Abstract
Arthur Ripstein’s conception of Kantian freedom has exerted an enormous recent influence on scholars of Kant’s political philosophy; however, the conception seems to me flawed. In this paper, I argue that Ripstein’s conception of Kantian freedom as “your capacity to choose the ends you will use your means to pursue” – your “purposiveness” – is both too narrow and too broad: (1) Wrongful acts such as coercive threats cannot choose my ends for me; instead, such acts wrongfully restrict my perceived options. And (2) rightful changes to the context in which I choose that render my means insufficient for my ends restrict my capacity to choose them. Alternatively, my purposiveness reduces to my entitlements; but then freedom as purposiveness is viciously circular or fails as a new approach to the “devastating” objection that motivates it.
Acknowledgements
I thank Melissa Seymour Fahmy for her invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay as well as Sarah Holtman, Onora O’Neill; the audience members of the 12th International Kant Congress; and anonymous reviewers for helpful criticism.
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
