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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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