NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF LAW
PUBLIC LAW & LEGAL THEORY RESEARCH PAPER SERIES
WORKING PAPER NO. 18-39

All Kings in the Kingdom of Ends? Republic and Dignity

in Kant’s Practical Philosophy

Jeremy Waldron

July 2018

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 All Kings in the Kingdom of Ends?
Republic and Dignity in Kant’s Practical Philosophy
Jeremy Waldron1

Abstract
Kant’s “kingdom of ends” formulation uses a political model to illuminate some moral
ideals. Kant scholars have mostly failed to explore what we might think of as the politics
of the kingdom of ends, and how far it reflects Kant’s own political ideas—his
Rousseauian and republican ideas. My paper will look at the kingdom of ends through the
eyes of a political philosopher. Among other things, the paper will consider Kant’s view
that a king—if there is one—ought to rule in a republican spirit. And it will reject the
interpretation that sovereignty in the kingdom of ends is reserved for God: the whole
point of the model is that people should think of themselves as sharing in sovereignty.
There is also a question about the relation between the kingdom of ends and Kant’s
observations on dignity in the Groundwork. Is dignity a concept within the model—the
dignity of a law-maker—or is it something with real application in moral life, which the
kingdom-of-ends model helps illuminate? I shall argue that it is both of these.

It is commonly thought that Kantian political philosophy is the application of ideas

derived from Kantian moral philosophy. Kant is one of a number of philosophers
renowned for their moralistic approach to politics.2 In this paper, however, I would
like to explore the application in Kant’s moral philosophy of a model that in my
view has to be made sense of, in the first instance, in his political philosophy.3 I

1
University Professor, New York University (School of Law).
2
Kant’s late essay “On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy,” is about the use of
uncompromising moral standards in politics: “Right must never be accommodated to politics, but
politics must always be accommodated to right” (8:429). See also Appendix I of Kant’s essay
Toward Perpetual Peace.
3
I realize this is controversial. Among others, John Rawls maintains that Kant’s moral
philosophy is not constructed using elements from any realm other than that of practical reason
(by which he seems to mean moral reason): see Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in
Ronald Beiner and William Booth (eds.) Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary
Legacy (Yale University Press, 1993), at 301. But that can’t quite be right: after all, Kant makes
use of the idea of a system of nature in one formulation of the categorical imperative. Rawls
makes it sound as though the various formulations of the categorical imperative involve nothing
more than rearranging ideas which moral philosophy is already in possession of. I think this
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have in mind Kant’s third formulation (in some enumerations, formula IIIa) of the
categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In H.J.
Paton’s paraphrase, that formulation is:
So act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of a
kingdom of ends.4
The model that Kant invites us to entertain here consists of at least three political
ideas:5 (i) the idea of a social order or legal system meeting certain specifications
so far as the pursuit of its members’ ends is concerned; (ii) the idea of law-making
in such an order or system; and (iii) the idea of a law-making role for a “member”
of (i.e., someone subject to) such an order or system. It looks like we first have to
understand these political ideas (and of course the connections between them) in
order to understand, for the purposes of moral philosophy, the above formulation
of the categorical imperative. We have to have a grip on politics in order to work
with this model, so we can understand the moral point of view in light of it.
Now, if we like, we can approach the three ideas I mentioned in a quick and
impressionistic way. Or we can pause to explore the politics that are presupposed
by this formulation of the categorical imperative. In the first part of this paper, I
intend to do the latter, looking at the model which Kant deploys in the third
formulation through the eyes of a political philosopher. I want to consider the
politics of Kant’s kingdom of ends and the idea of law-making in such a kingdom
by a member or the members thereof.
Whether this perspective is strictly necessary in order to understand the
moral import of the passages in the Groundwork where the third formulation is
elaborated is, I guess, an open question. (I say that out of respect for the
generations of Kant scholars who have not engaged in such exploration or who

impoverishes Kant’s account. At any rate, see also the issues referenced below in footnote 47
and accompanying text.
4
H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative, p. 185, paraphrasing Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals (GW) at 4:438.
5
Thomas Hill, Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations, 190, says that “[t]he idea of a
kingdom of ends is constructed from elements in the previous formulations of the Categorical
Imperative.” I disagree: it is constructed from specifically political elements.
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have engaged in it with next to no knowledge of political or constitutional theory.)6
Necessary or not, the politics of the third formulation is surely an interesting
question. I hope too—and this will be the burden of the second part of my paper—
that it can help us with the idea of human dignity, which is introduced by Kant in
the Groundwork in close connection with the third formulation of the categorical
imperative.
There is one preliminary point to get out of the way. In The Categorical
Imperative, Paton observes that the phrase “the kingdom of ends” is “manifestly
reminiscent” of the idea of the Kingdom of God:7 Kant’s formula of the kingdom
of ends, he says, “is quite explicitly his rational form of recognizing a church
invisible and visible, the Kingdom of God which has to be made manifest on
earth.”8 According to Paton, the notion of sovereignty in such a kingdom is
identical with or suggestive of the position of God Himself.9 Thomas Hill seems to
follow him in this: the sovereign, he says, “is presumably God or the holy will.”10
I don’t think this can be right.11 Despite Paton’s use of terms like “explicitly” and
“manifestly reminiscent,” there is no textual warrant for it in the Groundwork
passages in which the idea of the kingdom of ends is introduced.12 Something like

6
I should mention also the observation in the organizers’ notes for this conference—confirmed
by my own reading—that the kingdom-of-ends formulation has been less explored by
philosophers than other formulations of the categorical imperative. The organizers say that this is
because the kingdom-of-ends formulation seems “rather esoteric and metaphysically fishy.” I
think it is because too few scholars have approached it with Kant’s political philosophy in mind.
7
Paton, The Categorical Imperative, p. 188.
8
Ibid., p. 196.
9
Ibid., p. 181.
10
Thomas Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory, 59. To be fair, having
subscribed to this interpretation, Hill puts it aside as mostly uninteresting: “For the purposes of
this paper, he [God] can be ignored” (ibid.). See also Hill, Virtue, Rules, and Justice, 261n21,
for a helpful discussion.
11
Nor do I accept Onora O’Neill’s suggestion, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s
Practical Philosophy, 143, that “kingdom of ends” is a “potent symbol” of “the communion of
saints.”
12
There is a hint of it in the Second Critique, where Kant observes that the Christian doctrine of
morals represents “the world in which all rational beings devote themselves with their whole soul
to the moral law as a kingdom of God … through a holy author who makes the derived highest
good possible” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:128-9). But, as I read what immediately
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it crops up later, but even then only elliptically and indirectly in Kant’s account of
what would be necessary for a pure kingdom of ends to be realized in fact (GW
4:439). We should not allow this equation of sovereign=God to distract us from
our assignment of exploring the human politics of a kingdom of ends and, in
particular, Kant’s insistent use of the Rousseauian idea that each rational and
autonomous person in a well-ordered society can be thought of as both sovereign
and subject so far as its law is concerned.

I
What does the kingdom of ends involve from a political point of view? It is
conceived as a certain sort of order with human persons cast in the various roles
that the model comprises. Some of those roles amount simply to lives being led in
that order—subject to it, ordered by it, coordinated, governed, and regulated by it,
and with potential conflicts resolved by it. And some of the roles are those of the
agents of the ordering in question—persons who ordain or lay down the rules that
constitute the order. To put it crudely, the concept of a kingdom of ends comprises
the concept of subject-roles and the concept of legislative-roles. As I said at the
beginning: Kant’s kingdom of ends formulation seems to implicate three political
ideas: (i) the idea of a particular sort of social system; (ii) the idea of law-making
in such an system; and (iii) the idea of a law-making role for all or some of the
members of such a system.
Ideas (ii) and (iii) have to do with what we may call the dynamic aspect of
the order that Kant is asking us envisage: how it is made; how it changes (if it
does).13 The static aspect consists in the way the laws apply to particular cases; that
comprises (i) above. Let’s begin with the static aspect of the kingdom of ends.
Kant invites us to consider, as “a very fruitful concept,” what he calls a
“systematic union of various rational beings through common laws” (GW 4:433).

follows this in the Second Critique, Kant is emphatic that we have to secure the idea of the moral
law as (though it were) prescribed by human law-makers first, before we can take the very last
steps in Kant’s morality that engage “the existence of God as a postulate of pure practical
reason.”
13
I have in mind Hans Kelsen’s distinction between static and dynamic aspects of our
understanding of a legal system: Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, pp. 108 and 193.
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We are to imagine a plurality of individuals, who are diverse—that is, different
from one another—in the ends to which they are devoted14 and of course also in
the individuals’ sheer plurality as ends in themselves.15 We must imagine
moreover a large plurality of such persons: as Hill observes, the point of view
being set up here requires us to presuppose not just an isolated pair of individuals
who have (e.g.) made promises to each other, but a state-sized array of persons
living side by side, who “need to join together into communities with common
laws that assign to each other rights and responsibilities.”16
Now, as they negotiate their way through life, people pursue different goods
and happiness under different conceptions.17 These pursuits pose a problem of
social order, which consists in the possibility (likelihood, inevitability) that the
activities inspired by various people’s aims will come into conflict with one
another. Conflicts arise when the activity of one agent cuts across or collides with
the activity of another, in such a way that the actions in question cannot both take
place. The legal rules of the order Kant envisages may be viewed as a way of
dealing with that possibility of conflict. For example, it is the job of traffic law to
ensure that people moving around the territory can get to their destinations
reasonably quickly and in an orderly fashion without risk of collision. And it is the
job of property law to address the possibility of conflict between different persons’
attempts to make use of the same material resources. In general, the kingdom of
ends as a legal order comprises rules governing the time and manner in which
activities of all sorts may be undertaken, to ensure what Hillel Steiner called the
compossibility of all the various ends whose pursuit is supposed to be governed

14
For Kant’s quite liberal position on the diversity of individual conceptions of happiness, see
his essay “On the common saying: ‘That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice,’”
(T&P), 8:290-1.
15
For the importance of both these sets of ends, see Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and
Happiness, 340 and Hill, Virtue, Rules, and Justice, 29.
16
Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory, 208. For a perverse alternative
view, see Daniel Robinson and Rom Harré, “The Demography of the Kingdom of Ends,”
Philosophy, 69 (1994), 5, at 9: “There appears to be no need for a population numbering more
than one.”
17
What follows is adapted from Jeremy Waldron, “Toleration and reasonableness,” in Catriona
McKinnon and Dario Castiglione (eds.) Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable
Toleration (Manchester University Press, 2013).
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and coordinated in this order.18 The kingdom of ends is exactly an order governed
by what Kant calls in The Metaphysics of Morals, the universal principle of right:
“Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a
universal law” (MM 6:230). We imagine a set of laws solving the problem of the
compossibility of individual ends,19 and we use this solution as the touchstone of
the rightness of our actions.
Of course, actually existing polities may have laws that are less permissive
than this: maybe they restrict actions in despotic ways that are not necessary in
order to secure a universal compossibility of choices and pursuits in a kingdom of
ends. Or they may permit too much, thus allowing unnecessary conflicts or
collisions. So actual positive legality is not a good test, for the purposes of moral
philosophy. We have to imagine instead an ideal legal order, and that is what Kant
is inviting us to do in the third formulation of the categorical imperative. 20
Interesting though all this is, it is the dynamic aspect of the kingdom of ends
that is of greater concern in this essay. In this regard, Kant invites us to consider
the norms or constraints of the order we have been describing not, in the first
instance as natural, but as something made or ordained.21 How are the rules of the
kingdom of ends made? We are to consider (ii) the idea of law-making. And in
connection with that, there is (iii) the question of agency: Who occupies the law-
making roles? And how is the occupancy of those roles related to membership of

18
See Hillel Steiner, “The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights,” Journal of Philosophy, 74
(1977), 767.
19
Formally speaking, the task is to specify a set of constraints on conduct (call it set C),
satisfying three conditions: (1) no two actions permitted by C conflict with one another; (2) for
each individual who is subject to C, the range of actions permitted by C is adequate for the
pursuit of his ends; and (3) the laws are general and equal for all. Although, in order to avoid
conflict, each person has to accept some constraints, the idea is that all are equally constrained
and no one is required to labor under such extensive or burdensome constraints as to make the
pursuit of his or her chosen ends impossible.
20
For Kant’s helpful discussion of the difference between actual positive law and the principles
that inform the ideal of legality, see MM 6:239-30
21
I do not accept Christine Korsgaard’s suggestion in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge
University Press, 1996), at p. 140, that, under the auspices of the 3rd formulation, “[t]he Kingdom
of Ends is represented by the kingdom of nature; we determine moral laws by considering their
viability as natural laws.”
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the order—that is, being one of the persons whose ends are reconciled with those
of all others in that order?
Reference to the political order as a kingdom of ends suggests to the unwary
that the legislative function is vested in just one person: a king. But “kingdom” in
“kingdom of ends” is just an artefact of an English tradition of translating the
Groundwork. The German term is actually “Reich” (not “Königreich”) and, as
Mary Gregor notes in her translation, “Reich” might as easily be translated as
“Commonwealth.” H.J. Paton offers these observations on what he calls a “point
of terminology”:
For a time I was persuaded by an Oxford colleague to abandon the phrase
“kingdom of ends”. This was on the ground that the German word “Reich”
does not strictly mean a “kingdom” but a “realm.” A “Reich” may be a
kingdom (Königreich) or an empire (Kaiserreich) or a mere tyranny like the
so-called “Third Reich”, now fortunately deceased. These are strong
arguments, and in some ways the word “realm” is a more exact translation.
On the other hand, it is not always possible to get precise equivalents in
different languages. The word “realm”, when taken strictly, is a trifle
pompous and archaic, whereas the word “Reich” is neither. What is worse,
the word “realm”, like the word “sphere”, is apt to be taken colourlessly, as
when we speak of “the realm of fancy” or “the sphere of industry.” The
conclusive consideration is, however, this—that the word “Reich” is
manifestly reminiscent of “Das Reich Gottes” (The Kingdom of God).22
We have dealt with Paton’s “conclusive consideration” already.23 As for his points
about archaism and colorlessness, he doesn’t explain why an alternative translation
that he suggests in a footnote—“Commonwealth”—might not be used instead. For
reasons that I will now explain, the translation of “Reich” as “kingdom” is a
stunningly bad translation, which has led over the years to massive indirection
among students of the Groundwork.24

22
Paton, The Categorical Imperative, pp. 187-8.
23
See text accompanying notes 6-10 above.
24
John Rawls makes short work of the traditional translation in “Themes in Kant’s Moral
Philosophy,” at 298: “This community Kant calls a realm of ends—a commonwealth and not a
kingdom….”
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 Why is “kingdom” such a bad translation? Well, first we must acknowledge
that the dynamic logic of Kant’s idea of the kingdom of ends in the Groundwork is
thoroughly republican, not monarchical. Put briefly, we are asked to entertain the
possibility that every person whose life is governed by a given social order might
be an exerciser of sovereignty relative to that order, at least so far as law-making is
concerned. How else can we read the following passage?
A rational being belongs as a member to the kingdom of ends when he gives
universal laws in it, but is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs to it
as sovereign when, as lawgiving, he is not subject to the will of any other. …
Morality consists, then, in the reference of all action to the legislation by
which alone a kingdom of ends is possible. This lawgiving must, however,
be found in every rational being and be able to arise from his will. (GW
4:433-4)
This is explicitly republican. There is nothing about kingship here. And it is
impossible to read Kant in this and similar passages as suggesting—as Paton
maintains—that authorship of the law in the realm or commonwealth of ends
belongs to the holy will of God.25 Kant’s whole point—the insistent focus of his
moral theory—is that we can conceive of the authorship of the law as in ourselves.
We are to imagine ourselves as legislators in the realm or commonwealth of ends.
So, if the realm or commonwealth that Kant imagines were to be regarded as a
kingdom, then each of us should have to think of himself as king. We would be, in
the silly terms of my title for this paper, “all kings in the kingdom of ends.” Or, in
Paul Guyer’s more thoughtful formulation, the will of each person is to regard
itself as legislating “for a realm of equally qualified co-legislators.”26

25
Ibid., p. 188.
26
Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, 142. Later Guyer observes: “[C]onceiving of
not only oneself but of all the others who may be affected by one’s actions as universal
legislators, that is, as agents who have not only particular empirical interests but also the same
overriding interest in universal legislation as one has oneself—that is, postulating that those
whom one’s actions affect can be members of a kingdom of ends—is a necessary condition of
acting on [the categorical imperative], for only the postulation that all who are affected by one’s
actions are capable of universal legislation can make it reasonable to suppose that a universal law
can be accepted by a manifold of agents in spite of their diverse empirical interests” (ibid., 202).
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 Kant’s position is almost exactly the one envisaged in The Social Contract
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
[T]he act of association consists of a reciprocal commitment between society
and the individual, so that each person … finds himself doubly committed,
first as a member of the sovereign body in relation to individuals, and
secondly as a member of the state in relation to the sovereign.27
This similarity should not surprise us. In moral and political philosophy, no-one’s
work was more important to Kant than that of Rousseau. The idea of a person
being bound only by laws he has given to himself is obviously Rousseauian,28 as is
the idea that each person is both subject and lawgiver.
By the way: that the combination in each person is a combination of
subjecthood and sovereignty is clear in Rousseau. And I believe Kant adopts this
too: certainly he talks freely of the subject belonging to the kingdom of ends as
sovereign and as having a share in sovereignty (GW 4:433). Thomas Hill says that
“Kant’s political metaphors suggest an ideal legislature in which all citizens are
free and rational legislators and (except for the sovereign) bound by the laws that
they make.”29 This suggests a dichotomy between sovereign and legislator(s). But
that makes no sense in Kant’s Rousseauian logic. True, Kant talks of the sovereign
not being bound by the laws that are made, in contrast with the subject-lawgivers
who obviously are. But instead of steering this towards a dichotomy of the kind
Hill suggests, Kant toys instead with the idea that insofar as each of us has a share
of sovereignty, so far (considered in that role alone) we are not to think of
ourselves as bound.
That’s the logic of Kant’s account of the dynamics of the “kingdom” of
ends. Now, as to Kantian politics: we know that for all his own crusty
authoritarianism, Kant was deep down a republican in his political philosophy. He
criticized the idea of “born rulers”; he said it made no more sense than the idea of a
born professor (MM 6:329). He rejected “the hereditary privilege of ruling rank”

27
Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. I __
28
See Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason, 81.
29
Hill, Virtue, Rules, and Justice, 61. But see also Hill’s very helpful discussion at ibid.,
261n21.
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(T&P 8:297). His position in Toward Perpetual Peace is well-known: what he
called the “First Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace” was that “The civil
constitution in every state should be republican” (PP 8:349). But it is not just
pragmatic, for the purpose of avoiding war. Towards the end of his life, in Conflict
of Faculties, Kant said several times of the republican form that it is “the eternal
norm for all civil constitutions” (CF 7:91).30
There is nothing particularly fancy or esoteric about Kant’s republicanism.31
It is not distinctively “Roman republicanism” or anything like that.32 It comprised a
typical late eighteenth century commitment to separation of powers (PP 8:352),
representation (MM 6:341 and PP 8:352), fundamental equality (T&P 8:291-4 and
PP 8:350-1), a commitment to ordered liberty (T&P 8:290-1), and government for
the sake of the common pursuit of the common good.33 Like James Madison,34
Kant distinguishes for practical purposes between a republic and a direct
democracy (PP 8:351-2). But still, as a matter of principle, he thinks like Rousseau
that the fundamental logic of a republic is the law-making consent of every citizen:
“The legislative authority can belong only to the united will of the people” (MM
6:313).35 All this is deeply and pervasively embedded in Kant’s philosophical
politics, and it would be quite wrong not to bring it to bear on our understanding of
the political model he is using in the Groundwork.
Does this mean there is really no possible role for a king in Kant’s
“kingdom” of ends? Well, the matter is complicated by three factors.

30
Kant, The Contest of the Faculties (CF), in Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and
Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (Pauline Kleingeld ed., 2008).
31
There is a good level-headed discussion in Wolfgang Kersting, “The Civil Constitution in
Every State shall be a Republican One,” in Karl Ameriks et al. (ed.) Kant’s Moral and Legal
Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
32
For Kant’s observations on the republics of antiquity, see PP 8:353
33
In a long footnote to CF 7:86, Kant expresses contempt for the philosophical fantasy that the
common good might be secured through despotic political mechanisms: “[T]he enjoyment of
life’s comforts is not sufficient for beings endowed with freedom, since these could also be had
from others (in this case from the government). What matters to a being endowed with freedom
is the principle by which it attains such comforts for itself.”
34
The Federalist Papers, no. 10.
35
There’s an excellent discussion of this in Kersting, op. cit.
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 First, like Rousseau, Kant distinguished structurally between sovereignty
and government. Even if sovereignty in a republic is in principle vested in the
united body of citizens, the government, which is the entity charged with the
administration of the laws laid down by the sovereign and the administration of the
state generally may be democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical.36 That is to say,
executive authority may be in the hands of a single ruler, even though it offends
republican principle for the chief of the executive to be also the maker of the laws
(MM 6:316-8). So there is certainly a role within a fundamentally republican
structure that might be occupied by a king-like figure; only, it is not a law-giving
role.
Secondly, Kant himself lived—and not all that restively37—under a
monarchy in Prussia—a monarch whose powers went beyond mere administration,
and he believed that submission on his part to the monarch was (more or less)
required. Republican as he was, Kant was also still an authoritarian. He was not in
favor of people rising up to change their government to a republican form. If
somehow a republic suddenly came into existence—even wrongfully—where a
monarchy had existed before, Kant might celebrate the fact and his
authoritarianism would call for that republic now to be supported and obeyed
against the forces of reaction (MM 6:323).38 But he denied that people were
entitled to agitate for the overthrow of a non-republican system of government
(T&P 8:299-305).

36
See generally Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. III; look especially at the first few lines of Bk.
III, Ch. 6: “So far, we have considered the prince as a moral and collective person, unified by the
force of the laws, and the depositary in the State of the executive power. We have now to
consider this power when it is gathered together into the hands of a natural person, a real man,
who alone has the right to dispose of it in accordance with the laws. Such a person is called a
monarch or king.”
37
Kant had a run-in with the Prussian authorities in 1794 concerning his publications on religion.
He promised King Frederick William II that he would not write any more on this topic. But in
1798 Kant denied he was bound by this promise after Frederick William II died (CF 7:5-11).
38This was his attitude towards the declaration of the French Republic in 1792. On
hearing of the declaration, Kant gave voice to a Nunc Dimittis: “Now let your servant go in
peace to his grave, for I have seen the glory of the world.” Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A
Biography 342 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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 But thirdly—and this is really interesting—Kant ventured the suggestion that
a monarchy might act like a republic. A republic, he said, might be defined either
in structural terms or in terms of the spirit in which it is ruled (PP 8:352). Just as
Montesquieu talked of “a nation [perhaps Great Britain] that may be justly called a
republic, disguised under the form of monarchy,”39 so Kant mooted the idea of a
king ruling in a more or less completely republican spirit. Although in ideal theory
we should organize our polity on the structural principles of republicanism, in the
real world it is the duty of monarchs to govern in a republican spirit (PP 8:372),
i.e., “in analogy to the laws that a people would give itself according to universal
principles of right” (CF 7:88). In effect, Kant is a theorist of constitutional
monarchy. And he says that one can legitimately work slowly for this in an
actually existing monarchy, to “change the kind of government gradually and
continually so that it harmonizes in its effect with the only constitution that accords
with right, that of a pure republic….” (MM 9:340).
In light of all this, we can see how odd it would be for Kant to use the idea
of a literal kingdom as his political model in the third formulation of the categorical
imperative. His fundamental ideas are republican; even such monarchies as he is
prepared to acknowledge tend—if they are any good—towards republicanism in
the spirit of their operation. And anyway, even without this wholesome diversion
into Kant’s own constitutional theory, the logic of what is said in the Groundwork
about the “kingdom” of ends is utterly republican. We are given the image of a
commonwealth in which those who are subject to the laws have a role in making
the laws. And not a trivial role, either: each is imagined to play a part in the
making of the laws constrained only by the accommodation of an equal lawgiving
role for all others who are subject to them. The “kingdom” is a republic and its
lawgivers are its citizens.

II

Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, V. 19. But cf. Kant’s own acerbic comments on British
39

monarchy and politics in T&P 8:303 and CF 7:90.

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The second part of my paper is briefer and more tentative.40 It addresses the
relation between the political conceptions appealed to in the elaboration of
categorical imperative’s third formulation and the idea of human dignity.
There are two strands to Kant’s discussion of dignity in the Groundwork: (1)
dignity as the infinite value of the human capacity for morality; and (2) dignity as
the status of a law-maker in the kingdom of ends. (The two strands are connected
in the saying: “In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity” (GW
4:434).)41 Plainly (1) and (2) are related, but (2) is more of a political idea; and
again, exploration of Kant’s politics might help us elaborate it.
Dignity, as Kant uses it in sense (1), is (or is like) our notion of human
dignity. It is something of incomparable importance in each of its instantiations. It
is beyond price. It marks the elevation—the ennoblement—of those who have it
above the ordinary run of mortal beings.42 At the same time, it is equal in all
humans. We all have it on account of our rational ability to engage in and control
our behavior with moral thinking.
Now of course there are and have been uses of “dignity” that are much more
hierarchical than this. I have in mind the old idea of dignity in the sense of Roman
dignitas—the status attached to a specific role or rank in an unequal system of
nobility and office. Kant talks about dignity in this sense too, only not in the
Groundwork. In the first part of his late work The Metaphysics of Morals (the
Rechtslehre), he talks of legislative, executive, and judicial offices as dignities
(MM 6:315.); in a slightly different sense, he speaks of “the distribution of
dignities, which are eminent estates without pay, based on honour alone” (MM
6:328.)

Some of what follows is adapted from Waldron, “Citizenship and Dignity” in Christopher
40

McCrudden (ed.) Understanding Human Dignity, 327-32.

41
I am grateful to the conference organizers’ notes for this emphasis. See also Jürgen Habermas,
“The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy,
41 (2010), 464, at 474: “In order to understand what we mean by ‘human dignity,’ the ‘kingdom
of ends’ must first be explained.”
42
I owe some of these formulations to Oliver Sensen, “Kant’s Conception of Human Dignity,”
Kant-Studien, 100 (2009).
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 Kant does not explicitly address the question of the relation between these
understandings of dignity. But one line at least seems to be thrown across whatever
chasm separates the two. And it takes us from strand (1) to strand (2) in Kant’s
conception of dignity. It goes as follows.
Having spoken of various hierarchical dignities in The Metaphysics of
Morals, Kant says this: “Certainly no human being can be without any dignity,
since he at least has the dignity of a citizen” (MM 6:329). In context, the dignity of
a citizen is presented as one dignitas among others, albeit a pervasive one. But it is
said to be a dignitas to which in principle every human being as such is entitled.43
The intriguing link that is established in this way between dignity as used in the
Groundwork (where it seems to be associated with lawgiving) and dignitas as
characteristic of the political role of the citizen seems to me to be worth
exploring.44
Now, actually the identification of dignity in Groundwork 4:434 with the
dignity of the citizen in the Metaphysics of Morals (written more than ten years
later) is not straightforward. In his constitutional theory Kant distinguishes
between active and passive citizenship, with the lower grade assigned to those who
cannot present themselves in social, economic, and political life as fully
independent of others. This includes women, many servants or employees, and
possibly paupers as well (MM 6:315). In politics, the dignity of law-giving
citizenship is withheld from those who are dependent. Only independent citizens—
those who are not dependent directly on others for their livelihood—have “the
right to manage the state as active members of it,” as voters or as jurors, for
example (MM 6:315). How is this related to the dignity of law-giving in the moral
theory?
In his theory of politics, there is a certain unease in Kant’s conception of
passive citizenship: “the concept of a passive citizen seems to contradict the
concept of a citizen as such” (MM 6:314). And in The Metaphysics of Morals,
Kant observes that the passive citizens’ “dependence upon the will of others and
this inequality is … in no way opposed to their freedom and equality as human

43
One qualification: the dignity of a citizen may be forfeit for crime: MM 6:329-30.
44
For a similar intimation, see Habermas, op. cit., 475.
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beings” (MM 6:315). As persons, they have “a human being’s quality of being his
own master” (MM 6:238). They are still entitled to be treated “in accordance with
the laws of natural freedom of equality,” and treated indeed as persons who make
up the people of the state, for whose sake and for whose moral co-existence as
ends civil society is established (MM 6:314).
On the other side, there is one brief mention in the Groundwork account of
dignity of the independence that is supposed to distinguish active citizenship.
A rational being must always regard himself as lawgiving in a kingdom of
ends possible through freedom of the will, whether as a member or as
sovereign. He cannot, however, hold the position of sovereign merely by the
maxims of his will but only in case he is a completely independent being,
without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will. (GW 4:434)
This is not the most lucid passage in the Groundwork. But the gist of it seems to be
that each of us—even those who in real-world politics might be relegated to
passive citizenship—can think of himself or herself as a possible legislator
independent of the will of others. We can think of ourselves as not being
dominated by need or fear or favor (even if in real life we are). We can think of
ourselves as making laws in that spirit, laws that permit or prohibit actions not
because of their relation to our needs or the desires of those who have some hold
over us, but purely because of their relation to the kind of order of ends that we
imagine ourselves setting up. This capacity affords each of us the dignity of a
“share … in the giving of universal laws” (4:435). And we can use our thinking of
ourselves in this way as a heuristic for our moral thinking.
So, that’s what I want to emphasize: how we think of ourselves in the
kingdom of ends, when we deploy this idea for the purposes of moral philosophy,
is as active citizens. Only, now it is really really important that the “kingdom” be
acknowledged as in principle a republic—one in which all the citizens participate
in law-making. Without that acknowledgement, the connection between human
dignity and the dignity of the citizen will seem mysterious.
It is tempting to understand dignity in the Groundwork simply as a certain
sort of value—value beyond price—inhering in the rational capacity for morality:
“morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has
dignity” (GW 4:435). But actually Kant almost always associates dignity in the
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Groundwork with lawgiving in the kingdom of ends. In a way, the dignity of
having a share in lawgiving is an integral part of the political model that Kant is
inviting us to use in his third formulation of the categorical imperative. Dignity is
not used in relation to any of the other formulations of the categorical imperative,
not even the formula of the end in itself.
In some moods, I am inclined to think of dignity as nothing but a status we
imagine for ourselves as part of the kingdom-of-ends heuristic. Just as we imagine
ourselves as lawgivers or just as we imagine ourselves as sharing in sovereignty, so
(and on the same basis) we imagine ourselves as having this dignity: the dignity of
an active citizen if the realm of ends is a republic or the dignity of a king (but one
of thousands of kings) if the realm were really a kingdom.45 It is a sublime
political status to which we think of ourselves as entitled.
But that won’t quite do, because Kant does also seem to want to extrapolate
dignity from the model, drawing it out and applying it directly to us in virtue of our
capacity to use the model. We have dignity;46 we are not just required to think of
ourselves as having dignity. Our dignity is made intelligible in terms of the dignity
associated in the model with lawgiving: “the worthiness of every rational subject to
be a law-giving member in the kingdom of ends” is the basis of our dignity and of
what distinguishes each of us from “all merely natural beings” (GW 4:439). But
we who are actually not lawgivers have dignity too. Our entertaining and use of the
model of the kingdom of ends vouches for the sort of self-mastery that is the basis
of our real-life dignity. We are worthy of dignity in virtue of this self-mastery
(GW 4:440)—a form of self-mastery (both laying down law for oneself and
obeying it) that has its counterpart and thus its illumination within the model of the
kingdom of ends.

45
It therefore has something in common with the “universal nobility” account of human dignity
that I have developed in some of my other work: “Dignity and Rank,” Archives Européennes de
Sociologie, 48 (2007), 201 and Dignity, Rank and Rights, ed. Meir Dan Cohen (Oxford
University Press, 2012). Though it would be wrong to identify the two (certainly without further
discussion), there is some congruence with my use of “universal nobility” as a heuristic for
thinking about dignity and the idea that Kantian dignity might be an artifact of the political
model he is using to illuminate moral life.
46
This is clear in his discussion of dignity in the Metaphysics of Morals in the great passage that
distinguishes a human being regarded as a person with dignity from a human animal considered
only as such in the order of nature (MM 6:434-5).
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 I don’t think we should short-circuit this extrapolation. Hill comes close to
that when he says that Kant asks us to think of ourselves as engaged in “moral
legislation in the kingdom of ends.”47 On this formulation, what we think of
ourselves as doing in the political model is exactly what we are trying to get help
with in reality. No, the model asks us to think of ourselves as engaged in regular
political legislation as though in any polity. Moral legislation is what that model is
trying to illuminate: it is not what is being used as illumination.
We think of ourselves as bearing the dignity of active citizenship in a true
republic. Imagining what that would be like involves imagining a certain form of
self-mastery—both in the legislating and in the obeying—that is important for
political purposes. Being a legislator in a republic—sharing in its sovereignty—is
associated with a very high dignity. That’s the model, and the moral philosopher’s
observation is that, in many ways, self-mastery in ordinary moral life is just like
that. Anyone is capable of it.48 As such, it deserves to be credited with a high
dignity of its own that commands respect both in one’s own eyes and “from all
other rational beings in the world” (MM 6:435)

July 2, 2018

47
Hill, Virtue, Rules, and Justice, 239 (my emphasis). I think something similar might be
involved in Rawls’s presentation of the realm of ends as a moral community: Rawls, “Themes in
Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” 298.
For Kant on equality in this regard, see Jeremy Waldron, One Another’s Equals (Harvard
48

University Press, 2017), 124-6.

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