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6 Jurisprudence 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/jisprud6 and id is 1 raw text is: DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5235/20403313.6.1.1 The Jurisprudence Annual Lecture 2015 Means and Ends Arthur Ripstein* My aim in this paper is to offer an account and defence of Kant's idea of right as a set of restrictions on the means that people can use in pursuing their pur- poses. In the introduction to the Doctrine of Right Kant introduces this perspective by drawing a contrast between what he characterises as the 'form' of choice and its 'matter'. In the introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue Kant appeals to the same contrast, contrasting the formal conditions of outer freedom as 'the consistency of outer freedom with itself if its maxims were made universal law', with ethics, which provides 'a matter (an object of free choice), an end'.' Right is concerned with the possibility of ends, but does not command any ends; virtue is concerned with mandatory ends. This distinction explains why right can be compelled, but virtue cannot. Virtue requires acting for a specific end; if you do so in response to the threat of compulsion, the avoidance of the threatened consequence is the end for which you act. Kant's contention that actions can be compelled but maxims cannot might be thought to exhaust the distinction between right and virtue, and so, at least potentially, to open up space for the compulsion, or coercive prohibition, of what John Stuart Mill called 'self-regarding acts', such as suicide, on the ground that the act can be specified without reference to the end for the sake of which it is done. I will argue, to the contrary, that the structure of right is always focused on * Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on justice and Virtue in Kant's Practical Philosophy', 25-26 March 2011, at the Centre for Law and Cosmopolitan Values at the University of Antwerp, at a Colloquium sponsored by the Norwegian Kant Society in Oslo in November 2013, and as the jurisprudenceAnnual Lecture in January 2015. I am grateful to members of the audiences on those occasions, to Jacob Weinrib for comments on an earlier draft, and to Philipp-Alexander Hirsch and George Pavlakos for discussion. 1 6:381. References to Kant are to Mary Gregor's translation in the Practical Philosophy volume of the Cambridge Edition of Kant's works. Because Gregor's translation has appeared in a variety of other editions and paginations, I have given page references to the Prussian Academy pagination which appears in the margins of Gregor's translation. 2 JS Mill, On Liberty (1859) in Collected Works, vol XVIII,JM Robson (ed) (University of Toronto Press, 1977). (2015) 6 (1) jurisprudence 1-23

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