Poverty and Structural Injustice in (and beyond) Kant’s Theory of Right

1. Freedom and Equality: The Kantian Reconciliation

Is poverty unjust? If so, should governments alleviate poverty through redistributive taxation, taking from some in order to give to others? My aim in this paper is to develop Kant’s answers to these questions, and to show how his answers help reconcile views about economic inequality long thought to stand in opposition to one another. I will focus primarily on Kant’s remarks on poverty and taxation in the Doctrine of Right (1797). These remarks contain the kernel of a compelling justification of the welfare state. But they are as brief as they are dense, and they appear to sit uneasily with Kant’s strident commitment to property rights. The ultimate lesson of Kant’s remarks, I contend, is that a society which recognizes the right to private property must, on pain of inconsistency, also support programs for social welfare. In a word: what justifies private property, justifies its redistribution.

So understood, Kant’s remarks on poverty can make a meaningful contribution to contemporary debates about economic inequality. These debates often turn on the alleged tension between the ideals of freedom and equality. Emphasizing equality, egalitarians hold that the state should redistribute wealth when doing so is necessary to maintain a fair system of social cooperation. Emphasizing freedom, libertarians hold that economic redistribution violates the rights of individuals to use their property as they see fit. At bottom are two competing visions of society. For the egalitarian, society is an association of cooperators. For the libertarian, society is an aggregate of dissociated individuals.

In my view, Kant’s political philosophy can reconcile the ideals of freedom and equality.¹ Key to Kant’s project is his understanding of freedom as “independence from being constrained by another’s choice.”² To be independent is to be one’s “own master (sui juris),” i.e., not subordinated to anyone else.³ The central claim of the Doctrine of Right is that independence is constituted by a familiar set of negative rights to non-interference—e.g., protections of person, property, contract, and certain domestic arrangements—rights which can only be realized through a state that interprets and enforces those rights in the name of all. For Kant I am independent, roughly speaking, if no one else can use me or my things without my permission.

Kant’s equation of independence with non-interference might seem to place him in the libertarian camp, and for a long time he was in fact interpreted this way.⁴ But Kant also holds that realizing independence requires a state with the authority to regulate and redistribute property for the sake of alleviating poverty and other social ills. Understanding why Kant thinks that a commitment to independence requires both rights to private property and the reduction of economic inequality can help us see beyond the contemporary impasse.

My argument proceeds as follows. Section 2 explains the apparent inconsistency between redistributive taxation and Kant’s broader freedom-based political commitments. Sections 3-5 resolve this apparent inconsistency. Section 6 defends my interpretation against alternatives in the existing literature. Section 7 addresses some limitations of the Kantian justification of the welfare state. Throughout, my goal is to illuminate both poverty and the moral basis of its alleviation by thinking with and through Kant’s views on these pressing matters.

2. The Puzzle about Dependence

Kant’s remarks on poverty are mostly contained in the following passage (which I will call the Poverty Passage):

To the supreme commander there belongs indirectly, that is, insofar as he has taken over the duty of the people, the right to impose taxes on the people for its own preservation, such as taxes to support organizations providing for the poor, foundling homes, and church organizations, usually called charitable or pious institutions.

The passage continues with Kant’s justification of redistributive taxation:

The general will of the people has united itself into a society (Gesellschaft) which is to maintain itself perpetually; and for this end it has submitted itself to the internal authority of the state in order to maintain those members of the society who are unable to maintain themselves. For reasons of state (von Staatswegen) the government is therefore authorized to constrain the wealthy (die Vermögenden) to provide the means of sustenance to those who are unable to provide for even their most necessary natural needs. The wealthy have acquired an obligation to the commonwealth, since they owe their existence to an act of submitting to its protection and care, which they need in order to live; on this obligation the state now bases its right to contribute what is theirs to maintaining their fellow citizens. This can be done either by imposing a tax on the property or commerce of citizens, or by establishing funds and using the interest from them, not for the needs of the state (for it is rich), but for the needs of the people.⁵

The details of the passage are complicated, but Kant’s general point seems both clear and plausible. States should take care of citizens’ basic needs, both for the sake of citizens themselves (“the needs of the people”), and for the sake of the state’s continued functioning (“reasons of state”). After all, protection from harms such as hunger and preventable disease strikes many as basic to the social contract. Without such protections, poor citizens are likely to rise up and reject the state’s authority.⁶ (Kant is writing in the context of the French Revolution.) So, for reasons both moral and pragmatic, the state should tax the ‘haves’ in order to provide for the ‘have-nots.’

In directing our attention to the adverse effects of poverty on the polity and its members, this general interpretation of the Poverty Passage is surely on the right track. But without further refinement, the claim that the state may tax the rich to meet the needs of the poor appears to conflict with the freedom-based commitments of Kant’s political philosophy as a whole. Kant writes that freedom as independence must be “the principle and indeed the condition for any exercise of coercion.”⁷ This means that any state-based coercive activity, including redistributive taxation, is legitimate if and only if it is necessary to ensure the independence of persons from one another. As such, the obvious loss of welfare in having citizens’ basic needs go unmet is not, on its own, a suitably Kantian justification for redistributive taxation.⁸

Kant is as adamant as any contemporary libertarian that the condition of poverty is not per se a violation of a person’s rights. Equal rights under law, he argues, can perfectly well coexist with “the greatest inequality in terms of the quantity and degree of [citizens’] possessions,” so that even if “the welfare of one is very much dependent upon the will of another (that of the poor on the rich)…in terms of right, they are…all equal to one another as subjects.”⁹ Kant’s claim here follows from his essentially negative understanding of rights: a person might lack basic resources, but if no one interferes with their existing property (through force or fraud, for example), Kant would still deem them free. So, for poverty relief to be consistent with the freedom-based rationale of the Kantian state, the condition of unmet need must in some way violate the independence of persons. Otherwise, Kant can rightly be accused of smuggling redistributive politics into a system of thought that cannot support it.¹⁰

Yet it is not easy to understand why material deprivation should have much bearing on Kantian independence. Kant’s political theory is focused on the ideal of securing independence from the will of another. This renders his political philosophy a species of republicanism. But within the republican tradition there are at least two different views about what kind of will endangers independence. According to one strand, an independence-endangering will interferes with your basic material interests. According to another strand, an independence-endangering will interferes with your rights.¹¹ The rights-based strand operates with a far narrower conception of dependence, since not every action or relation that sets back your interests necessarily violates your rights. Accordingly, the interest-based strand seems better able to account for the intuition that poverty threatens independence. There are numerous ways in which poor people depend on rich people with respect to their basic material interests, but not all of these involve the rich violating the rights of the poor.

Kant’s republicanism is clearly rights-based: independence from the will of another is constituted by the protection of one’s rights. On this, many commentators agree. But it is not fully appreciated that Kant’s negative conception of rights means that his conception of what violates independence must be extremely narrow. For Kant, one’s rights are one’s entitlements to control what one already has—e.g., one’s body and property. While theft and assault clearly violate a person’s rights, failure to provide for their needs does not.¹²

My goal here is not to establish that Kantian independence can only be interpreted according to this narrow construal of negative rights.¹³ I simply grant this interpretation, because what interests me is whether a public duty of poverty relief can square with a starting point that looks quite libertarian in spirit.

How can poverty be a form of wrongful dependence for Kant if he understands it neither as the frustration of basic interests nor as the denial of rights? Call this the puzzle about dependence. Specifically, what’s puzzling is that Kant, perhaps caught between the attractions of freedom and the attractions of equality, seems committed to the following mutually inconsistent claims:

1. (1)

   The state should alleviate poverty.

2. (2)

   The state exists only to realize freedom as independence.

3. (3)

   Freedom as independence is the protection of people’s rights.

4. (4)

   Poverty doesn’t violate people’s rights.

We appear to be left in absurdity: the state should alleviate poverty, but the state should not alleviate poverty (more strongly, the state should be prohibited from alleviating poverty), because being poor does not violate anyone’s rights.

Key to resolving the puzzle, I will suggest, is that in his remarks on poverty, Kant is developing a conception of injustice that is not reducible to the violation of one person’s rights by another. He is developing, rather, a conception of what in contemporary parlance often gets called structural injustice. According to Kant’s nascent conception of structural injustice, even if (4) is true and poverty is not a violation of anyone’s rights, it still represents a failure of the institutions of the freedom-protecting state. Specifically, I will argue that Kant is best understood as holding that in a state without welfare protections, poor citizens become de facto excluded from the institutions of ownership. Since these are the very institutions which the Kantian state must maintain for all its citizens, a state without welfare protection is in contradiction with its own fundamental principles.

3. Poverty

In order to understand Kant’s justification of poverty relief, we must first understand his view of poverty. For Kant, the concept of poverty depends on the concept of property: “if none might appropriate more of this world’s goods than his neighbor, there would be no rich folk, but also no poor.”¹⁴ We can develop this suggestive claim in terms of three points.

First, poverty is a comparative notion: there are no poor without the wealthy. A lone individual stranded on a desert island without decent shelter or adequate food is clearly deprived, but they are not necessarily poor. If one day newcomers arrive on the island and begin to live in luxury, it now makes sense to call this individual poor.

Second, if nobody was allowed to own anything, nobody would be poor. For Kant, to be poor is to lack the authority to take or use what one needs because others have already claimed the entitlement to the relevant resources. But without property rights, no one wrongs anyone else in taking what they need to survive. Those who lack the skills meet their own needs are not poor, but simply unlucky. Poverty, we might say, emerges adjacent to legality.

Third, there is no poverty without accumulation (“if none might appropriate more of this world’s goods than his neighbor”). As we will see in more detail below, Kantian property rights allow for social arrangements in which those who already have enough can control resources that others need to survive. By enabling accumulation, the property-protecting state enables owners to wield power over non-owners, who must now depend on owners to have their basic needs met. Accumulation produces the wealthy and the poor as social classes.¹⁵

Combining these three points, we can define poverty for Kant as a condition in which someone “lack[s] the most basic necessities” because others have the right to exclude them from the relevant resources.¹⁶ To extend Kant’s reasoning a bit, it seems that the existence of those with vastly more than they need indicates that existing social arrangements could in fact provide for the needs of all. The poor have grounds to conclude that their condition could be otherwise.

It is important to keep in mind that Kant’s conception of poverty is minimal. Poverty is not just any condition in which someone living in a decently resourced society experiences material hardship. Poverty does not pertain to all cases where a person fares worse than others in terms of socially desirable goods. Poverty is not shorthand for all forms of troubling socio-economic inequality.

One can draw textual support for a minimal interpretation of poverty from Kant’s (notorious) remarks on “passive citizens.” Passive citizens are those members of a society who, while entitled to legal protections, are not entitled to exercise political decision-making powers, including most significantly the right to vote.¹⁷ Kant’s passive citizens include children, women, and—most importantly for my purposes—certain kinds of manual and domestic workers.¹⁸ Many such workers, then and now, enter into employment agreements on highly unequal terms. Yet Kant does not appear to think that redistributive taxation should be aimed at improving their material condition. In his view, all the government owes such people is formal equality of opportunity.¹⁹ One conclusion one can draw from Kant’s discussion of passive citizens is that he is not using the idea of poverty as shorthand for all forms of socio-economic vulnerability or hierarchy. A person is not necessarily poor for Kant just because they have to sell their labor on unfavorable terms. A person is poor, rather, when no one wants to buy their labor on terms that enable them to meet their own basic needs.

We should not seek more precision than is warranted by Kant’s brief account of poverty. Significant questions remain. Should poverty be measured in terms of an absolute standard of deprivation or a relative standard of falling significantly below others? Which needs count as basic? Does the answer to the second question depend on a society’s relative affluence?²⁰ I return to some of these issues below. In this section I have only tried to delineate the conception of poverty which I think best explains Kant’s discussion of poverty relief.

4. Property

While Kant’s understanding of poverty is not particularly difficult to grasp, his theory of property is highly complex and the subject of much interpretive dispute. Here, I put these disputes aside and state my own understanding of that theory, with the focused aim of explaining the Kantian justification of poverty relief.²¹

On many theories of property, the justification of redistribution is easy. If poverty arises as a consequence of private property, and if poverty is unjust, then states should just tax property owners to prevent such a condition from arising. Behind this view usually stands a conception of property as a social convention meant to advance important human interests. In structuring the rules of the game, so the thought goes, the state should balance owners’ interests in liberty against the welfare interests of non-owners, including the poor.²²

On Kant’s conception of property, by contrast, the justification of redistribution is hard. Kant holds a stringent conception of property rights as natural and grounded in the paramount value of freedom, a value which permits no trade-offs against welfare. Like many contemporary libertarians, he worries greatly about what could justify government interference with the rights of owners for the sake of others’ needs. (Fear of paternalism looms large in Kant’s political psyche.) Even so, I argue, social welfare programs are compatible with—perhaps even required by—Kant’s fairly absolutist conception of property rights. This is surprising.

For Kant, rights in general are “moral capacities (Vermögen) for putting others under obligations.”²³ A property right, specifically, is a moral capacity to place others under an obligation to forbear from using a particular thing unless one grants them permission to do so. To understand the nature of this moral capacity, one needs to understand both: (1) the meaning of this capacity (e.g., what is it to have property?), and (2) the conditions needed to exercise it (e.g., how can one make a particular thing one’s property?). Accordingly, Kant’s theory of property proceeds in two distinct explanatory steps. The first step treats how to “have something external as one’s own”; the second step treats how to “acquire something external.”²⁴

In the first step, Kant argues that persons are in fact entitled to have things as their own. In other words, Kant argues that it is morally possible for persons to have rights to things, meaning that interfering with their things (not just their bodies) counts as wronging them. I have rights not only to what is me, but also to what is mine.

Let me briefly summarize Kant’s compressed argument for this claim, expressed as the “Postulate of Practical Reason with Regard to Rights.”²⁵ The Postulate states that the bare possibility of having something as one’s own does not in principle interfere with the rights of others. My having a thing as my own obviously means that others cannot have it. But my having the thing doesn’t interfere with their capacity to have and use what is already theirs.²⁶ And it is just this capacity which right (in the Kantian sense) protects. Zones of exclusive control over the material world are therefore compatible with everyone’s independence. It follows from freedom as independence that I am permitted to do whatever does not violate other peoples’ rights.²⁷ So, Kant concludes, it is morally possible to have a thing under my exclusive control—that is, under my dominion.²⁸

In the second step, Kant argues that the moral power of dominion depends on the state to be rightfully exercised. The state provides the conditions under which the right to own can be applied to determinate objects in the world through acts of acquisition.²⁹ Kant’s basic point is that there is no way to make something mine, consistent with the freedom of others, without a state that constructs and enforces a system of property law. His reasoning is that if each of us is in charge of ourselves, no one could have the personal authority to force others to keep off a thing that they claim as their own. Call this the unilateralism problem. As Kant puts it, “a unilateral will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone with regard to possession that is external and therefore contingent, since that would infringe upon freedom in accordance with universal laws.”³⁰ In the absence of the state, property is thus embroiled in moral contradiction. The Postulate shows that we cannot deprive one another of the right to control resources and other things in the world. But the idea of independence prevents one person from unilaterally subjecting others to his ownership claims.

The state solves the unilateralism problem by creating the conditions of reciprocity through which individual acts of acquisition can be rendered consistent with the freedom of all. Think of it like this: if we are free and equal, then my act of acquisition—if it is to be rightful—must be understood as making a kind of overture to you. I’m doing this on condition that you can do it too. Since rights concern coercion, mere goodwill cannot establish this reciprocity. Rather, my coercing you to keep away from my things could only be consistent with our mutual freedom if we are each coercing one another through a collective entity that is the product of both of our wills. What looks to be a set of distinct acts—your acquiring and my acquiring—must be something we do together. (Trying to acquire all on your own is like trying to dance the tango by yourself.) But remember, it's not just me and you here. Nobody has a right to take anyone else’s things, and the agreements we make now bind future parties. The state is just the name for the institutionalization of this shared will, and so, Kant concludes, “only in a civil condition can something external be mine or yours.”³¹

The upshot of Kant’s two-step argument is that property rights are partially private and partially public. Property is public because only the state makes it possible to actually acquire property consistent with others’ freedom. My right to acquire is an instance of a legal power shared with everyone else. But property is private because the nature of property rights—i.e., what it means to own and how one does it—is there to be recognized by the state, not created by it. ‘Ownership’ just is my entitlement to have something at my exclusive disposal, to use as I please. ‘Acquisition’ just is my entitlement to subject an unowned thing to my purposes. The state does not create such entitlements. Rather, the state “provides the conditions under which these [entitlements] are put into effect.”³²

Another way to put this difficult point is to say that for Kant property both precedes the state and depends on the state.³³ Property precedes the state because a central purpose of the state is to make it possible for people to exercise their natural right to own things. But property depends on the state because, without a state, all people have is a moral power to make ownership claims without any way for that power to be applied to the world consistent with the freedom of others.³⁴ The state exists to give reality to natural right. This is why persons have a genuinely moral (rather than merely prudential) duty to exit the state of nature.³⁵

For Kant, it follows from the fact that the state provides the necessary conditions for rightful acquisition that all private property is in some sense under the control of the state. The state, he says, is “supreme proprietor” or “lord” of the land.³⁶ This does not mean that the state ultimately owns everything—on the contrary, it owns nothing—but it does mean that the state can, under certain narrowly defined conditions, decide who owns what and impose regulations on the use of private property. As Kant puts it, the state “has the right to assign to each what is his,” so that each person’s private property is to be thought of as a “division” of the whole.³⁷ In the state’s role as “supreme proprietor,” it must “administer the state’s economy.”³⁸ The public powers necessary to do so include the creation of the police and the construction of roads, both of which protect and facilitate the free movement of persons and things. Such services cost money—cue taxation by the state.

What are the implications of Kant’s theory of property for redistributive taxation aimed more specifically at social issues like poverty reduction? Since Kant’s two-step theory of property allows for the possibility of taxation for such ends, it may seem inhospitable to libertarians. But since Kant’s theory also greatly restricts the possible justifications for such taxation, it may seem inhospitable to egalitarians. For Kant, as we have seen, the basic concept of property—ownership as dominion—makes no reference to the needs of others. As long as my owning a thing does not interfere with the person or things of others, it is rightful. There can be no internal restriction on property based on need. In other words, Kant does not conceive of property as what falls to the individual from the common bounty of the earth just as long as they leave “enough and as good for others.”³⁹ Rather, property is what falls to the individual just as long as they do not infringe on others’ rights.

Since freedom as independence justifies the power to have things under one’s dominion, the results of the exercise of this power can be modified or restricted only if those results are somehow at odds with freedom as independence. Property and its redistribution must proceed via the same principle. The Kantian state cannot introduce principles of collective welfare as a reason to overturn or redistribute people’s property.⁴⁰ It can only do so on the basis of independence.⁴¹

In sum, on Kant’s theory of property, redistributive taxation is justified only if the exercise of everyone’s right to own generates problematic relations of dependence. But what are those dependence relations? The puzzle is that it is hard to see how we can answer this question given Kant’s austere conception of independence as, basically, protection of person and property.

5. Poverty as Systemic Exclusion

I think that Kant’s remarks on poverty can in fact reconcile redistributive taxation with (Kantian) independence. Central to my interpretive solution is the claim that for Kant, the injustice of poverty should be understood in terms of the state’s relation to its citizens, not in terms of private relations between people. This is because, as discussed above, at the level of private relations, one person’s needs, even if dire, do not give them a right to take from others.

Kant repeatedly stresses the public nature of the poverty problem. He writes that the state’s mandate to “maintain those members of the society who are unable to maintain themselves” stems from the fact that “the general will of the people has united itself into a society which is to maintain itself perpetually.”⁴² And he classifies the public duty of poverty relief as one of the “effects with regard to rights that follow from the nature of the civil union.”⁴³

As a social contract theorist, Kant holds that the structure and content of the general will must be established through the idea of hypothetical rational consent.⁴⁴ Ultimately then, the Kantian question of poverty is this: why exactly can’t citizens consent to a political order in which some may fall into destitution or be otherwise unable to meet their own basic needs?

6. Poverty as Interpersonal Domination

The systemic exclusion interpretation of Kant’s remarks on poverty challenges a prominent alternative interpretation according to which the problem with poverty is that it enables the interpersonal domination of poor people by rich people.⁶⁹ The interpersonal domination interpretation has many iterations. Here is the basic outline of the view:

1. (1)

   The state must represent everyone’s will. (Otherwise, as demonstrated in section three, it cannot solve the unilateralism problem about private property.)

2. (2)

   The state cannot represent everyone’s will if it leaves some citizens interpersonally dependent on the wills of others, i.e., dominated by them.

3. (3)

   Poverty, like slavery, is a form of interpersonal domination. Just as the slave is dominated by the master, so the poor person is dominated by the rich person, if only because they depend on the rich person’s private charity or largesse.

4. (4)

   Citizens cannot rationally consent to their own interpersonal domination.⁷⁰

5. (5)

   Redistributive taxation avoids interpersonal domination, since if the poor have their basic needs met, they won’t depend on the rich.

6. (6)

   Citizens can only rationally consent to a property-protecting state if it avoids interpersonal domination through redistributive taxation.⁷¹

One could put pressure on many different steps of this argument. The problem I wish to highlight arises at (3). Consider Arthur Ripstein’s formulation:

The most obvious way in which people could fail to share…a will is through relations of private dependence through which one person is subject to the choice of another. A serf or slave does not share a united will with his or her lord or master, so these forms of relationship are inconsistent with a rightful condition. Yet the same relation of dependence can arise through a series of rightful actions. The problem of poverty, on Kant’s analysis, is exactly that: the poor are completely subject to the choice of those in more fortunate circumstances.⁷²

This cannot be right. Given Kant’s narrow, rights-based understanding of independence, the relation between slaves and masters, and the relation between poor person and rich person, is not the “same relation of dependence” at all. On the Kantian framework, the poor person is not dominated by the rich person. The rich person just does what they see fit with their own property, perhaps thereby putting the poor person in a bad situation. Granted, there are cases where the rich directly violate the rights of the poor—e.g., theft, fraud, and intimidation. But not all cases of poverty are the outcome of direct rights violations. If the rich did not take from the poor what was already theirs, thereby violating their rights, the analogy between slavery and poverty fails.⁷³ Whereas the enslaved have their rights violated, the poor have their material interests frustrated.⁷⁴

Ripstein recognizes the problem. He concedes that viewed in terms of interpersonal relations between poor people and rich people, the dependence at issue is not one of rights violation, but is, as he says, “purely factual.”⁷⁵ But Ripstein also seems to think that this form of factual dependence comes to have a bearing on rights when we move from considering any given interpersonal relationship of rich person to poor person to considering the relationship between the poor and the unregulated property system as a whole. Poverty, he repeatedly insists, is a “systemic” problem.⁷⁶ I agree. But the difficulty lies in spelling out the details. If the relationships between rich person and poor person are not rights-violating, why is it problematic that the state leaves some citizens vulnerable to such relationships?

There are a number of interpretive proposals within the secondary literature for answering this question. Perhaps the poor cannot rationally consent to a social arrangement in which, because everything is already owned, they cannot use needed resources without the permission of another.⁷⁷ Perhaps the innate right to freedom involves not just negative protections against bodily aggression but also the positive right to take what one needs to survive.⁷⁸ Perhaps desperate poverty amounts to loss of control over one’s own body, and so violates the basic mandate of right to protect free agency.⁷⁹

These proposals illuminate important aspects of Kant’s thought. But I worry that, ultimately, they all fall into a dilemma. Either they decompose a systemic problem into interpersonal relations of dependence. Or they understand the relation of the individual to the property system as a whole in terms of material interests—the thought being that citizens could not rationally agree to a social order that fails so spectacularly to meet basic needs. Given Kant’s understanding of independence, neither of these strategies is promising. Against the first: interpersonal relations between rich and poor need not be rights-violating. Against the second: the legitimacy of state coercion does not rest on the state’s role in meeting basic needs. So, unless one wants to jettison the entire Kantian framework, another explanation is needed.

On the view I proposed above, the problem of poverty is not that the poor become the subordinates of the rich. The problem, rather, is that the poor find themselves unable to participate in the rightful institutions of property. The systemic exclusion account clarifies the way in which institutions can wrongfully exclude people without anyone violating anyone else’s rights.⁸⁰

The Poverty Passage nowhere mentions private relations of dependence between rich and poor. What Kant emphasizes is the relation between the wealthy and the state:

For reasons of state the government is therefore authorized to constrain the wealthy to provide the means of sustenance to those who are unable to provide for even their most necessary natural needs. The wealthy have acquired an obligation to the commonwealth, since they owe their existence to an act of submitting to its protection and care, which they need in order to live; on this obligation the state now bases its right to contribute what is theirs to maintaining their fellow citizens.⁸¹

In placing the obligation to address poverty squarely on the shoulders of the wealthy, Kant is not simply offering the sound practical advice that if you need something to be paid for, best to ask those with money. Rather, he seems to be suggesting that the wealthy should be the ones to bear the duty of the people because it is their benefit that is implicated in the “general injustice,” discussed above.

Kant says that the wealthy “owe their existence” to the commonwealth’s “protection and care.” But isn’t this true of rich and poor alike?⁸² Perhaps what Kant means is that the wealthy depend not just on the commonwealth’s “protection”—what I have called the negative dimension of the rightful condition—but also on the commonwealth’s “care”—the positive dimension. The wealthy have received the “care” of the commonwealth because they have been allowed to benefit from the institutions of property even at the cost of the exclusion of the poor.

To bring out the differences between the interpersonal domination and the systemic exclusion interpretations, let us return once again to the creditless person in the cash-free world. According to the systemic exclusion interpretation, the injustice is that the creditless person is excluded from basic social institutions. By contrast, according to the interpersonal domination interpretation, there is injustice only if the person suffers from problematic relations of interpersonal dependence. But on whom exactly does the creditless person unjustly depend? The interpersonal domination interpretation seems to me to lack a convincing answer to this question.

Consider the following actual incident. Hembert Figueroa, an ironworker, ordered a taco from a casual Mexican restaurant in Manhattan and tried to pay in cash. When Figueroa, to his surprise, was informed that the establishment had gone cashless, he had to stand by the side of the line until a sympathetic cashier helped him find another customer willing to pay for his meal with a card in exchange for cash.⁸³ For the sake of argument, grant that there is at least some level of injustice here. Are there any problematic relations of private dependence?

The most obvious candidate is surely the interaction between Figueroa and the customer in line. It may strike you as deeply problematic that one person must depend on the goodwill of another to satisfy their basic interest in eating lunch. But from the point of view of interpersonal justice, this interaction appears to be one of simple exchange—one, moreover, in which the person in the more advantaged situation derived no profit.⁸⁴ Perhaps we should look instead to the relation between Figueroa and the cashier. But why isn’t that relationship just one where an employee tries to help out a customer in difficult circumstances? Perhaps then the problematic dependence relation is best traced to the merchant or credit card company. But suppose those agents are abiding by all the relevant legal rules and simply catering to legitimate consumer demand. In none of these interactions does it make sense to say that one agent is using or damaging what is not theirs. And, to repeat, what Kantian right protects against is non-consensual use of or damage to what one already rightfully possesses.

As one pushes on the details, it seems that the problem is not that any one person (whether natural or corporate) takes advantage of Figueroa, but rather that larger social systems have been set up in a way that exclude him.⁸⁵ What is objectionable is that the state has tolerated (or enabled) economic arrangements in which some citizens are less able than others to move about in commercial space. The fact that Figueroa depends on the goodwill of other people in line is but a symptom of the underlying structural problem.

7. The Limits of Kant’s Remarks

I have sought to explain why the Kantian state should act to relieve poverty, even if poverty does not violate the poor’s rights. My explanation, in essence, has been that an unregulated system of property ends up excluding some from the institutions of ownership—the very institutions which the property-protecting state exists to facilitate. Citizens cannot freely accept a social order in which some are unable to participate in these institutions. Students of Kant’s moral philosophy will perhaps not be surprised to learn that a state without welfare protections amounts then to a kind of rational contradiction.

I end by delineating four limitations from the egalitarian point of view of Kant’s remarks on poverty. I draw here on the views of Rawls as well as on some of Kant’s more immediate successors.⁸⁶

First, Kant is not arguing that welfare rights are part of the basic legitimacy of the state. His view is that the state should provide for the basic needs of the poor, not that a state must do so in order to be entitled to exercise coercive power over its members.⁸⁷

Second, Kant’s argument for redistributive taxation concerns poverty rather than inequality. For Kant poverty is about lacking the means to provide for basic needs. It does not refer to just any condition where some have significantly less than others. Kant, unlike Rawls, does not think that all forms of social inequality must stand before the bar of moral justification. Practically speaking, this means that the Kantian state, unlike the Rawlsian one, will not be concerned with continually narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

Third, Kant appears to understand basic needs in terms of what is necessary for survival. Rawlsians and other egalitarians will hold that justice should be more broadly concerned with the goods necessary for citizens to meaningfully participate in public life.⁸⁸

Fourth, Kant’s conception of exclusion from civil society concerns, literally, lacking the relevant ownership of things or being unable to take part in market interactions. Rawlsians understand the idea of exclusion much more broadly in terms of warranted feelings of alienation from the productive life of society.⁸⁹ Moreover, Rawlsians may think that if the problem of poverty is exclusion from the system of property, the solution should not be welfare aimed at satisfying basic needs, but rather the widespread dispersal of property throughout society.⁹⁰

There is perhaps some room in the Kantian system for these more egalitarian ideas, based on Kant’s claim that every state has a duty to become more republican over time.⁹¹ But since Kant also thinks that states should be allowed wide latitude in how best to realize this goal, and since the Kantian republic seems to tolerate a great deal of inequality, I doubt this will be very convincing to egalitarians. In sum, contemporary egalitarians will think that the view I have drawn from Kant’s remarks on poverty is far too minimal. On my reconstruction, the Kantian says: redistribute up the point that people are not completely disenfranchised from the practices of ownership, and do so by taking care of those needs that are absolutely necessary for survival.

I do not wish to discount potential egalitarian dissatisfaction. But I end where I began. Kant’s conception of independence shows how one might develop a form of egalitarianism, perhaps a limited one, from premises about freedom that even a libertarian might accept. Ultimately, Kant may give us nothing more, but also nothing less, than a sound argument for a minimally decent society.

Acknowledgements

I am fortunate to have received detailed comments from Lucy Allais, Marisa Bass, J. Colin Bradley, Manon Garcia, Barbara Herman, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Julia Jorati, Colin McLear, Benjamin McKean, Jacob McNulty, Francey Russell, Nicholas Vrousalis, and Elisabeth Widmer. I owe special thanks to Paul Schofield, who read more drafts of this paper than I care to count. I am also indebted to audiences at the Kant on Poverty conference held at Ruhr University Bochum (2019), the Boston Area Kant Colloquium (Harvard, 2019), the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (Philadelphia, 2020), the New York German Idealism Workshop (Columbia, 2021), and the North American Kant Society (2022) for helpful discussions of ancestors of this material. A special thanks to Yoon Choi, Frederick Neuhouser, Constance Perry, and Stephan Zimmerman for official comments on those occasions. I have also benefitted from presenting several early drafts of this paper to my colleagues at Amherst College: Jyl Gentzler, Alexander George, Lauren Leydon-Hardy, Joseph Moore, and Nishi Shah. Gillan Chalono, Emmett McGrath, Naima Mohamed, Rebecca Picciotto, and Ross Kilpatrick, my undergraduate research assistants over the last several years, assisted with research for this article and offered valuable comments and editorial suggestions. I am beyond lucky to be able to work with such excellent students. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Philosophers’ Imprint, both of whom were exceptionally kind and helpful—a true rarity in the world of contemporary academic publishing.