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Engaging with Kant’s Ethical and Political Philosophy in Light of His Early Racial Theory Graham O’Brien
Content warning: This essay contains discussions of racism and racist philosophies Immanuel Kant, in the Groundwork For the Metaphysics of Morals and his other works of ethical philosophy, takes a universalist and egalitarian approach to humanity and morality. These philosophical claims, however, conflict with racist and inegalitarian views he upheld in some of his earlier theory; particularly, his essay “Of the Different Human Races”. Because of this conflict, scholarship has taken two notable positions on Kant’s racial theory and its conflict with his more influential ethical and political philosophy. As Pauline Kleingeld claims, in her essay “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race”, these two positions read Kant as either an “inconsistent universalist” or a “consistent inegalitarian.”1 Before I can adequately explain my argument, however, I ought to give substance to these two positions, which will inform this essay immensely. Beginning with the “inconsistent universalist” approach, Kleingeld writes: “The most common view is that Kant’s racism is a regrettable and appalling fact, but that it lies at the periphery of his philosophy, and that one can quite easily isolate it from the more important core of his Critical philosophy.”2 This view, as this passage suggests, seeks to divorce his earlier racial theory from his more influential Critical and post-Critical works. In particular, these scholars see such works as more relevant because they contradict with his racial theory.3 This view is, regrettably, not without issue, as
