Kleingeld, Pauline - Kant's Second Thoughts on Race

2016/08/26

The Philosophical Quarterly, No 229 Vol 57 October 2007

This paper seeks to describe Kant's views on race clearly and argues that they changed as the full force of his ethical theory unfolded. It starts with the highlights of Kant's essay from 1788 in which he advances a climate-based racial theory. The basic concept is that when races move from different climates, particularly warmer to colder, they lose industriousness and motivation to produce (pg573-4). Author argues that Kant changed his mind some time after 1792, to better accord with his moral theory.

The second section addresses Kant's history of racism and his review of other works that argued against using physical demarcations to determine race (pg576-7). In an essay written around the same time as his Groundwork (1785), Kant again re-affirms his racism as springing from the physical differences between humans (pg578) but curiously does not talk about any differences in moral capacity between the races. In a private letter he seems to suggest that the physical demarcations of races was separable from any possible moral one (579-80), and yet he re-asserts an intellectual hierarchy later on in 1788. Author describes some of the reactions to Kant's 1785 paper (pg580-1), specifically from Metzger, a professor of medicine, and Forster, a proto-anthropologist. It is to Forster that Kant replies in his 1788 essay, which re-introduces the heretofore 'detachable' deficiencies in intellect, reasoning, or agency capabilities associated with climate-based race.

The next section (III) is a summary of the hermeneutics between Kant's racism and his moral theory. Some author argue that the moral theory is paramount and that Kant had regrettable but minor unprincipled and empirical views on race (pg582-3). Others deny this tactic and instead argue that Kant's purported universalist theory is for "whites only", in other words, inegalitarian (pg583). Author criticizes this view because Kant argues that personhood follows from rationality, which all humanity possesses (pg583-4). This would make Kant an inconsistent universalist, rather than a consistent inegalitarian. But Kant's racism isn't a minor bug in his philosophy, it is a contradiction. More importantly, once this is admitted, his moral theory should not be 're-cast' as inegalitarian, but investigated to see in what ways (if any) his racism influenced his moral theory (pg584-5). A peek into the fruits of this investigation is Kant's introduction of a "cosmopolitan right" (pg585) later in the 1790s, after he dropped his hierarchical view of the races.

The final section discusses how Kant had "second thoughts" on his racism in the 1790s. Kant gives non-whites "juridical status" under the "cosmopolitan right" (pg586-7), claiming that contractual law should govern places where colonialism had instead been the rule. The idea here is that Europeans who seek to colonize must treat the natives as equals in a contractual setting, not as 'savages' to be civilized. He also came to reject chattel slavery (pg587-8). Furthermore, Kant came to reject climate-based racism and its implications for the inadvisability of intercontinental migration (for any race other than white). Instead, he argued that 'Nature' adapted humans so that they could live anywhere on earth, and that eventually it would allow for a super-structure of laws amongst the regions of the world (pg589). Finally, Kant drops his hierarchical rankings of the races and restricts his concept of race to be purely physical characteristics, explicitly saying that such characteristics have no bearing on human agency (pg589-91). Author discusses when this change might have occurred, perhaps between 1792 and 1795, as evidenced by his manuscripts changing for his 1795 work "Toward Perpetual Peace".