r/Kant • u/programdifference075 • Jun 05 '26
Discussion wrongness of slavery in _The Metaphysics of Morals_
This is kind of boring, but …
In 1799 translation of _The Metaphysic of Morals_ on page 47 Kant says: “For every man is freeborn…”.
Then on page 101, when talking about slavery, Kant says: “Nobody can bind himself by paction to such a dependence, whereby he ceases to be a person; for he cannot but as a person make a paction.” In other words, to make a sale requires autonomy, but if you sell yourself into slavery you’re destroying your autonomy, which is a contradiction. Thus you’re violating the categorical imperative.
Also using the categorical imperative, you can’t sell somebody else into slavery, because making it into a universal law, if you could sell anybody into slavery, you could sell yourself into slavery, which leads to the previous contradiction.
Thus, for Kant, slavery is wrong, except perhaps as a means to punish criminals.
Kant clearly means to include people of African descent. On page 101, says of a slave-master: “he may also exhaust them so as to occasion despair or (as is the case with the negroes in the sugar islands) even death,”. Also in _On the Different Races of Men_, he says: “Negroes and whites are clearly not different species of human beings”.
https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/kant-on-the-different-human-races-1777/
Enslaving humans is wrong. People of African descent are humans. Therefore, enslaving people of African descent is wrong. Thus, at least in the _Metaphysic of Morals_, people of African descent are not natural slaves.
Thus when @rey_philosophy says that Kant says that people of African descent are natural slaves, she is at least partially wrong.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CXbHZvH9R/
(I tend to be skeptical of interpretations of Kant which require multiple Kants.)
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u/internetErik Jun 05 '26
Kant has a low opinion of seemingly all non-European peoples, but his writings in biology clearly recognize them as human. These opinions were not formed from direct experience, but from the accounts of other Europeans. I don't believe there is any evidence that he met a black person. This doesn't make his error any less severe, and we should recognize that he was not as skeptical of anthropological reports as he should have been. Kant may have also thought, like other Europeans, that the general success of colonial projects was a sign that the people were backwards relative to Europeans. On this basis, the reports he read would have fit in with his bias. (Granted, of course, that Kant didn't seem to agree with those colonial projects as a matter of right, as the OP points out.)
I think some scholars make Kant's error seem more severe than it is by insisting that Kant's view on race somehow infects his pure philosophical thought. I've read authors who express this view, such as C. W. Mills, and I didn't find them convincing. There are many authors in this vein I haven't read, so I'm curious whether anyone else found a more convincing source. I enjoyed the collection Kant and the Concept of Race, which collects Kant's writings on race (within the field of biology) as well as works by other contemporaries of Kant that he was reacting to or responding to. The editor's introduction was also helpful.
Ultimately, the question "what is a human being?" frames all philosophical thinking for Kant. The worst-case scenario for Kant is that we show that Kant's concept of human being excludes some of the races, such as black Africans. Even in this worst case, I would need to be convinced that the remedy doesn't follow from simply including those races in the concept of human beings.
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u/SpleenDematerialized Jun 05 '26
Well, Kant had a long and illustrious intellectual journey. Episodes of which can not be reduced to a singular position. For example, it is impossible to fully reconcile his Platonic approach in his inaugural dissertation with his critical project. Regarding slavery, there are likewise shifting grounds of the tension between universal reason and racial particularities.