreement.7
This,
is not, as we know, what Weber means by instrumental
reason.
7Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action:

Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Volume One,
trans., Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p.
86 .
183
Like other critics of rigid individualism and

calculative action in regard to societal interactions,
Habermas sees such calculative agents or strategic agents
interested mostly in securing protection to pursue selfinterest with little or no regard for others.
Habermas
contends that instrumental action, which is nonsocial,

exists any time agents pursue goals.
He maintains there is
little or no social dimension to this kind of activity.

Strategic action, on the other hand, has a decided social
dimension,
and occurs whenever one
imperatives")
(or many, or "systemic
seek to succeed by reliance upon varying
degrees of force, deception, or manipulation to achieve a

goal.
Habermas also holds that any such strategic actions
can be either conscious or sub-conscious.
In sharp contrast
to either instrumental or strategic actions, Habermas names

communicative action any which is oriented to reaching
understanding "free from coercion."
the success-oriented model
cannot be our basis for generating or deriving norms to

which all participants could find compelling.
For very
clearly this skips over what makes for democratic life.

Habermas recognizes,
in a way that Rawls does not, the
importance of community and solidarity as aspects of social

identification.
In fact the contrast between the two
approaches on this point is worth reflecting upon.
184
For
Rawls, the individual is idealized as a free and equal moral

agent.
Prior associations are given little or no role to
play in determining who the individual any of us is turns

out to be.
In drastic opposition to this, Habermas
recognizes the role associations play in identifying any

person in particular.
He views inherited associations as
significant contributors or detractors to identity

formation.
He agrees with Mead that "one has to be a member
of a community to be a self."8
Understanding will be bypassed if success is the most
important goal in trying to extend broad concern to each
through confirmation of each.
I will not hear your protests
if they conflict with my more calculated goals, and you will

not listen if your goals compete with what I have to say.
am more inclined to hear you if I relinquish my calculations

and open myself up to your point of view.
interaction,
then,
Strategic
is not the way to generate a compelling
generalized view.
There are obstacles everywhere to thwart the success of
these kinds of communicative interactions, yet Habermas
argues only attempts to understand each other through
communicative efforts that make reaching understanding about
8Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action,

Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of
Functionalist Reason, Thomas McCarthy, trans., (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1987), p. 24
185
something in the world our goal can be the true purpose of

democracy.
Unlike Rawls, Habermas points to a critique of any
institutions or interactions that suppress generalizable
interests, or that might themselves give incentives to not
promote communicative action.
Unlike Rawls who asks how
could we develop a vantage point which might aid us in

deciphering a compelling generalized view, Habermas proceeds
through a critique of all those times and places,
institutionally sustained,
frequently
that prevent a generalizable view
from emerging.
For this purpose he attempts to re-formulate the
Categorical Imperative.
Having situated the general project
of communicative action against instrumental action,
I now
turn to Habermas's attempt to go public with the categorical

imperative.
Going Public with the Categorical Imperative

Like Rawls, Habermas turns to Kant's categorical
imperative to help guide his moral and political
philosophy.9
Also like Rawls, Habermas is concerned with
9While Habermas' distinctive trademark may be his

ongoing engagement with vast and various thinkers, Kant only
one among a multitude, his project, on the whole, is seen as
a "triumph of the Kantian influence."
This point is widely
recognized.
See, for example, David Rasmussen, Reading
Habermas (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell: 1990), p. 57.
Kenneth Baynes, in his The Normative Grounds of Social
Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1992), also deals extensively
186
furnishing a procedure for normative justification.
But
there is one central difference between these two theorists,

even though they both draw inspiration from a common source
of light.
Whereas Rawls's original position repeats the
silence of the famed Kantian model, Habermas gives center

stage to dialogue.
It is importantt to appreciate this difference.
For
whereas Rawls seeks to re-work the categorical imperative

along less metaphysical and more political lines,
the
original position he advocates for this task requires no

dialogical exchanges.
Like his precursor's,
Rawls's
procedure carries on in silent fashion, dismissing from the

outset all that Habermas will emphasize is essential to the
very meaning of a true democracy.
In four words,
participation free from domination.

As we have seen in the previous chapter,
Rawls's
approach fails to include participation in the actual

cultivation of the moral point of view.
Rawls argues that
the moral domain of justice is best discovered and
with the Kantian themes motivating the Habermasian project.

Nevertheless, it is important to see that his work clearly
lends itself to other interpretations.
His strong
affinities with Marx and Weber as well as Hegel and
additionally Adorno, Meade and Pierce, among others, really
sets him apart as a political and social theorist who is
serious about engaging with all who take up his questions
and who are credited with already informing him as he argues
with and against each and every one as if in a "practical
discourse."
187
immediately apparent upon simulating the original position.

We are not enjoined to see any concrete position or to
reflectively engage with others in mind.
We are not
encouraged to think solidaristically or relationally.
We
ask only ourselves what could be generalized for all, but

without any knowledge of who the others are with whom we
share the world.
But Habermas's sociologically sensitive approach
clearly means to bring into sharper relational focus all
that Rawls believes we should place out of our vision.
Recall that Rawls does indeed promote a stance for mutual
recognition, but the consequences are for the legalconst4tutional right for each individual to procure as many
primary goods as is lawfully permitted.
The very desire for
ever more primary goods is not itself a topic for critical

reflection and further investigation as it is surely meant
to be if we take our cues from Habermas's more critically
aware and socially attuned approach to politics.
The
quality of our relationships to one another are not

important to Rawls in the same way they are to Habermas.
While Habermas also takes his bearings from Kant's
categorical imperative, he clearly means to change its
original formulation which he claims is formal and silent.
He asks what can animate the categorical imperative.
answers "unconstrained discourse."
188
With his focus so
He
thoroughly upon dialogue, Habermas bids farewell to the

model of a solitary consciousness which remains at the
center of Kant's categorical imperative,
and which gets
repeated in the Rawlsian reconfiguration.

In opposition to a subject-centered politics, or a
subject-object relationship to the world, Habermas argues
for the politics of radical intersubjectivity.
As Thomas
McCarthy describes Habermas's dialogic twist on Kant's

universalizability procedure:
"This really shifts the frame
of reference from Kant's solitary,
reflecting moral
consciousness to the community of moral subjects in

dialogue."10
imperative is to guide,
then, if the categorical
it can only do so through a drastic
reformulation which enjoins historical subjects themselves

to engage together in what he calls "practical discourses."
But what are practical discourses, when do they arise, what
purpose do they serve, what might thwart their success,
how
practical are they really, and how does Habermas's

deontology work against his endorsement for promoting
"dialogue free from coercion?"
These are questions I will
address below.
10See his introduction to Habermas's Theory of

Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of
Society, Vol. 1, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. x.
189
As a beginning point, we can extract some passages from

Habermas to get at what he means by practical discourses.
Given my project,
the following passage represents a
particularly appropriate starting place because it contains

Habermas's rejection of the Rawlsian procedure and a pitch
for his own.
project.
Habermas speaks directly to the Rawlsian
Distinguishing his project from Rawls's, he puts
it this way:
Practical discourse is an exacting form of
argumentative decision-making.
Like Rawls's
original position, it is a warrant of the
rightness (or fairness) of any conceivable
normative agreement that is reached under
those conditions.
Discourse can play this
role because its idealized, partly
counterfactual presuppositions are precisely
those that participants in argumentation do
in fact make.
This is why I think it
unnecessary to resort to Rawls's fictitious
original position with its "veil of
ignorance.1,11
For all the emphasis we will see Habermas put upon
insights gained through dialogical exchanges,
it remains to
be seen whether or not Habermas remedies the monologic

problem, which he detects is plaguing Kant and Rawls, only
then to have his own approach fall into an unjustifiable
narrowing of the moral domain of justice.
Jurgen Habermas, "Morality and Ethical Life: Does

Hegel's Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?" in Kant
and Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner and William James
Booth, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp.
322-3.
190
The critical question in this regard is does Habermas's

approach, while more appealing than Rawls's,
still remain
trapped in what Benhabib has termed the "rationalistic

fallacy?"12
I shall claim that it does and that Habermas's
strongly construed deontological ethic prevents him from

broadening the moral domain of justice in a way that would
be compatible with his own radically democratic impulses.
It will become increasingly clear that when the
commitment to strongly construed deontology is at issue,
Habermas is neither contesting his legendary predecessor nor
challenging his contemporary colleague, but rather firmly
joining their ranks.
This, however,
should not blind us to
the many important ways in which Habermas clearly means to

part company with these two other theorists of the
categorical imperative.
And how he very clearly succeeds.
It would be a mistake to devalue his vast contributions

to contemporary critical theory.
At the same time, it is
important to keep a vigilant eye on how Habermas restricts

the moral domain of justice and how this threatens to
undermine his participatory model of politics in which
"discourse free from coercion" really holds sway.
Before jumping to the more critical points surrounding
Habermas's narrowing of the moral domain of justice,
I shall
12Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of

the Foundations of Critical Theory, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), pp. 320-323.
191
first give the additional attention deserved to those ways

in which Habermas succeeds in moving away from Kant and
Rawls.
For only then will we see how it is his
uncompromising deontology, not his exemplary participatory

model of politics,
that puts him back in company he would
rather not keep, or so it would initially appear.
And so we
return to Habermas's conception of practical discourse.

Practical Discourse
Through his concept of practical discourse, Habermas
sets out to defend the simple yet extraordinarily
challenging and important idea that being affected by any
norm is enough to gain entrance into a process which
determines whether or not the norm that affects is valid and
therefore ought to be vindicated or repudiated.
Habermas says
" . . .
the categorical imperative
needs to be reformulated as follows"

rather than ascribing as valid to all others
any maxim that I can will to be a universal
law, I must submit my maxim to all others for
purposes of discursively testing its claim to
universality.
The emphasis shifts from what
each can will without contradiction to be a
general law, to what all can will in
agreement to be a universal norm.13
13Jurgen Habermas, "Discourse Ethics: Notes on

Philosophical Justification," in The Communicative Ethics
Controversy, e d s ., Seyla Benhabib & Fred Dallmayr,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 72.
This passage is
requoted from Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen
Habermas, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), p. 326.
192
Others have stated Habermas's theoretical claim, which

is the basic insight of communicative action, as follows:
only those norms can claim to be valid that
meet (or could meet) with the approval of all
affected in their capacity as participants in
a practical discourse."14
Habermas assumes that some norms exist, but they may
not be worthy.
He argues that "norms are judged according
to whether they can be justified,
that is, whether they
deserve to be recognized as legitimate."

norm exists,
"And we say that a
is in force, or enjoys social currency when it
is recognized as valid or justified by those to whom it is

addressed.1,15
He further states that:
A norm is ideally valid means that it

deserves the assent of all those affected
because it regulates problems of action in
their common interest.
That a norm is de
facto established means by contrast that the
validity claim with which it appears is
recognized by those affected, and this
intersubjective recognition grounds the
social force or currency of the norm.16
If we do not grant this intuition, we can go no further
with Habermas.
If we want to recognize the validity of
making this kind of a distinction without,
14Kenneth Baynes,
Criticism, p. 3.
in the process,
The Normative Grounds of Social
15Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action:

Reason and Rationalization of Society, Vol 1, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984), p. 88.
16See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative
Action, Vol. One, pp. 88-9.
193
turning to foundational beliefs, essentializing claims, or

first principles,17 then it may well be that only a very
inclusive and very open procedure for determining whether a
norm is legitimate or not can be endorsed.
Habermas says:
communicative action, the very outcome of

interaction is . . . made to depend on
whether the participants can come to an
agreement among themselves on an
intersubjectively valid appraisal of their
relations to the world.
On this model of
action, an interaction can succeed only if
those involved arrive at a consensus among
themselves
. . ."18
He also says:
Norms express an agreement that obtains in a
social group.
All members of a group for
whom a given norm has validity may expect of
one another that in certain situations they
will carry out (or abstain from) the actions
commanded (or proscribed). The central
concept for complying with a norm means
fulfilling a generalized expectation of
behavior.19
According to Habermas, practical discourses occur when
all affected by any norm
(or their advocates)20 engage in
17None of these are options for Habermas.

He says,
"All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which
the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken
down. " See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative
Action, pp. 2-3.
18See Jurgen Habermas,
Action, p. 106.
The Theory of Communicative
19Jurgen Habermas,
Vol. One, p. 85.
The Theory of Communicative Action,
20Jiirgen Habermas,
Vol. One, p. 104.

194
the very process of vindicating or repudiating its

worthiness to exist.
Participation in practical discourses
by all affected is at the core of Habermas's understanding

of communicative action.
participant is an adult,
While his model assumes the

inclusion is extended to others,
who may be unable to speak and who will therefore need

somebody to advocate for them.
Very young children would be
an example, but not necessarily all children.
Animals too
if the moral domain is significantly expanded,
although
Habermas never mentions this.
The major point here is that
presumably those who advocate on the behalf of another's

position can and will be inspired to do so with the intent
of what is best for those on whose behalf they are
advocating.
In practical discourses,
the participatory process
itself becomes the basis for determining whether or not a

norm can claim legitimacy in the more de jure rather than
merely de facto sense.
practical discourse,
The idea is that only by engaging in
and not before, do participants
themselves come closer to understanding one another about

the status of a particular norm.
Habermas writes:
What was intended by the categorical

imperative can be made good by projecting a
will-formation under the idealized conditions
of universal discourse.
Subjects capable of
moral judgements cannot test each for himself
alone whether an established or recommended
norm is in the general interest and ought to
195
have social force; this can only be done in

common with everyone else involved.21
But then does not such an endorsement for this kind of
a procedure itself have strong idealizations built into its
very framework?
We shall see that it does, and how
Habermas's reticence to acknowledge the full implications of

this throws his whole procedure into question.
I do not
challenge the basic insight of communicative action, but

rather I support it.
I only question the deontological
ethic that so strongly informs it, and then depletes it, and
ultimately limits its full democratic intentions from
emerging.
Like Rawls, Habermas separates questions of formal
justice and those of substantive well-being in a priori
fashion.
But this attempt can only once again mean that the
moral domain of justice is limited to procedure while

deflecting attention away from our life struggles, needs,
and desires.
More generally, questions about happiness and
what might make for "good action" are not deserving of our
reflection and discussion within these "practical
discourses".
Habermas insists upon keeping the Just point
of view more separate from substantive concerns for the Good

than is desirable for his own understanding of democracy.
21Jiirgen Habermas,
Vol. Two, p. 95.

196
If this distinction between the just and the good did

not have such troubling political consequences,
would be of no matter.
then it
But with strong allegiance to this
distinction, Habermas takes the life right out of his own

otherwise very compelling procedure.
From the beginning, he
limits what is discussable and what is not.
In fact, he
calls for a "razor-sharp" distinction.

He s a y s :
the universalization principle acts like a
knife that makes razor-sharp cuts between
evaluative statements and strictly normative
ones, between 'the good' and 'the just.'22
Habermas "define(s)
the scope of application of a
deontological ethics", which he supports, by saying it

covers only practical questions that can be
debated rationally, i. e., those that hold
out the prospect of consensus. It deals not
with value preferences but with the normative
validity of norms of action.23
But recall the consequences that emerged from Kant's
attempt to wholly subordinate questions of virtue to those
of justice.
else.
He could not succeed,
so he looked somewhere
I believe that Habermas inherits this deontological
prejudice precisely from taking his moral bearings from the

Philosophical Justification," in The Communicative Ethics
Con troversy, p . 101.
Philosophical Justification," in Seyla Benhabib and Fred
Dallmayr, e d s ., The Communicative Ethics Controversy, p.
101.
197
thereby ignoring what it fully means
to "shift ground to others," as Kant was beginning to stress

as important in his third critique.
Even though Habermas
shows a way to render the Categorical Imperative dialogical,

the theorist of communicative action is not moving beyond
its deontological limits.
According to his procedure, we are clearly no longer
meant to see ourselves as Kant's self-legislating cogito,
nor are we led behind Rawls's veil of ignorance.
Rather we
are asked to consider what it would mean to put ourselves in

a "practical discourse" where we can engage together and
discuss together the very worthiness of our own n o r m s .
there is a catch here, and it is a deontological one.
But
For
although we are now considering the very worthiness of our

norms together,
in democratic fashion,
and doing so through
insights that we presume dialogical exchanges can bring, we

are without an opportunity to bring up evaluative questions.
We cannot discuss what most matters to us and what we value.
So what good do these discourses do, or can they only ever
be deontologically just?
Or is there a confusion here about
trying to pull justice and the good life apart?

In an incisive critique of all procedural ethics, of
which Habermas's is acknowledged as the richest,
Charles
Taylor makes the crucial point that there are "tacit

assumptions about the good" in any procedural ethics.
198
"[W]hich," he continues,
"on the one hand places their logic
in question and on the other hand renders it possible to

bridge the supposed chasm."24
By assuming that any procedural ethics such as
communicative action is "secretly nourished by a conception
of the good," Taylor helps us see that there is not such a
great divide between procedural ethics and substantive
questions.25
It is Habermas's deontological allegiances
that lead him to sidestep the centrality of this question.

What is important in all of this is the politics of
proceeding "as if" we can make these kinds of hard
distinctions.
not good ones.
There are political consequences and they are

Making this kind of a separation cannot be
acceptable to a more genuine politics of intersubjectivity

and "discursive will formation."
Virtue is, and needs to
be, a part of justice.

However one wants to answer,
there are political
consequences to trying to sustain this distinction.
It is
contrary to what cultivating a democratic way of life is

about.
The procedure is reduced to a procedure which takes
our attention away from addressing questions about what
24Charles Taylor, "The Motivation behind a Procedural

Ethics" in Ronald Beiner and William James Booth, e d s ., Kant
and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 338.
25Charles Taylor,
Ethics," p. 338.
"The Motivation behind a Procedural

199
makes for a better way of life than the one we have

inherited.
If we put ourselves in Habermas's practical
discourses, we are not behind a veil, and this is a big

relief, but we are not quite out in the open either.
And so
we are not really engaging in a way that is consistent with

the politics of radical intersubjectivity.
Habermas is limiting what we, if we follow him through,
in our "practical discourses" can and cannot discuss before
we even get started.
But if we allow ourselves through such
discourse to re-consider our norms, why not allow ourselves

the opportunity to address the goodness of them, as
determined by how all are affected by them, based upon
"shifting our ground" to others as they are and not only
based upon trying to reach cognitive competence through
rational agreement?
If we see Habermas's procedure as inherently
democratic, because through it we can bring up any norm for
the purposes of vindicating or repudiating it, but not in
the process seek out ways through which to cultivate, or at
least consider more substantive and collective well-being,
do not see the motivating force behind these discourses.
we treat these two moral orientation too differently,
procedure runs the risk of being empty.
I
If
the
And what ever can
be the criteria for separating norms from values before the

discussion gets going?
200
As Benhabib addresses this question:

It is crucial that we view our conceptions of
the good life as matters about which
intersubjective debate is possible, even if
intersubjective consensus, let alone
legislation, in these areas remains
undesirable.26
She supports the basic insight behind communicative
ethics, but allows for the possibility for better addressing
our evaluative questions and then potentially transforming
these through allowing them to be addressed in the first
place,
in light of better seeing how each is affected by
them.
She supports Habermas's project of communicative
ethics, but she goes beyond it saying that it should also

render "our conceptions of the good life accessible to moral
reflection and moral transformations."27
While Benhabib supports Habermas's project,
she
nonetheless shifts its focus away from a heavy-handed

deontological ethic, showing a way to bring justice and the
good life more together.
As I argued in the last chapter,
it is Benhabib's closer affinity with Enlarged Mentality,

rather than the Categorical Imperative that allows this
move.
She sees the value in Habermas's procedure, but will
not make strong a priori separations between justice and the
26See Seyla Benhabib's "Communicative Ethics and

Current Controversies in Practical Philosophy," in The
Communicative Ethics Controversy, p. 3 50.
27Seyla Benhabib's "Communicative Ethics and Current
Controversies in Practical Philosophy," p. 350.
201
good life, stressing the desirability of their mediation

instead.
If it is not the point of the "practical discourses" to
clarify our controversies and our issues in light of how
each is affected by them more substantively,
them?
then why have
If we cannot bring some of our values into the
practical discourses in order to reflect upon their

worthiness in light of "shifting our ground to others" more
particularly, beyond what the extension of human dignity
demands,
then what good are they?
Without reformulating
Habermas's project along the lines by which Benhabib

attempts to, Habermas's procedure suffers from deontological
blindness and is thus depleted from everything it cannot
really a priori keep out.
If we see value in these kinds of democratic
procedures, which I do, then we would want the discourses to
be more open and attentive to all of our current crises,
even those that cannot always be put so readily into
rational terms.
By letting more in, we may find that
rational consensus itself is not always appropriate for our

reaching greater understanding with one another, but may
even distort our vision in the process.
of Habermas's most motivating points,
To come back to one
communicative ethics
is about promoting non-threatening relations to otherness
202
and overcoming dominating relations of all kinds.

is its motivation,
If this
there can be no razor sharp cuts.
While I support Habermas's politics of radical

intersubjectivity and his decided focus upon dialogue as a
key ingredient for better defining what democratic theory
needs to be and is about in practice,
I cannot accept his
restrictions upon the content of the discussions, or that he

makes them in advance.
I would come back to one of
Habermas's other insights that the point of communicative

interaction, what makes it so radically different from
strategic or instrumental actions,
is its decided focus upon
the importance of reaching understanding with others, or at

least trying.
If this is the point, Habermas cannot sustain
his deontological distinction, without jeopardizing the

success of his
own focus upon the politics of radical
intersubjectivity.
life distinction,
another
Without easing up on the justice-good

his procedure deteriorates into just
procedure that may be just, but is not also good
precisely because it seeks not to be.

If the point is to really reach some kind of
understanding with one another,
as he says it is, it is not
helpful from the beginning to "cut like a knife" what is and

what is not a question of normative versus evaluative
validity.
A real politics of engagement cannot proceed
203
with these distinctions, but must find ways to bring these

moral orientations together more.
I believe that of the three theorists studied in this
dissertation, Habermas,
compelling.
in many ways, remains the most
Yet, he undermines the whole spirit of his
procedure insofar as it is meant to so wholly endorse the

subject-subject relationship.
This would mean that the
subjects come
into the discourse as they are, which may not
be as one who
can put forth the most
rational argument,
but
whose needs are important to try to understand and better

address because this is what is good about this kind of
procedure and
this kind of democracy
which heotherwise
supports.
When the focus moves back to engaging without coercion
and trying to understand without strategy or
instrumentality,
then his procedure is made more compelling.
It is my thesis that if Habermas had engaged more with

Kant's alternative,
rather than relying too heavily upon
cognitive competence, he might have agreed with Kant that

the point of cognition is to "make final use of it" and this
begins when we "shift our ground to others more."
Only when
we ignite this process are we better equipped to make use of

Habermas's
with
"practical discourses" which would not proceed
a priori sharp distinctions, but look for ways to
bring justice and the good life together.
204
We cannot better
judge what we do not allow ourselves to first see, and this

is the point of the Politics of Enlarged Mentality: to build
and seek out ways to create and cultivate non-threatening
relations to others while also envisioning happiness as more
sharable.
This enlarges the moral domain of justice.
Recovering Kant's conception of Enlarged Mentality is

to take conscious steps in these directions,
to cultivate
this way of life, but this requires a shift to others as

they are.
As Kant was beginning to realize there are no
determinant judgments beyond the regulative ideas of human

dignity, but reflective judging requires a shift to others
more particularly in order to better derive the General Will
from the ground up.
This is the true meeting place of Kant
and Rousseau, and how to vindicate them,
though retaining
their commitments, by moving with and going beyond them.

This is the new groundwork!
The Politics of Enlarged Mentality makes it more
important to try to understand others as they experience the
world, and not only as how they can articulate through
rational discourse what norms can claim validity or deserve
repudiation.
If we only ever consider the norms regulating our
actions, but do not address the implications of the actions
themselves, we deflect attention away from questions about
happiness and what might make for more sharable and good
205
actions.
Habermas disbars more substantive questions about
what makes for the good life and happiness into the debates
because he does not believe we could rationally ever agree
upon what these might be.28
But if it no longer is the
purpose to reach rational agreement but it is the point to

better understand one another,
through shifting our ground
to others as they are, then we may find that what we really

all want goes beyond the very logic of deontology itself.
Habermas succeeds in giving the Categorical Imperative
a dialogical formulation, and so his procedure does not
repeat the silence of the original Kantian model or of
Rawls's, but what puts all three procedures of the
Categorical Imperative into question is strong
methodological deontology.
It may be that rational agreement is not as important
as trying to hear what the other is attempting to say or
what their position is, or what we ourselves are really
after.
If we reach greater understanding, we may find that
rational consensus itself may not be what we really need,

want, or desire.
But happiness and good action is.
If we
let ourselves reflect upon and discuss questions of well

being and not only the worthiness of the norms regulating
our actions within the "practical discourses", then we might
28He calls "moral-practical" questions those we can

discuss rationally while "aesthetic-expressive" ones we
cannot.
See his Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two.
206
gain insights into how this activity itself contributes to

cultivating a more just point of view because there is
something of the good in this activity.
But if we enter the
"practical discourses" with the idea that we can only

discuss what is a question of justice as separable from the
good life,
I do not see how this is consistent with the
politics of radical intersubjectivity and collective

normative will-formation.
If Habermas sought to integrate these more, he could
not make his quasi-scientific claims for morality.
But
watch what happens to the theorist of communicative action

when he does not see the full value of his own procedure.
Communicative Action; Oriqinarv or Compelling?
While I agree with Habermas that the focus upon
reaching understanding is desirable and essential for the
democratic way of life, Habermas makes a very troubling
claim about the status of communicative action.
Here we
need to look at the originary mode he gives to communicative

action.
Now that we have compared communicative to
instrumental and strategic action, we have a basis for

understanding the basic differences.
They are rather stark.
In further developing communicative action, Habermas

seems to do so veeringly.
gripping,
What is peculiar,
if initially
about Habermas's alternative conception of reason
is that he gives it a primary status, upon which any other
207
forms are said to "parasitically feed."
In other words,
Habermas does not merely argue that communicative action is

better than instrumental and strategic action
(although he
must believe this) as much as he makes a case for its

primacy.
Habermas says,
" [r]eaching understanding is the
inherent telos of human speech."29

Describing Habermas's project, Rasmussen says,
The argument is not that communicative forms
ought to be primary, the argument is that
they are primary.
Reason does not need to be
regenerated, it is by nature regenerative in
the sense that reason as communicative reason
is embedded in language.30
But in reclaiming reason in its more communicative
form,
is it also necessary to argue that it has an originary
mode?
What good,
theory?
if any, does this do for democratic
How does democratic theory at all benefit from
claiming such an originary mode for communicative action?

Is the claim for the originary mode of communicative action
itself meant to help us develop a conception of society that
can get us beyond all forms of threatening relations to each
other?
Habermas seems to suppose that there is quite a let to
gain by claiming that communicative action is the originary
29Jtirgen Habermas,
Vol. One, p. 287.
30David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas, p. 28.

208
mode of all action.
If he can persuade that communicative
action does in fact enjoy a certain originary status,
then
he assumes the path is paved for showing how all other

actions are distortions.
But if we see these other forms as
distortions, can this really be because they are not

originary, or do we want to evaluate instrumental and
strategic actions as themselves inappropriate for good human
relationships,
and something to consciously strive to get
beyond?
It is troubling that Habermas claims an originary mode
for his alternative conception of reason, primarily because
this diverts our attention away from the virtues of critical
theory whose practical intent is to get beyond all modes of
domination.
David Held once described Habermas's project
as the "attempt to develop a theory of society with a

practical intention: the self-emancipation of people from
domination"31
The extent to which it lives up to this goal
is what keeps it alive.
But Habermas is attempting to prove
that communicative action is more grounded than it might

truly b e .
This has prompted charitable critics of his project,
such as Rasmussen32 and McCarthy,33 to ask what is the cost
31David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory:

Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley and Los A n g e l e s : University
of California Press, 1980), p. 250.
32David Rasmussen,
Reading Habermas.
209
of his attempt to ground communicative action, and why is

this even necessary?
demonstrate his claim,
If Habermas can convincingly

then communicative action is not a
matter of choice or mere preference, or even a matter of

moral transformation, but visible in our very utterances to
each other.
(that is, if our relations to each other are
not already suffering from deep colonizing practices

creeping in from depersonalized and systemic imperatives,
such as capitalism and the bureaucratic state which Habermas
believes to be the case.)
The attempt to ground
communicative action in science rather than cultivate it

leads to not cultivating it.
This claim takes Habermas,
and any who might follow
him, away from the greater part of his argument for the
politics of non-threatening relations to otherness via
developing radical intersubjectivity.
This brings him into
quasi-scientific forays that seem to be wholly inappropriate

for his theory.
What gets lost from this claim, and then
the increased investment in it, is that orienting our

actions in order to reach understanding is desirable for its
own sake.
This is democratic virtue.
In claiming that language itself reveals and contains

an inherent telos geared towards reaching understanding,
33Thomas McCarthy,
Habermas.
The Critical Theory of Jurgen

210
Habermas makes his scientific claims for morality.
But
morality can have no such status, even in reconstructive

form.
Saying this, however,
is not to also claim that
morality is therefore without criteria.

understanding,
Trying to reach
through extending virtual reciprocity and
deeper caring are not akin to scientific claims, but these

are all unmistakably moral dispositions and provide criteria
for promoting non-dominating relations to each other.
Seeing the good in trying to attain mutual understanding
helps one move away from claims that such attempts must have
something of the scientific in them.
Science,
for all its
own virtues, cannot help us here.

With these claims, Habermas's deontology visibly
intrudes upon his democratic inclinations.
Cast under the
dark shadow of Kant's Categorical Imperative, Habermas

inherits all of its deontological trappings and prejudices,
which recall Habermas never really sought to repudiate as
much as he tried to validate with a communicative form.
Habermas displays a way to reach a dialogical rational
consensus about our norms without allowing substantive
engagement with what is good about our actions.
We thereby
could emerge from Habermas's practical discourses with

questionable agreements because we do not make it our point
to reflect and engage about the good to begin with.
211
While the emphasis upon dialogue and the development of

practical discourse are both deeply compelling for
democratic theory and practice, his move into linguistics,
while interesting when comprehensible,
takes us from seeing
any motivation we might have for wanting to communicatively

interact rather than not, or from seeing that communicative
action itself needs to be developed and nurtured for its own
sake.
This requires seeing its virtues as virtues.

Drawing particularly from Austin,
and then through an
in-depth and complicated discussion of linguistics,

introduces us to illocutions and perlocutions.
Habermas
If we allow
time to get acquainted with them, we eventually learn for

what purpose.
Perlocutions are parasitic upon illocutions
which are primary.
But once all of this is cleared up, it
pretty soon thereafter is difficult to acknowledge what any

of this has to do with the politics of radical
intersubjectivity or democratic theory.
Rasmussen's question to Habermas is a pressing one.
asks,
Is it that once we know the illocutionary
(read communicative reason) has a certain
priority over the perlocutionary (read
strategic or instrumental reason) in language
we will struggle to make this the case in
society?34
34David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas, p. 96.

Parentheticals mine.
212
He
Is it a fear that his theory will degenerate in its

significance by falling into being a decionistic one that
causes Habermas to seek a grounding for it that somehow
reaches beyond the evaluative?
response
(and criticism)
In other words,
that one might claim,
is the
"well, you
like communicative action and I do not," that leads Habermas

into wanting to ground it in something more solid than a
perceived preference?
Habermas claims that communicative
action is not merely a matter of preference.
Any and all
ethical skeptics are the specters haunting Habermas.
If the
claims that reaching understanding is the inherent telos of

language proves true, Habermas has won the argument.
But
what we wipe away from our attention here is the motivation

there is for wanting to reach understanding.
For all his differences from Rawls, and they are many
and substantive, Habermas agrees with him on this point.
Deontology is ultimately at variance with its own desire for
justice.
Habermas's deontology and his endorsement for the
politics of radical intersubjectivity cannot be reconciled.

Breaking out of the deontological straightjacket does
not mean that one forfeits the benefits of procedural ethics
as much as it requires getting clear about the goodness
motivating it.
If one is unabashedly interested in
promoting all forms of non-threatening relations to

otherness as Habermas obviously is, it is simply necessary
213
to make evaluative judgements that non-threatening relations

to otherness and its cultivation is better.
It is not
necessary to claim or show how linguistic or scientific

vindication makes for communicative action, but rather to
show that it is good to practice such relations and build
upon these.
While his question about linguistics fascinates,
also distracts.
it
Habermas is at his least compelling when he
speaks of how perlocutions are parasitic upon illocutions.

It is sometimes beyond difficult to find the value in what
he says upon reading such sentences as the following two,
which abound in his text.
He begins to create bulky
constructions is his attempts to substantiate democracy via

linguistics.
Just to give a taste of what happens to
Habermas's own language when he uses perlocutions and

illocutions rather than pushing the argument into what is
good about communicative action,
examples.
I cite the following two
Habermas says,
I have called the type of interaction in

which all participants harmonize their
individual plans of action with one another
and thus pursue their illocutionary aims
without reservation 'communicative
action.'35
Or again,
35Jurgen Habermas,
Volume One, p. 294.

214
. . I count as communicative action those

linguistically mediated interactions in which
all participants pursue illocutionary aims,
and only illocutionary aims, with their
mediating acts of communication36
As Habermas increasingly invests in the originary mode
of communicative action,
the motivation for adopting it as a
better way through which to coordinate our actions seems to

disappear from sight.
Habermas seems to lose track of what
his participatory model of politics is about, what kind of a

life--the good life I assume--this mode of being with each
other both assumes is desirable and means to generate and
bring further forth.
In the end,
I am not really sure if language reveals an
"inherent telos towards reaching understanding" as Habermas

claims.
It might.
But Habermas's attempts to show that it
does still takes us away from evaluating what is good about

That it is more desirable to orient
our actions on trying to reach understanding seems to vanish

as soon as claims for its primacy becomes the focal point.
I conclude with the claim that communicative ethics is
compelling so much more than because it might be originary.
Once the claims that it enjoys primacy are not central to
the Habermasian project, we can see communicative ethics in
a more illuminating light.
36Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action

Volume One, p. 295.
215
Conclusion:
Enlarging the Moral Domain of Justice
In this dissertation,
I examined what I posited to be
Kant's two competing political philosophies as expressed

through his Categorical Imperative and his conception of
Enlarged Mentality.
Through a stylized juxtaposition of
these two Kantian legacies,
I sought to delineate two very
different approaches about how to define the moral domain of

justice appropriate for a democratic polity.
Beginning with Kant's Categorical Imperative,
I showed
the weaknesses of a procedure for deriving norms for others

through silently consulting one's own consciousness in
wholly dissociated fashion.
I concluded that the political
implications of the Categorical Imperative lead to an a

priori blindness to general well-being.
Needs get displaced
and evaluative concerns dismissed rather than incorporated

more directly into the moral domain of justice.
Dissatisfied with Kant's attempt to derive anything
more substantive from the Categorical Imperative beyond the
negative virtues,
I turned to his alternative political
philosophy of Enlarged Mentality, which I reinterpreted as a
216
sublation of the Categorical Imperative.

dialectical fashion,
and transcend it.
In true
I attempted to preserve, annihilate,
That is, I showed a way to preserve its
radical egalitarian intent by rejecting its overriding

problem of proceeding from "noumenal" assumptions of
idealized autonomy and ahistorical consciousness, and then
pointed to something greater.
In Kant's alternative model,
I found a far more
fruitful way in which to think about defining the moral

domain of justice.
In this alternative,
the moral domain of
justice extends well beyond the logic of deontology and its

tendency to degenerate into blind juridicalism.
Instead of
making a virtue out of juridical blindness, an enlarged

moral domain of justice relies upon contextual judging and
political engagement with our own inevitable historical
circumstances from within which our own societal and
cultural conflicts emerge.
Building upon Arendt and Benhabib,
I further concluded
that Kant's alternative has most meaning for us the more we

are historically self-conscious of our own conditions.
Once
we replace the assumption of pure consciousness and a priori

notions of autonomy with historical consciousness and turn
our attention to concrete struggles for recognition, we can
view any struggle for autonomy emerging from historical
situations through which social and cultural actions
217
necessarily transpire.
It is these that become for us
important to engage with as we ourselves come to see that

each one of us is individuated from within a larger and
inherited societal context, not autonomous or prior to it.
In Kant's alternative,
I found a different groundwork
than the one he initially set out to deduce from pure

practical reasoning.
The politics of enlarged mentality
enjoins us to begin from the ground up, not the other way
around.
I concluded that by shifting our ground to
"concrete others," we are led to more coherently define the

moral point of view appropriate for a democratic polity.
With Benhabib,
I remain convinced that what matters is
not to replace the Generalized other with the

Concrete other, but to develop a
universalistic moral theory that defines the
"moral point of view" in light of the
reversibility of perspectives and an
"enlarged mentality."1
Rather than by trying to deduce and thereby reduce the
moral domain of justice to juridicalism, where every
individual gains legal standing, but no more, our
understanding of the moral domain of justice is now
transformed.
Testing mv Thesis
To test the thesis -- that drawing from the Categorical
Imperative tends to bring deontological prejudices into the
^ e y l a Benhabib, Situating the Self,

Routledge, 1992), p. 164.
218
(New York:
very definition of the moral domain of justice -- I turned

my specific focus to the two most highly influential
contemporary neo-Kantian theorists.
Rawls and Habermas
represent a new generation of political philosophers who

turn to Kant in order to get their bearings on how to define
the moral domain of justice, appropriate for a democratic
polity.
Accompanying both Rawls and Habermas through on their
abstract thought experiments,
I found that both procedures
separate questions of formal justice from those of the good

life in a priori fashion.
I showed how Rawls's "procedural
reinterpretation of the Categorical Imperative" suffers from

the same limitations as Kant's original formulation.
behind the Veil of Ignorance is, as Rawls promises,
to Kant's Categorical Imperative.
flaws.
Going
similar
But herein lies its
Rawls's procedure emphasizes the same dissociated
sense of autonomy as Kant's Categorical Imperative rather

than engaging with the insight that the individuation
process happens historically and contextually and
relationally.
Rawls never asks us to think of who "the
other" is, except as one, who, like oneself,
is assumed to
have a life plan and therefore is in need of the same

primary goods we would all expect to secure for ourselves so
that we might enjoy our own autonomy.
219
No attempt is made to
define the moral domain of justice in light of bringing more

concrete perspectives into view.
I showed how Rawls's method also shares the silence of
the original model in Kant's Categorical Imperative.
We are
simply encouraged to ask ourselves alone about how to define

the moral domain of justice.
Rawls does not ask us to shift
our ground to others more concretely before or as we derive

the moral point of view appropriate for a democratic polity.
Rather, he asks us to proceed as if we were blind to these
very perspectives.
While I remain sympathetic to Rawls's
conviction that a generalized view remains desirable to

cultivate,
I concluded that his procedure does not allow us
to think coherently about what it might mean to cultivate

one.
Going behind the Veil,
I argued,
is a temptation worth
resisting.
Rawls's procedure, unlike Kant's Enlarged Mentality
perspective, does not try "to find the universal when only
the particular is given."
away.
Rawls takes all the particulars
At one and the same time, though, he smuggles in a
highly particular conception of the self, which he then

seeks to universalize or "substitute" for everybody, not
recognizing as important that this procedure itself deflects
our attention away from cultivating collective well-being.
I found in Rawls's procedure the same deontological
trappings that draw boundaries in a prioristic terms,
220
defining the moral domain of justice too legalistically,

before participants, or even legislators themselves might
have a chance to make law in light of practicing
reversalizability of perspectives with many more concrete
vantage points as is encouraged by the politics of enlarged
mentality.
I next focussed upon Habermas's attempt to "go public"
with the Categorical Imperative by examining his procedure
for "normative will-formation" which he argues we best see
as taking place in "practical discourses."
Compared to
Rawls's abstract thought experiment on how best to think

about the moral domain of justice,
I found this a much more
engaging attempt to reformulate Kant's original.

procedure brings many strengths.
Habermas's
In his abstract thought
experiment, we are not encouraged to ask ourselves alone

what is generalizable.
But it is precisely his point that
our norms, whenever they are brought into question by any

one of us, are to be validated or repudiated via dialogic
exchanges.
The idea is that such a dialogic procedure further
informs our views in regard to the troubled norm.
Moreover,
it is assumed that this process influences our reflections

and actions such that we might say about the procedure that
what emerges from it is acceptable because we have gone
through the very dialogic process itself which highlighted
221
for us many more vantage points than if we did not engage in

such a procedure.
I found that Habermas truly reconceptualizes Kant's
Categorical Imperative in dialogic terms such that the basic
insight of discourse ethics is the following:
norms can claim to be valid that meet
Only those
(or could meet) with
the approval of all affected in their capacity as

participants in a practical discourse.2
In regard to
Habermas's attempt to re-work the Categorical Imperative,
conclude that the emphasis upon dialogue is not in any way

the problem.
This remains Habermas's strength.
weakens the argument,
What
is the deontological ethic which
accompanies the dialogue.
It restricts the dialogue to
"norms" and not "values."
But I conclude this separation
has politically troubling implications, cannot really hold

up and is obfuscating.
While I found Habermas is much closer to Kant's
enlarged mentality perspective than is Rawls, his support
for a strong deontological ethic remains problematic for two
reasons.
First,
if "practical discourse" a priori banishes
evaluative questions from the very moral domain of justice,

we may not be able to discuss what matters most to us.
Frequently,
it is questions about our values that are in
2Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social

Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas (Albany: State
University Press, 1992), p. 3.
222
need of most sorting out with each other.
Quite simply,
how
can we know what we will find endorsable if the discussion

is at the outset limited to what we know a priori will bring
agreement from the beginning?
In allowing ourselves to discuss values,
this does not
mean that we have to accept them all as we discuss them, but

excepting them a priori is not acceptable either.3
Reflective and actual engagement and more solidaristic openmindedness is.
The politics of enlarged mentality resists a
priori separations, encouraging the democratic process

itself to perpetually occur through a simultaneous politics,
revolution, and education.4
Second, what is of concern in all of this is the
political implications of making this distinction in a
priori fashion and what consequences this has,
in fact.
believe the very attempt to antecedently separate the just

from the good leads to a suppression of needs, which is to
subvert the radical intent of politics by way of discussion,
3Seyla Benhabib makes a similar point saying, "It is

crucial that we view our conceptions of the good life as
matters about which intersubjective debate is possible, even
if intersubjective consensus let alone legislation, in these
areas remains undesirable.
However, only through such
argumentative processes can we draw the line between issues
of justice and of the good life in an epistemically
plausible manner, while rendering our conception of the good
life accessible to moral reflection and moral
transformation." See The Communicative Ethics Controversy, p
350.
4I owe this insight to Mark Roelofs.
223
such that the formal procedure becomes more important than

the content any of us might bring into it.
This implication
undermines the strength of Habermas's project of

communicative ethics, which is above all committed to
politics by way of discussion,
and the presumed insights
dialogue brings.
But limiting the discussions to norms alone,
I am
afraid, means we can only ever discuss those questions upon

which it is somehow clear from the beginning that we could
find agreement upon.
happened to democracy?
But if this is the case, what has

How will we ever know how to sort
out the differences in regard to our controversies unless we

give ourselves access to discuss them, unless we go through
the democratic process which Habermas himself says is an
exacting one?
If we cannot discuss what might be our worst
problems and our competing values through the practical

discourses, what really is their purpose?
What good do they
do?
Yet,
I sympathize with Habermas's struggle which I
believe is this.
I think he wants not to regress behind the
norm of human dignity, by falling prey to "concrete

particularism" that sometimes expresses itself in Naziism or
Fascism or the current nationalisms competing in bloody
battles across much of the world today, e. g., former
Yugoslavia . . .
I take this point well, yet I maintain it
224
is possible to acknowledge the regulative ideal of human

dignity, and view this not only as a norm, although it
certainly is this, but as deeply evaluative as well,
so
wherein really lies the razor-sharp distinction between the

just and the good?
To act as if we can make it,
I believe,
is not only confusing, but moreover what I am concerned

about are the political implications of trying to sustain
this kind of a distinction in practice.
Making this
distinction a priori risks reducing the moral domain of

justice to juridicalisms,
formalisms, and procedures thereby
deflecting attention away from our attempts,
our energy,
and
our democratic spirit to focus more upon concrete well-being

and shared happiness as important to the very project of
democracy as well as to life itself.
This is not an argument that concludes with or is a
plea to a priori define "the good life" or to prescribe in
hegemonic terms what is the good.
Rather, this is an
argument to expand the very moral domain of justice itself

such that questions about our needs, hopes, and desires and
our evaluative concerns and how we experience these are more
accessible to our political reflections and our public
discussions.
This is an argument to expand the moral domain
of justice such that evaluative questions gain access to our

public reflections in order to better inform our
institutional practices such that they do not continue to
225
proliferate juridical personalities with little or nothing

gained substantively.
The practical effects of making razor sharp
distinctions between justice and the good life is to deflect
attention away from the importance of deliberating upon our
needs, hopes and desires for well-being.
These questions,
believe, belong at the center of our political reflections,

not on the margins.
And they should inform our
institutional practices and arrangements in helping to both

generate and produce collective well-being.
An enlarged
moral domain of justice includes these, rather than, a

priori excludes or wholly privatizes or displaces them
altogether.
The political implications of making a priori
separations lead me to conclude that cultivating a more
radically democratic spirit and civic ethos that blends
justice and good life concerns, rather than trying to tear
them apart is more desirable for generating collective well
being.
A deontological conception of justice, because so
intent on not teaching virtue and so utterly privatizing it,

will itself not be virtuous, although it will be
deontologically just and probably highly juridical.
The way
out of avoiding dogma on the question of what is good is to

enlarge the moral domain of justice itself, making
collective well-being the goal, but supporting a grounds-up
226
process that strives for it, beginning with the politics of

Enlarged Mentality.
Habermas's concern about the pathologies of "concrete
particularism" can hardly be ignored, but the answer to this
danger is neither to go behind a veil as Rawls suggests nor
to restrict practical discourses to norms alone as Habermas
suggests.
All of these insights lead me to more strongly
conclude that the way out of these difficulties is to

support an Enlarged Mentality perspective.
Kant's Enlarged
Mentality perspective as first spotted by Arendt and then

radicalized by Benhabib fundamentally serves to re-direct
the Habermasian project.
It is no longer possible to study
communicative ethics without making use of Benhabib's

insights on the matter,
and,
I believe,
it is her closer
affinity with Kant's Enlarged Mentality perspective that

takes its bearings from reflective judging and context sensitivity,
but remains principled nonetheless, because we
are now enjoined to shift ground to "concrete others" more,

that serves to revive Habermas's project through wholly
transforming it from within.
Building and engaging with this alternative Kantian
legacy is far more productive for re-defining the moral
domain of justice for a democratic polity.
If we do not
attempt to expand our moral domain of justice, we will have

more juridicalism and less understanding.
227
It will be
tougher to shift ground to others more when juridicalism in

many ways reflects and continues to propagate a more
adversarial and individualistic culture.
These conclusions
are not meant to denigrate the gains of civil and political

rights.
Rights emerged from our struggles for concrete
recognition in a society that denied its less privileged

basic civil standing in society or some independence from
the "mother country" and the benefits of living in civil
society,
especially for the more educated or more
professional.
But, the sole emphasis upon legalism in
defining the moral domain of justice is not adequate to

address the worst of our society's ills.
Our culture is in
profound crisis, particularly on the questions of race, sex,

and class.
I do not believe that legalisms can any longer
address the cultural challenges emerging in these spheres.

Enlarging the moral domain of justice means to break free of
juridical blindness and to think beyond addressing any of
these problems through legal means alone, and to begin to
really face these through the politics of Enlarged
Mentality.
Negative Freedom
The advantages of Kant's negative freedom is that he
shows a way to understand external relations that need not
be possessively individualist, assumptions that I believe
228
beleaguer other conceptions of negative freedom as expressed

in canonical rivals, most particularly Hobbes and Locke.
Although I believe Hobbes and Locke--not Kant--remain
Liberal Democracy's philosophers, particularly American
style,5 my point is this: Even were we to draw from a more
enlightened conception of negative freedom a la Kant's
Categorical Imperative, which Rawls and Habermas seek to,
and moreover move beyond it by trying to creatively
reformulate it, as Rawls and Habermas do, we still end up
with an overly juridically defined and morally limited
domain of justice.
Were we in America ever to make a break
with Hobbesian and Lockean assumptions,
founding new
institutions by looking to Kant for inspiration would not

help much, unless we creatively engaged with his alterative
to the Categorical Imperative and further developed these
political insights.
Structural transformations begin by asking what the
world looks like to others, more concretely and more
5See H. Mark Roelofs, The Poverty of American Politics:

A Theoretical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1992), Chapters Two and Three, but
especially pp. 44-62. Roelofs systematically traces what he
calls the "Bourgeois/Protestant Complex" that he argues
imbues and informs American institutions and culture.
Hobbes and Locke inform the Bourgeois aspect of the cleavage
which is systematically ambiguous because competing with it
is another moral orientation that in rooted in radical
egalitarianism, communitarianism and pacifism that represent
the other pole.
The result is a systematically ambiguous
political orientation.
229
particularly.
This is one concrete step in reattempting to
define the moral domain of justice.
For example,
if
legislators looked not to punitive measures to "discipline"

(Foucault) welfare recipients, but instead asked themselves
what it might really be like to be unemployed for the last
five years because the economy itself cannot accommodate
everybody who has an interest in getting a job, other
concerns about true welfare and happiness might enter the
debates, were they not a priori restricted and privatized.
If concern for all via an Enlarged Mentality motivated our
legislators,
the new Contract With America currently under
way would not be on the brink of legislation.
The Contract
could not better show how lacking in an Enlarged Mentality

our legislators frequently are.
But, since it is my
observation that legislators are themselves structurally

constrained and cannot themselves act more magnanimously,
even if they should desire to, I can only conclude that a
firmer commitment to cultivating a stronger democratic ethos
that brings many of these institutional arrangements
themselves into question is desirable because,
to one of Habermas's insights,
to come back
institutions frequently
suppress generalizable interests from emerging in the first

p l a c e .6
6Jiirgen Habermas,
Press, 1973), p. 113.
Legitimation Crisis,
230
(Boston: Beacon
If our legislators were ever to make law with an

Enlarged Mentality perspective they would have to legislate
against excessive self-interest.
to others more,
When we shift our ground
in order to provide a more compelling
politics for all, we are thereby calling into question many

of the fundamental structures of our own institutions.
But
the results of doing so might be a more shared sense of

well-being, not only the legal protection to pursue and
consume it privately.
Pathologies
There are pathologies on both sides of the justicegood life tension.
This is why it is important to neither
succumb to one nor the other, but keep them in the same
moral domain, and in healthier conflict.
Justice without
solidarity and understanding will be "substitutionalist" in

the Benhabisian sense, an extension of juridical standing to
all, but no more.
On the other side,
if only the good,
whose?
In this century,
believe,
"concrete particularism" would,
have been fodder for Kant's appeal to "abstract
universality" where moral obligations outrightly and

normatively prohibit many modern atrocities and acts of
genocide happening as I write my conclusions.
Habermas,
Like
I believe the sage from Konigsberg would have
231
then
truly and deeply grieved over these modern tragedies,

pointing to the virtues of abstract universality.
The virtues of negative freedom and negative virtues
are all plain to see if we would only always see them.
yet herein lies the major challenge.
And
If we only mostly see
these--our vision is obscured which is what I believe has

been the overriding intent and strength,
success in this
country, but we have mostly depleted our conception of the

moral domain of justice from virtue and positive freedom.
Any conception of the moral domain of justice that so
insistently seeks to keep virtue outside of its scope, as
deontology does, will eventually succeed by failing.
new pathologies emerge.
side,
And
To avoid pathologies on either
"concrete universalism" is the only option left.
for this purpose,

way to begin.
And
a politics of enlarged mentality is one
Benhabib's "historically self-conscious
inter-active universalism" is my model here.
Looking Beyond Deontological Liberalism

Looking beyond deontology means that justice and the
good life are not as far apart as Kant originally sought to
keep them.
In the end, the great deontologist himself
begins to yield in the face of contingencies,
but still
remains principled through striving to find solutions to our

inevitable differences and tensions through adopting an
Enlarged Mentality perspective.
232
Kant's commitment to radical egalitarianism is not

relinquished, but rather it is superseded so that
understanding is the primary goal,
rather than consensus as
we recognize we are as complex and diverse in all of our

concreteness through which we want to be free to express
infinite and diverse modes of living together.
If even a relationship between two people is not best
grasped by reaching a consensus, but thrives when there is a
mutual attempt to understand one another, why or how could
we want it to be our goal to reach consensus for 280 million
people?
And, of course, we cannot restrict our view to this
country because our actions here have consequences for other

people in other parts of the world.
This is not a trivial
claim, but one that strongly suggests that our foreign

policies as well as our domestic strife should proceed with
an Enlarged Mentality perspective.
This is by no means a suggestion for world government
which as Kant well knew, and with whom I concur, would be
among the worst of tyrannies7, but rather an endorsement
for a moral orientation in which reaching understanding and
liberating oneself or one's nation from excessive selfinterest is the primary g o a l .
Reaching understanding
through mutual respect that transcends into care brings

Philosophy, Ronald Beiner, ed. (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982), p.
44.
233
justice and the good life together.
Reaching understanding
about our respective needs, hopes, and desires that take us

beyond the commitment to mutually respect one another is the
driving force behind the politics of an Enlarged Mentality
perspective.
The moral domain of justice in this enlarged
understanding does not limit itself to juridical
conceptualizations and practices, but seeks to move beyond
them.
Going beyond them means to move substantive questions
of well-being and happiness to the center of our political

debates, not privatize these so completely, and thereby only
legally protect everybody's private pursuits of them.
The
point is to liberate oneself or one's nation from selfinterest .

This cannot ever be a priori determined, but requires
cultivation of democratic will and institutions that do not
pre-empt a true politics of reflective commitment to others
through generating a politics of Enlarged Mentality and
solidarity with those who struggle for a better life than
the one a Liberal society generates for all of us.
It
requires imagination and commitment to try and put oneself

in the shoes of another, not only as one deserving of
respect,
and as one who has formal standing in society, but
as a concrete,
sensuous being who has needs that require
234
more than formal standing in society, moving the margins of

our society to the center of our politics.
Conn ectures
By way of conclusion,
I re-formulate Rawls's abstract
thought experiment based upon what might have happened if he

drew from Kant's Enlarged Mentality perspective.
Compare
the differences between the democratic flavor that comes

through in Rawls's original formulation -- which
deontologically rips justice and the good life apart -- with
my reformulation which puts them back together, based upon
engaging with Kant's Enlarged Mentality perspective.
Recall that Rawls,
in asking us to simulate the
Original Position as a privileged vantage point from which

to define the moral domain of justice invokes the
metaphorical devise of the Veil of Ignorance.
Recall that
Rawls says:
It is assumed, then, that the parties do not
know certain kinds of particular facts.
First of all, no one knows his place in
society, his class position or social status;
nor does he know his fortune in the
distribution of natural assets and abilities,
his intelligence and strength, and the like.
Nor, again, does he know his conception of
the good, the particulars of his rational
plan of life, or even the special feature of
his psychology such as his aversion to risk
or liability to optimism or pessimism,
More
than this, I assume that the parties do not
know the particular circumstances of their
own society.
That is they do not know its
economic or political situation, or the level
of civilization and culture it has been able
to achieve.
The persons in the original
235
position have no information to which

generation they belong.
Now,
I want to demonstrate what might happen if Rawls
drew upon Kant's alternative.
Remember what Kant says:
But the question here is not one of the

faculty of cognition, but of the mental habit
of making use of it. This, however small the
range and degree to which a man's natural
endowments extend, still indicates a man of
enlarged m i n d : if he detaches himself from
the subjective personal conditions of his
judgement, which cramp the minds of so many
others, and reflects upon his own judgement
from a universal standpoint (which he can
only determine by shifting his ground to the
standpoint of others).8
No doubt on first sight, these appear like similar
exercises, and there is an unmistakable ring of Kantianism
imbuing both passages.
And it is clearly the intent of both
procedures to practice some degree of reversalizability.

But Kant's man of enlarged mind does not go behind a veil,
but tries to liberate himself from self-interest by shifting
his ground to the standpoint of others.
I do not know why Kant relegated this insight to a
parenthetical.
passage,
It is the most important sentence in this
if not in all his writing.
It is an essential
insight that an enlarged moral domain of justice cannot

afford to do without, but is its life.
Rawlsian moral
agents practice reversalizability only with others who are
8Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans.,

James Creed Meredith, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p.
153 .
236
assumed to have a life plan whatever else they also want,

others who have not critically looked into the great costs
of deontologically defining the moral domain of justice.
There is no shifting ground in the Rawlsian experiment to
others except in vacuo, much like Kant's Categorical
Imperative.
But the political implications of shifting in
vacuo cannot move beyond negative virtue and may even

mistake negative for positive virtue.
But Kant shows a way
to move beyond this way of thinking.

Now consider what Rawls might have said if he offered a
"procedural re-interpretation of Enlarged Mentality" rather
than a "procedural re-interpretation of the Categorical
Imperative, which repeats the deontological ethic.
It would
go something like this.

It is assumed, then that the parties, even
though they cannot always know all the
particular facts, will, by attempting to
shift their ground to those they are aware
of, seek to derive the moral point of view
appropriate for a democratic polity in light
of practicing reversalizability with as many
"Concrete Others" as they can.
Rather than
ignore particular circumstances and social
facts, each is enjoined to make use of these
insights in order to consistently make
efforts to better derive what might be in
everybody's collective well-being.
Based
upon these insights, we define institutions
to meet these needs.
If Rawls engaged with Kant's alternative, everything he
abstracts away needs to come back out from behind the veil
and into our "reflective judgements" as we try to find the
237
"universal when only the particular is given."
It is not
acceptable to say class is no matter in a society so fully

defined and structured by class.
It is not acceptable to
conclude that sex is insignificant in a culture that is

suffering its way through an extraordinarily problematic
gender-structured society and the violences that surround
it.
An Enlarged Mentality perspective proceeds from the
insight that only after, and not before, we ignite this

process of shifting our ground to concrete others more can
we speak of generating a moral view compelling for all.
238
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ENLARGING THE MORAL DOMAIN OF JUSTICE: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE OF NEO-KANTIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Patricia Moynagh

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ENLARGING THE MORAL DOMAIN OF JUSTICE: AN IMMANENT CRITIQUE

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

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But, there would not be enough of Mark to go

(nor is it to be assumed that he would want the job)

so I amend it to all should be fortunate to have one like

Mark is a great source of inspiration and encourages

He is always there for his students,

mind and spirit, despite his own very frantic schedule.

deeply indebted to him for this.

He could see, when

staying focused on less in order to say more.

readers will recall the other two projects contained in this

one, and how the integrity of these projects should stand on

I only wish I had known him sooner.

me pondering a new set of questions.

project, Bertell Oilman's good fortune took him to Japan and

thank him for all his encouragement and for the

Especially the one before he packed his bags

the night before leaving to share some final thoughts with

I also thank him for

returning to my project via the

modern wonder of the fax

machine which brought his critical and challenging questions

forcing me to elaborate some of my own

I also thank him for all his work on

abstractions and internal relations which I have borrowed

Fortuitous circumstances placed

her just up the street from me twice.

I thank her for her

graciousness on both occasions, particularly I am grateful

I thank Christine Harrington for joining my

project in the later stages and Marshall Berman for reading

Both have brought critical input.

Two very dear friends and graduate school colleagues,

continue to enrich my academic and personal

I look forward to all of our future conversations,

explorations and experiences together and value all those

in fact most of all,

husband Bruce Cronin, who, in the final months of my re

I thank him for his extraordinary

intellectual and emotional support.

I hope his new

experiences at Madison, where he begins his professorship

Chapter One: Introduction

Chapter Three: The Politics of Enlarged Mentality:

Chapter Four: Rawls: Going Behind the Veil of Ignorance

Chapter Five: Habermas: Going Public with the Categorical

Conclusion: Enlarging the Moral Domain of Justice

How did it ever get so

What would it mean to broaden it beyond

the narrow spheres of deontological Liberalism?1

institutional arrangements and cultural practices sustaining

Michael Sandel defines Deontological liberalism as

the choice is stated in very

stark terms: either justice or the good.3

justice must trump the good.

Justice is public, while the good is private.

the ascent of the

deontological ethic can be seen as a justified check upon

defensible position, and one can raise many points in its