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The Morality of Unequal Autonomy: Reviving Kant’s Concept of Status for Stakeholders

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Abstract

Though we cherish freedom and equality, there are human relations we commonly take to be morally permissible despite the fact that they essentially involve an inequality specifically of freedom, i.e., parental and fiduciary relations. In this article, I argue that the morality of these relations is best understood through a very old and dangerous concept, the concept of status. Despite their historic and continuing abuses, status relations are alive and well today, I argue, because some of them are necessary. We must therefore carefully specify the conditions in which such status relations may morally obtain, as well as the duties of virtue and duties of right to which all parties are subject when it does (including a duty of care) to clearly articulate the ways in which these putatively moral status relations that essentially involve an asymmetry of autonomy (status relations) can go well or badly even within the context of the Kantian tradition from which our current legal and social practices arose. To this end, I offer Kant’s own concept of status as a promising one because in Kant’s theory, status is a nexus of virtue and right that is reducible to neither property nor contract but akin to each in familiar ways. Once status is admitted as an alternative to property and contract, status may be extended beyond Kant’s domestic paradigm, most perspicuously to institutional ethics. In this article, I sketch a status-based theory of stakeholding that locates environmental impact, institutional oppression, and other significant features of our moral landscape within a Kantian framework of duties rich enough to more accurately characterize the complexities of stakeholding than current tradition has allowed.

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Notes

  1. Liberal democrats in this broad sense include all those who are concerned with human or civil rights, especially rights that entail legal claims and protections. All liberals in this sense assume or argue that we have some sort of basic right to equal freedom, though how this is to be specified may diverge widely.

  2. I have in mind the Humean distinction between natural relations and their extension to artificial relations, where artificial relations are artifacts of the workings of civil society. Artificiality in this sense has no negative connotation. Ships, plays, and fiduciary relations are artificial, or more aptly artifactual.

  3. In this article, I use “autonomy” in the thick, general sense of self-rule or self-governance that is commonly employed today in legal, political, and moral discourse. Two more specific senses of autonomy that I mean to include in this thick concept are the liberal democratic “right to non-interference” or “freedom from” unnecessary external governance, and the more recent feminist “set of competencies” or “freedom to” exercise one’s capacities in the course of one’s life. These are temporally contextualized concepts, thus would be “phenomenal” in Kant’s terminology, but this does not preclude their being practically necessary (“normative” in current terms). Asymmetries of autonomy include mere asymmetries of power. The relevant problem for the liberal arises only in cases in which someone’s autonomy is compromised, i.e., there is an asymmetry of power, and this is somehow alleged to be morally justified, i.e., putatively moral. Moral justification takes the conversation beyond the mere empirical, but it does not immediately require appeal to metaphysics. I presume in this article that mere power does not morally justify asymmetries of autonomy and begin to investigate what might, within the general Kantian context but without tracing justification all the way to Kant’s metaphysics.

  4. Historically, the morally reprehensible kinds of status relations have typically been those in which all members of a class are by default denied majority status solely because they are members of that class (see Pesante’s excellent history of master–servant relations). Class may decisively exclude certain kinds of asymmetric relations and it may be centrally relevant to the morality of others, but class is a highly changeable, morally diverse category with imprecise boundaries. Not all putatively moral kinds of status relations are clearly class-based, e.g., medical relations. Status may thus be a better candidate to develop.

  5. Appeal to the same grounds for diverse phenomena has greater explanatory power according to standard theory choice (and Kant). Unifying grounds are worth seeking and can be a reason to prefer a theory to its contenders.

  6. There are currently three prominent philosophical traditions that might be good candidates for providing an adequate theory of status, namely the legal tradition, virtue ethics, and care ethics. Because care is arguably a relational virtue, I will focus on care theory generally rather than treating care and virtue ethics as distinct alternatives. Both US legal theory and the care theory I discuss are Kantian, but neither has the scope and resources needed for a theory of status.

  7. Chronic needs in the relevant sense may be temporary, e.g., I need help for a few weeks or months while I’m in recovery from surgery. Chronic need is opposed to episodic need, where an episodic need is a short-term well-defined need like getting a ride home from the hospital. Episodic needs can be met through promissory or contractual duties, or though duties of beneficence.

  8. Several plausible accounts of authority and obligation are available from legal and political philosophers. The brief defense offered here is a very simplified rendering of instrumental rationality that is ultimately premised on a Kantian duty to self.

  9. Though one might think obedience is necessarily heteronymous, Kant himself claimed that minors are to obey (1797, 6:279). The possibility of obedience is a significant issue in Kant scholarship.

  10. Infants are unable to choose contingent ends, but they nevertheless have biologically determined ends and human ends in that some things are good for them and other things are not. Many minors are only partially incompetent. For example, I might have sufficient agency to choose between some kinds of contingent ends, e.g. what color shirt to wear today, but I might not be competent to practice medicine. There are very many kinds of possible ends and needs, thus there are many ways in which one might be partially competent to determine or meet them. My point here is merely that to the extent that one is competent, one’s competency must be respected. Care is generally better than paternalism with respect to this principle.

  11. We have discretion to practice the wide duty of beneficence such that our aid is not distributed equally to all, and it may even be prudent on grounds of efficiency to distribute unequally, but the duty is necessarily to humanity and only contingently to those individuals we actually aid.

  12. Kant’s concept of status right has received little positive attention, for reasons that will shortly be obvious, but Arthur Ripstein has notably generated a recent buzz about Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals that must be mentioned. This discourse in the literature has generally ignored or apologized for Kant’s discussion of status right, and the context of argument has been overwhelmingly political, focused on authority to coerce. Issues concerning the legitimacy and authority of the state are peripheral to understanding status, however, so the potential of Kant’s concept of status remains poorly explored.

  13. Kant claims the three formulas of the moral law are merely different formulations of a single moral law, just as F = ma and F = mv 2/r are different formulas of a physical force law. Strictly speaking, there is only one first principle with several formulas, but it is more congenial to think of them as distinct principles for application purposes.

  14. A (claim) right, as opposed to a duty of right, is a legal claim one person may make against others to fulfill their duties of right. These are entitlements rather than responsibilities. In Kant’s system responsibilities have explanatory priority; claim rights are corollary.

  15. As what ought to happen when virtue obviously fails is not the topic of the doctrine of virtue, we must look elsewhere to determine conclusively what Kant contends. Kant’s theory of moral education is generally very positive (e.g., 1770, 24: 85; 1784, 27: 437) and some passages suggest that negative measures like shaming are unlikely to be the most effective means to encouraging the proper exercise of autonomy. However, Kant does indicate that shaming and shunning are appropriate measures in some circumstances (1784, 27: 1429 and 27: 469). As I describe them social sanctions are not punishment in Kant’s sense, nor are they legal sanctions imposed by the state. They are not rightful, yet nor are they wrongful. They are fitting consequences that (1) are not morally precluded and (2) do contribute to the highest good. We have no duty to educate others, but we morally can help others become better people by prompting rational reflection. We can exercise discretion with respect to our voluntary associations, i.e., shun, by pointedly choosing not to associate with someone or render supererogatory aid. To shame someone is to make their vicious action or character public in the hope that this will prompt critical reflection and moral improvement (1784, 27: 1429; 1803, 86–87). Disclosure is only morally prohibited when a promise of secrecy or some other privy duty obtains, so individuals can have the moral authority to shame others. Shunning and shaming are like punishments in that they are unpleasant and analogous to rightful consequences, but they are not punishment.

  16. Public right concerns both relations between a state and its people, and relations between states. A great deal of the text concerns the authority of the state, or the scope of its rightful powers.

  17. There is a case to be made that the relation between individual and the state is one of status as well, but I cannot make the case here.

  18. In the Introduction to the Doctrine of Right, Kant says there is only one original right belonging to every person by virtue of their humanity, i.e., freedom, which entails innate equality and “being one’s own master” (1797, 6: 237–238), He later explains that a right to an external thing or to another person (e.g., contractual use of another’s labor) must be acquired. It follows that the original right to freedom is a right to control one’s own person, which is another way of describing a right to be autonomous. This does not, however, clearly determine whether one has a right to exclusively control one’s own body.

  19. As contracts involve rights “to persons,” it is important to point out that unlike property, contracts cannot entitle one to “use up” a person. I can eat all my soup, by I cannot rightfully contract every moment of a person’s time so that they are unable to eat, sleep, and otherwise tend to their needs. Contracts can entitle one to no more than sustainable use of a person’s choice, consistent with everyone’s autonomy. The underlying justification for private contracts is that organization, division of labor, and trading of services can be more conducive to individual autonomy than universal independence.

  20. Kant notably referred to children and those who lack healthy understanding as “minors” in his lectures (e.g. 1770, 24: 21; 1784, 27: 468).

  21. “All duties are either duties of right (officia iuris), that is, duties for which external lawgiving is possible or duties of virtue (officia virtutis s. ethica), for which external lawgiving is not possible—duties of virtue cannot be subject to external lawgiving simply because they have to do with an end which (or the having of which) is also a duty. No external lawgiving can bring about someone’s setting an end for himself (because this is an internal act of the mind), although it may prescribe external actions that lead to an end without the subject making it his end” (1797; 6: 239. See also 6: 219–220, 380ff).

  22. The possibility of sharing an end is metaphysically problematic, especially for those like Kant and Hume who contend that inclinations are natural contingencies that are not subject to rational control. If the major party is to be obligated to share the minor party’s necessary ends, it must at least be metaphysically possible to do so (because ought implies can). If the two parties involved in a moral status relation morally must share any other ends, it will be necessary to determine which kinds of ends can be shared, which ought to be, and which cannot. As the happiness of any minor party is deeply determined by contingent inclinations which the major party cannot share (because they are matters of purely personal taste, which we cannot simply choose), in order for any major party to be obliged to share this end, Kant would argue that the major party would have to be able to act apart from or even despite her contrary inclinations. Of course, those of us who happen to have congenial and empathetic temperaments can share contingent ends with friends and colleagues despite differences in taste, but the issue for Kant is whether someone with a contingently uncongenial personality and no empathy could do so, because a duty to share a contingent end would require that any of us could manage it. When it is morally necessary, Kant argues, it is possible for us to act solely from duty, even though it may be entirely contrary to our temperament and inclinations. In other words, moral obligation may fill the gap where inclinations fail, so that major parties can share their minor party’s general end of happiness as well as many of the particular ends it entails, and they can participate in the promotion of these ends without sharing specific idiosyncratic inclinations.

  23. It may follow that competence in business ethics is a moral requirement of legal license.

  24. The “less visible” responsibilities to non-consenting stakeholders are sometimes understood as merely supererogatory corporate social responsibilities (CSR) that are not legally enforceable. I contend that this is a mistake. When any organization compromises our security or our health, the state is has a responsibility to regulate.

  25. If organizing by others crowds me out of the kingdom of ends through their collective use of public goods that I need, or their organization promotes oppression and disrespect, then I ought to interfere at least with respect to how the organization serves its function.

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Correspondence to Susan V. H. Castro.

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Castro, S.V.H. The Morality of Unequal Autonomy: Reviving Kant’s Concept of Status for Stakeholders. J Bus Ethics 121, 593–606 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1737-8

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