Kant’s Constitutivism and the Problem of Alienation

Chapter in Reason, Agency and Ethics: Kantian Themes in Contemporary Debates, Bagnoli and Bacin (eds.), Oxford University Press. Forthcoming

While recent literature interprets Kant as meta-ethical constitutivist, in this paper I argue that the label only partly fits. Despite the constitutivist strategy Kant clearly employs in deriving the moral law in the Groundwork, his recasting of the law as a command to seek the Highest Good in the second Critique renders it unfit to serve as success criterion for action, undermining the core of Kant’s constitutivist strategy.  I argue that Kant’s attempt to overcome the problem of alienation is what leaves him in this bind, revealing a persistent tension in his ethics between the constitutivist moral standpoint and the broader practical good of non-alienation.

On Rainer Forst’s The Noumenal Republic

Kantian Review, special issue, ed. Howard Williams. Forthcoming. 

This paper critically examines Rainer Forst's theory of justification as a "mediating term" that bridges normative and empirical modes of social analysis in his book The Noumenal Republic. I argue that his view rests on understandings of power and agency that are not yet fully plausible, damaging its diagnostic and critical potential. More specifically, I argue, first, that Forst’s conception of power as the capacity to affect another's internal motivating reasons is too restrictive, and, second, that his equation of motivating and explanatory reasons ends up underplaying structural factors like racism and class oppression that, as expressions of power, may affect agents in diverse ways without changing their motivating reasons. The paper concludes that a broader conception of power, which includes both the internal and external affection of agency, is needed to fully capture the complexities of social and political domination.

Towards a Capabilities-Based Conception of Distributive Epistemic Justice 

Social Epistemology, 2024

Despite a growing effort in recent years to theorize epistemic justice as a species of distributive justice from within a Rawlsian framework, there is as yet no well-worked out capabilities-based account. In this paper, we set out to provide one. According to our sufficientarian conception, epistemic justice requires a distribution of capabilities that ensures to all individuals opportunities for minimal epistemic agency, publicly conceived. We argue that this conception has advantages over existing resourcist accounts of distributive epistemic justice inspired by Rawls as well as over Miranda Fricker’s tentative capabilities-based alternative. We contend that epistemic justice concerns a plurality of capabilities for epistemic agency, where the scope and nature of these capabilities is ultimately left open to discernment through public reasoning, but where equal emphasis is placed on contributing to as well as drawing from common pools of epistemic tools and resources.  Equally, we emphasize that epistemic justice essentially concerns both combined and internal capabilities, contrary to Fricker’s view. (link)

The Demand for Systematicity and the Authority of Theoretical Reason in Kant

Kantian Review, 2017

Abstract Kant’s notoriously unclear attempt to defend the regulative principle of systematic unity as the supreme principle of theoretical reason in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic has left its status a source of controversy. According to the dominant interpretation, the principle ought to be understood as a methodologically necessary device for extending our understanding of nature. I argue that this reading is flawed. While it may correctly affirm that the principle is normative in character, it wrongly implies that it binds with mere hypothetical necessity. I offer novel grounds for thinking that if reason’s principle is normative, then it binds agents categorically instead. (link)