Republican liberty and needs: A Kantian welfare state (Immanuel Kant)

The distinction between negative and positive liberty is familiar to political philosophers. The negative variety is freedom as non-interference. The positive variety is freedom as self-mastery. However, recently there has been an attempt on the part of a growing number of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars to recapture a third concept of political liberty. Philip Pettit has argued that political liberty is non-domination. People are free when no one has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily with them. Pettit furthermore identifies it with the republican tradition. I locate it specifically within the liberal republicanism Kant advocates in his political writings.; I argue that features that distinguish it from non-interference and self-mastery highlight the theoretical and practical advantages of liberty as non-domination. It is, among these candidates, best suited to serve as the guiding principle for the state's basic institutions and rules. The principle says that the state should secure non-domination among its citizens.; There is a quick argument from this principle to a distributive principle that calls for equality in meeting basic needs, or in what Amartya Sen calls the space of basic functioning capabilities. The state is responsible for securing its citizens' freedom as non-domination. Without adequate resources or income, a person is subject to dependence on others. Poverty makes people vulnerable to the capacity of others to interfere with them arbitrarily. Therefore, the state is responsible for distributing resources or income in order to insulate them from this condition. Equality in the space of basic functioning capabilities is necessary to do this. Therefore, the state is responsible for guaranteeing equality in the space of basic functioning capabilities. My account of the basic functioning capabilities specifies a set of requirements for a minimally acceptable life and says everyone has a right to achieve those functionings. I identify the appropriate content of this set by reflecting on the goal of republican liberty to secure non-domination among its citizens. What I call republican equality guarantees a threshold level of socio-economic security, educational security, and medical security. Should someone be unable through his own efforts to reach that level in these areas, the state should provide it up to that level.