Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 brill.

nl/hobs

Voluntarism and Conventionalism in Hobbes

and Kant

Larry Krasnoff
Professor, Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston
Charleston SC 29424, USA
E-mail: krasnoff@cofc.edu

Abstract
Kant’s relation to Hobbesian voluntarism has recently become a source of controversy for
the interpretation of Kant’s practical philosophy. Realist interpreters, most prominently Karl
Ameriks, have attacked the genealogies of Kantian autonomy suggested by J. B. Schneewind
and Christine Korsgaard as misleadingly voluntarist and unacceptably anti-realist. In this
debate, however, there has been no real discussion of Kant’s own views about Hobbes. By
examining the relation of Hobbes’ voluntarism to a kind of conventionalism, and through a
reading of Kant’s most explicit discussion of Hobbes, in “Theory and Practice,”1 I argue that
Kant’s criticism of Hobbes is much more limited than it might first appear. Rather than
rejecting Hobbes’ voluntarism and conventionalism entirely, Kant ends up criticizing only
Hobbes’ understanding of the relation between these doctrines. The essay thus defends
Schneewind’s and Korsgaard’s histories of modern moral philosophy, and raises doubts
about realist readings of Kant’s practical philosophy.

Keywords
constructivism, conventionalism, Hobbes, Kant, original contract, realism, voluntarism

1. Voluntarism and Conventionalism in Hobbes

In Chapter VI of Leviathan, Hobbes famously writes:

But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which
he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and
of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and

1 I. Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in
Practice,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 279-309 [8:275-313]. Hereafter abbreviated as TP. Throughout the essay, unbracketed
page numbers for Kant refer to this translation of Gregor; bracketed page numbers refer to
the edition of the Prussian Academy.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/187502512X639605

44 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there
being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil
to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of
the man, where there is no Commonwealth; or, in a Commonwealth, from the
person that representeth it; or from an arbitrator or judge, whom men dis-
agreeing shall by consent set up and make his sentence the rule thereof.2
With these words, Hobbes sweeps away any traditionally realist or objec-
tive conception of the good. In its place, he proposes a radically subjective,
voluntarist, and finally conventionalist conception in which goodness is
relativized to the claim of a particular agent (“that … which he for his part
calleth good”). If there is to be any sense in which different agents can
understand something as objectively good, it can only be because the dif-
ferent agents can agree on a “common rule” that defines the object as good
for all of them. Such a common rule gets its force not from the nature of the
object that the rule approves, but from the act of the person who makes the
rule. As for how the ruler came to have this special, good-creating status,
Hobbes appeals to yet another voluntary act, through which the ruled agree
to be ruled by someone in particular (“an arbitrator or judge, whom men
disagreeing shall by consent set up and make his sentence the rule thereof”).
The sovereign of the commonwealth, established for Hobbes by covenant,
is just a special case of this sort of contractually established arbitrator – one
with the power to hire, fire, or overrule any subordinate arbitrator that
might presume to judge any disputes within that commonwealth.3
Voluntarism and conventionalism govern this account, at three different,
hierarchically structured levels. At the first level, an object becomes good
because an agent understands it as worth pursuing. One might think that
for Hobbes, an object is good because an agent desires it, but this is not in
fact what Hobbes says. He writes only that an agent calls what he desires
good. The appeal to goodness enters the picture not with the original appe-
tite, but with the labeling of the object of the appetite as worthy of pursu-
ing, and thus as good. It is a mistake to see in Hobbes, as a utilitarian
perhaps might hope for, any later-day realist (though subjectivist) under-
standing of goodness as the satisfaction of desire. Goodness is in its original
sense the result of an act of judgment on the part of an agent, the establish-
ing of a kind of first-person linguistic convention through which the
agent comes to define the goals of his or her actions as valuable. Hobbes’

2 T. Hobbes, Leviathan I.VI, 28-29. Page numbers for Hobbes’ Leviathan refer to the
English edition edited by E. Curley (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1994).
3 Leviathan II.XVIII, 113-115.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 45

conventionalist account of speech as the association of an arbitrary verbal

sign with a physical object is presented just before the discussion of good-
ness in Chapter VI, and is absolutely crucial to the later account.4 (The full
title of Chapter VI is “Of the Interior Beginnings of Voluntary Motions,
Commonly Called the Passions, and the Speeches by Which They are
Expressed.”) Goodness, like any other form of speech, is not a natural
object or the property of any natural object, beyond the bare status of
the word as a physical symbol, as an audible or legible marker, applied by
the agent to the objects of his or her desires. If the attainment of those
objects is good, it is not because the objects themselves are naturally good,
or even because the satisfaction of desire is naturally good. Rather, the
attainment of the object is good because the agent has voluntarily estab-
lished a form of speech, a linguistic convention, under which those objects
are defined as worth attaining. We can naturalistically explain the estab-
lishment of such conventions in terms of the biological forces that govern
our desires, but if the explanation is to count as a naturalistic, Hobbes well
understands, no notion of goodness must be deployed in the explanatory
account. From the point of view of nature, our actions are simply the results
of physical forces, and cannot be described as either good or bad. That we
describe them in this way is the result of our imposition of an artificial lin-
guistic convention on our actions (“the speeches by which … [our actions]
are expressed”).5
The second (social) and third (political) levels of Hobbes’ account are
more familiar, but it is important to see that they depend on and follow the
logic of the first, individual level. At the second level, the crucial idea is
that of covenant, which for Hobbes grounds every moral value and indeed
every value that is in any way common to individual agents.6 Once again,
the defining feature of covenant is linguistic and performative: the verbal

4 See Hobbes, Leviathan I.IV. The importance of language to Hobbes’ project is the cen-
tral theme of the recent study by P. Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and
Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
5 Compare the discussion in J. Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” Philosophical
Perspectives 6 (1992), 333-353.
6 See Leviathan I.XIV-XV. That humans need to enter into and keep covenants with one
another is the fundamental principle of the science of the laws of nature (“the true and only
moral philosophy,” 100), as set out in the first three laws. Laws 4-10 speak of virtues and vices
like gratitude and arrogance which in themselves do not refer to covenants, but Hobbes’
account of them essentially instructs us to be the sort of people that others would see as
likely to keep covenants. Laws 11-19 then instruct us to adhere to fair procedures for settling
disputes about covenants. So all of the laws of nature, and thus all moral values, are grounded
in the keeping of covenants.
46 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

declaration by two or more agents that they will mutually surrender their
rights to act in certain ways, thereby defining the forbearance of those
actions as (publicly and not just privately) good.7 There are many reasons
why agents might enter into particular covenants, many goods that those
covenants might serve, but Hobbes is careful to describe the origin of cov-
enant in a way that is meant to eliminate the possibility of any sort of social
or public good that is prior to the original establishment of covenants
among human beings. One could say that covenants are introduced to serve
the collective good of security, but it is important to see that Hobbes defines
security not in terms of the collective preservation of human life, but in
terms of the assurance agents have that others have surrendered their
rights to harm them.8 Security is not for Hobbes a natural, collective good,
but a explicitly conventional good that human beings individually have a
psychological need to establish. All natural creatures seek to avoid death,
but only human beings fear death; only humans imagine the violence that
might be done to them by others, and assume a warlike posture as a result.
Our natural state of war is the consequence of our uncertainty about what
others might do to us, and so the individual good that is served by the col-
lective good of security is not so much the preservation of life, in itself, but
the assurance that our lives will not be taken by others. That assurance is
what is expressed in original idea of a covenant. It is true that we cannot
have the full assurance we seek without believing that others will be physi-
cally restrained from attacking us, but the very idea of their restraint is in its
original sense a kind of convention that they have agreed to obey (why they
obey, whether from fear of us or from fear of the ruler is, as Hobbes says, not
particularly important). Everything that is morally good, expressed in
Hobbes’ nineteen laws of nature, is thus defined as a commitment to con-
ventions of mutual restraint, to the keeping of covenant.

7 Leviathan I.XIV, 81.

8 The notion of “assurance” figures crucially in Hobbes’ account of human interaction
from its very beginning, in the chapter “Of the Difference of Manners” (Leviathan I.XI).
Hobbes begins with the sweeping assertion that there is no highest good, no stable concep-
tion of human happiness: “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to
another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter” (57). The explana-
tion of this sweeping person is entirely about what we think might happen to us in the
future: “The cause whereof is that the object of man’s desire is not to enjoy once only, but to
assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclina-
tions of all men tend, not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life”
(57, my emphasis). For human interaction, the crucial question is what we think others will
or will not do us, and the assurances we can or cannot have about this.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 47

To assure the performance as well as the explicit requirements of these

conventions, Hobbes famously insists on the establishment of political
authority, the creation of a sovereign with the power to interpret and
enforce contracts. Though the practical effects of sovereign power are the
physical force of its police and military, and the fear they inspire, it is impor-
tant to see that the defining feature of sovereignty is the convention that
grants the sovereign the power to create conventions through the voluntary
exercise of political speech. Law, on Hobbes’ entirely voluntarist and posi-
tivist conception, is simply the will of the sovereign, expressed in public
proclamations.9 At the first, individual level, we have seen, Hobbes holds
that though an individual’s practical goal may be the satisfaction of desire,
the goodness of the desired object comes originally from the individual’s
voluntary designation of the object as worthy of pursuit. At the second,
moral level, though the practical goal of the laws of nature may be to avoid
the violent threat of other human beings, the laws of nature are in them-
selves simply voluntary conventions in which individuals mutually define
actions as collectively good. Now, at the third, political level, though the
practical goal of the commonwealth is the enforcement of the laws of
nature through physical force, the defining feature of the political is the
conventional resolution of the plurality of individual commitments to the
laws of nature into a single will, one which cannot disagree with itself, and
whose pronouncements define what is collectively good for a potentially
divided citizenry. At all three levels, we can describe our talk of goodness
and badness as oriented toward certain physical states of affairs; in this
sense Hobbes’ accounts of individual actions, of morality, and of politics
are entirely naturalistic. But we cannot speak of those states of affairs as
good or bad until we introduce the voluntary creation of conventions by
individuals declaring their commitment to courses of action, by groups
of individuals declaring their mutual forbearance of violence, and by indi-
vidual sovereigns empowered to make law.

2. Is Kant a Hobbesian Voluntarist?

In recent years Kant’s relation to Hobbes has become a important point of

contention in larger debates about the interpretation and significance of
Kant’s practical philosophy. Put simply, the historical issue is whether

9 Leviathan II.XXVI, 173 and especially 177.

48 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

Kant’s conception of autonomy or self-legislation is modeled on the volun-

tarist conception of agency that we have just surveyed in Hobbes. In his
work on the history of modern moral philosophy, in earlier articles like
“Kant and Natural Law Ethics” and then in the comprehensive The Invention
of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind has suggested that this is very much the
case.10 Kant, argues Schneewind, completed the project of the natural law-
yers like Grotius and Pufendorf by combining their search for moral prin-
ciples that would be available to all ordinary individuals, regardless of their
religious or theological commitments, with a revised form of theological
voluntarism. A key question for the natural lawyers was how their laws of
nature, the minimal but universal moral and political principles needed for
non-violent social cooperation, could have the status of laws that would
command obedience, rather than serving just as prudential recommenda-
tions. The need to explain this led to debates about the role of a universal
moral legislator, about God’s role in commanding or at least providing
sanctions for the laws of nature. But could God play an essential role in the
project of the natural lawyers without undermining their goal of theologi-
cal neutrality between Catholics and Protestants? Schneewind argues that
Kant’s solution to this problem was to elevate all human beings to some-
thing like the status of divine legislators, dictating universally valid princi-
ples through the exercise of their rational wills.11
The model of divine agency invoked here is clearly a voluntarist one,
derived from Hobbes’ account of legislation, as is even more explicitly
argued by Christine Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity.12 Voluntarism,
argues Korsgaard, is one of the distinctively modern answers to the distinc-
tively modern question of how we can have obligations, and her discussion
of voluntarism takes Hobbes as the classical source. Hobbes, Korsgaard
writes, tells us that principles become obligatory when they are com-
manded by an authority.13 The problem, of course, is to go on answer why
we might be obligated to obey the authority in question. On Korsgaard’s
view, Kant takes up this objection not to refute voluntarism but to make it
respectable, by arguing that the relevant authority is always ourselves as

10 J. B. Schneewind, “Natural Law, Skepticism, and Methods of Ethics,” Journal of the
History of Ideas, 52 (1991), 289-308; “Kant and Natural Law Ethics,” Ethics, 104 (1993), 53-74;
The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
11 Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, Part IV, 429-530.
12 C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
13 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 21-27.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 49

reflective agents. The voluntarist conception of agency developed by

Hobbes is now elevated to the status of a moral principle, the source of the
authority and dignity of all human beings.
Korsgaard’s defense of autonomy has inspired extensive critical atten-
tion, and the historical account of Kantian autonomy’s relation to
Hobbesian voluntarism has come in from especially sharp criticism from
a number of commentators. Most prominently, Karl Ameriks has strongly
attacked the idea that the moral law could have its source or derive its
authority from the voluntary exercise of human agency.14 On Ameriks’
view, this claim implies an anti-realist account on which morality is
“invented” or “constructed” by human beings, an account that Ameriks
regards as deeply at odds with Kant’s more traditionally realist conception
of the independent validity of the moral law. Ameriks is deeply suspicious
of what others see as a post-Kantian philosophical tradition, one that
understands Kant’s account of autonomy as essentially connected to more
radical views of human freedom like those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,
and as similarly connected to late or even post-modern forms of anti-
realism.15 Even before the reception of Korsgaard’s book, Ameriks was
attacking the historical genealogy of this view in Schneewind.16 More
recently, one of Ameriks’ former students, Patrick Kain, has published a
series of papers attacking the model of self-legislation suggested by
Schneewind, Korsgaard, and other Kantian constructivists, arguing that
Kant nowhere suggests that the moral law is legislated.17 In all of these criti-
cisms, the crucial idea is that Kant’s commitment to the authority of the
moral law is thoroughly inconsistent with a voluntarist view that a law is
the product of a legislator’s will.18 If this is Hobbes’ view, then we can under-
stand why Hobbes is an especially controversial figure in this debate. For
Schneewind and Korsgaard, Hobbes was a crucial source of inspiration

14 K. Ameriks, “On Two Non-Realist Interpretations of Kant’s Ethics,” in Interpreting

Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 263-282.
15 K. Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
16 K. Ameriks, “On Schneewind and Kant’s Method in Ethics,” Ideas y Valores, 102 (1996),
28-53; this earlier essay was the source of the discussion of Schneewind in “On Two Non-
Realist Interpretations of Kant’s Ethics.”
17 P. Kain, “Self-Legislation in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie, 86 (2004), 257-306; “Realism and Anti-Realism in Kant’s Second Critique,”
Philosophy Compass, 1 (2006), 449-465.
18 See the discussion in E. Watkins and W. FitzPatrick, “O’Neill and Korsgaard on the
Construction of Normativity,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 36 (2002), 349-367.
50 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

for Kant, setting the terms of modern moral philosophy and prompting
Kant to develop Hobbes’ views in a new and ultimately more radical direc-
tion. But for Ameriks and Kain, Hobbes could inspire Kant only in a critical
sense, prompting him to oppose Hobbes’ views as undermining the objec-
tivity and authority of the moral law.
Thus it may seem surprising that in all of these debates, especially those
over Korsgaard’s book, there has been little or no discussion of what Kant
himself has to say about Hobbes.19 A main reason for this, which might
seem even more surprising, is that what Kant himself has to say about
Hobbes is relatively little. Most of Kant’s explicit references to Hobbes are
brief asides, and the main exception, the section subtitled “Against Hobbes”
in Kant’s “Theory and Practice” essay, is a discussion in political philosophy
that does not touch directly on the themes of moral autonomy or self-
legislation. Still, the discussion there would seems to provide at least indi-
rect support for Ameriks’ perspective, since Kant’s main conclusion is that
the original or social contract is not any sort of actual agreement made by
any actual individuals at any time, but a moral ideal that any actual govern-
ment ought to reflect. This conclusion seems to suggest both of Ameriks’
main claims: first, that Kant is committed to belief in independent moral
truths, and second, that Kant understands the independence of these
truths to consist precisely in their independence from anyone’s willing.
Since Kant seems to make these points specifically by criticizing Hobbes,
Korsgaard’s characterization of Kant as a kind of radicalized Hobbesian vol-
untarist seems especially suspect.
In the remainder of this essay, I will argue, through a reading of the dis-
cussion in “Theory and Practice,” that these impressions are mistaken.
Though Kant does criticize Hobbes’ view of the original contract as an
actual agreement, his own account of the original contract, and his political
philosophy more generally, do in fact reflect the sort of deeper Hobbesian
assumptions emphasized by Schneewind and Korsgaard. In making this
case, I will be relying heavily on the specific account of those assumptions
that I provided in the opening section of this paper. The key feature of this
account, not generally stressed in the contemporary debates about volun-
tarism, will be Hobbes’ commitment to conventionalism. This convention-
alism, I will argue, also structures Kant’s political philosophy in a very deep

19 A helpful recent account of Kant on Hobbes is G. Slomp, “Kant against Hobbes:
Reasoning and Rhetoric,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (2007), 207-222. But ultimately
Slomp’s concerns are more narrowly political than the issues of voluntarism and realism
that I engage with here.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 51

way. Since Kant’s political philosophy is in an important sense independent

of his moral philosophy, this reading of “Theory and Practice” can have only
indirect implications for our understanding of moral autonomy as self-
legislation. Still, there really are such implications, even if they are only
indirect, and I try to explain what they are at the close of my discussion.

3. Kant’s criticism of Hobbes

The full title of Kant’s essay containing his explicit criticism of Hobbes is
“On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use
in Practice.” Kant seeks to establish that it is this common saying itself that
has no validity for moral practice, by showing that morality itself sets out
ends that we ought to achieve in practice. These moral ends, he argues, are
possible through our efforts, despite the objections of putatively worldly,
cynical observers who scoff at humanity’s efforts to bring about what
morality requires. Kant divides his essay into three parts, in which he
responds serially to three different kinds of critics who respectively cast
doubt on the practicality of morality at three different levels.20 The first
level is that of the individual moral agent, who is alleged by the “private
individual who is still a man of affairs” to be too fundamentally motivated
by his or her own happiness for the pure concept of duty to have any practi-
cal force. The second level is that of the individual nation, whose laws are
alleged by the “statesman” to be relations of power and self-interest, on the
part of rulers and citizens alike. The third level is that of humanity as a
whole, the relations between nations, which are alleged by the “man of the
world” to be a series of conflicts and wars without any progress toward the
better. Although Kant frames these three allegations as general types of
objection, he also identifies each with a particular representative, who then
becomes the explicit target of Kant’s criticism. So the first section of Kant’s
essay is directed against “some objections” to his moral philosophy by
Christian Garve, the second section is directed “against Hobbes” and the
third “against Moses Mendelssohn.”
In his Kant’s Critique of Hobbes, Howard Williams argues that Hobbes is
the real target of the entire essay, of all three of Kant’s criticisms.21 At the

20 Kant, TP, 280-281 [8:271].

21 H. Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); see
especially the claims on p. 19.
52 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

level of the actual text, at least, this reading seems questionable. Kant refers
explicitly to Hobbes just once, close to the end of the second section, men-
tioning but not quoting a passage from De Cive and going on to reject
its claims.22 By this time, Kant has already been responding to other
objections in this section: for instance, from Achenwall.23 By contrast,
Mendelssohn is cited and extensively quoted at the start of the third sec-
tion, and is the only explicit target of Kant’s criticisms in this part of the
text.24 And Garve is quoted and addressed constantly through the whole of
the first section of the essay.25 Kant’s text, then suggests that Mendelssohn
and especially Garve are more important targets of criticism than Hobbes.
So Williams needs to, and does, argue that all of these targets are meant to
stand for empiricist views in moral and political philosophy, taken gener-
ally, and that since Hobbes is the most famous exponent of an empiricist
view in moral and political philosophy, he is the real, implicit target of the
essay. If Garve is addressed more explicitly, that is just because he is a more
local, less controversial, and – since he had just reviewed Kant’s work –
more convenient target for Kant’s arguments. On this reading, Kant’s real
goal is to criticize empiricism, and for Williams, this means criticizing
Hobbes.
But in fact Kant’s aim is not to criticize empiricism, in this essay or any-
where else. For Kant, morality itself suffices as a critique of empiricism, by
demanding that we conform to unconditionally valid principles of duty,
principles that are unaffected by any claims about experience. That fact is
the starting point of the argument, for both Kant and his opponents in
“Theory and Practice.” What the opponents maintain is that the uncondi-
tional claims of morality are true – which a full-blown empiricist would not
grant – but only in some irrelevant theoretical sense. To demonstrate this
irrelevance, the opponents cite some alleged observation about human
nature that will make it impossible for us to achieve what morality demands.
Thus Kant’s target is not empiricism but the use of empirical observation to
discredit what is clearly valid prior to any observation. And Kant replies not
by denying the empirical observation in question, but by showing how our
moral ends themselves take account of the relevant empirical facts and
incorporate them into our aims as (finite) rational beings.

22 Kant, TP, 302 [8:303-304].

23 Kant, TP, 299-301 [8:301-303].
24 Kant, TP, 304-305 [8:307-308].
25 Kant, TP, 291-290 [8:278-289].
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 53

This is clearest in the reply to Garve, which is intended to explain the role
that happiness plays in Kantian moral thinking. Kant begins by fully grant-
ing the sweeping empirical claim that Garve hopes to use a critical wedge:
“I did not fail to remark that the human being is not thereby required to
renounce his natural end, happiness, when it is a matter of complying with
his duty; for that he cannot do, just as no finite rational being whatever
can.”26 Every human being is motivated by his or own happiness, just as
Garve wants to suggest, but this does not preclude the possibility of another
kind of motive, distinct from and having priority over any sort of desire. So
long as we can understand duty as a separate, self-sufficient motive,27 noth-
ing in morality is threatened by the recognition that we are always moti-
vated by our own happiness. Morality does not demand that we ignore the
end of happiness, as Garve suggests,28 but simply that we subordinate it to
duty in a principled way. The result of this subordination is a new, hierar-
chically structured end of all individual human action, the highest good, in
which happiness would be achieved in proportion to virtue. Here I do not
want to enter into all the problems with the idea of our working to achieve
this end, which Kant understands as possible only with divine assistance.
Kant’s religious arguments are beyond the scope of this paper.29 For pres-
ent purposes what is important is the structure of Kant’s reply to Garve.
Faced with a sweeping empirical generalization that is alleged to challenge
the possibility of a pure moral philosophy, Kant’s response is (1) to fully
grant the generalization; (2) to show how morality can accommodate the
generalization within a new, more complex end, one that nonetheless
maintains the priority of morality; and then (3) to argue that all we need to
show is that we recognize the end as one that we ought to achieve. If that is

26 Kant, TP, 281-282 [8:278].

27 Kant, TP, 281-282 [8:278-279].
28 Kant, TP, 282 [8:279].
29 For work on this subject, see A. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1970) and Kant’s Moral Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); Y. Yovel, Kant
and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); A. Reath, “Two
Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988), 593-
619; P. J. Rossi and M. J. Wreen (eds.), Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991); S. Engstrom, “The Concept of the Highest Good in Kant’s
Moral Theory,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992), 747-780; P. Kleingeld,
“What Do the Virtuous Hope For? Re-Reading Kant’s Doctrine of the Highest Good,” in
H. Robinson (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1995), 91-112; C. L. Firestone and S. R. Palmquist (eds.), Kant and
the New Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); C. L. Firestone
and N. Jacobs, In Defense of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
54 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

so, then morality is valid in practice, even in the face of the supposedly
damaging empirical fact.
I have stressed the form of this argument because it is crucial for under-
standing Kant’s discussion of Hobbes in the subsequent section. Although
that section of the essay is framedas an argument “against Hobbes,” Kant
does not, as in his reply to Garve, begin with Hobbes or with the objection
he is trying to rebut. Instead he starts by simply asserting the claim that the
original contract is an end in itself, an end that all human beings ought to
have.30 By immediately specifying this end, Kant is effectively already at
step (3) in the strategy of the reply to Garve, leaving us to wonder who or
what Kant is arguing against in this section. But if we keep the earlier argu-
mentative strategy in mind, we can work our way to an answer to this ques-
tion. In this section the original contract plays a role analogous to the
highest good in the previous section: it is a more complex end that reflects
the adaptation of morality to certain general empirical conditions.
What kind of adaptation is going on in this case? Kant is clearest about
this at the start of his “Conclusion” to the section, when he writes that the
original contract is
only an idea of reason, which, however, has its undoubted practical reality,
namely to bind every legislator to give his laws in such a way that they could
have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject,
insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will.
For this is the touchstone of any public law’s conformity with right.31
The crucial sentence here is the last one, which explains the original con-
tract not as an immediate moral end, but as a more complex end arising
from the combination of the fact of public law with the more basic princi-
ple of Recht (right).32 As Kant explains in the immediately preceding dis-
cussion, Recht is the most basic moral principle governing the use of our
external freedom: it tells us that we can legitimately use our bodies and
external objects in ways that are consistent with the possibility of the simi-
lar exercise of external freedom by all others.33 Since the restriction of

30 Kant, TP, 290 [8:289].

31 Kant, TP, 296-297 [8:297].
32 I prefer to leave the word ‘Recht’ untranslated; in English, neither ‘right’ nor ‘justice’
has the specifically juridical meaning that the German ‘Recht’ has, and that is crucial to
Kant’s usage. See Kant, Rechtslehre, in Practical Philosophy, trans. M. Gregor, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 375-376 [6:214], 383-384 [6:219-220], and 386
[6:229]. Hereafter abbreviated as RL.
33 Kant, TP, 290-291 [8:289-290]; see also RL 387 [6:230].
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 55

external freedom to rightful or legitimate use is already a form of coercion,

directing us not to use our bodies or external objects in certain ways, the
idea of Recht already carries with it the legitimacy, and indeed the neces-
sity, of coercive laws that would guarantee the condition of Recht.34 For
Kant, this means that a morally motivated agent is obliged to conform not
just to standards of Recht but also to the establishment of a state, a coercive
authority with the power to make and enforce laws. It is with the introduc-
tion of legislative institutions, with public law, that the idea of the original
contract enters into Kant’s thinking. In itself, a legal authority is nothing
but a coercive force: some person or group of persons telling others what to
do. In this sense, a legal authority is nothing more than the potential threat
to external freedom that the idea of Recht was introduced to halt. It is the
idea of the original contract that insures that the coercive force of govern-
ment has moral force as well, by conceiving legal authority as a collective
act to protect the equal freedom of every person. What the original contract
does, then, is to adapt the basic moral end of Recht to the inevitable fact of
particular coercive authority, by reconceiving this authority as obligated to
understand itself as the combined will of each citizen.35
If this is the adaptation of our moral ends that Kant has in mind, then we
can easily infer the basic objection that this section of the essay is intended
to rebut. Since what the original contract adapts our moral ends to is the
fact that there will always be some particular person(s) ruling over us, the
objection must be that this fact makes it impossible for politics to achieve
what morality requires. Politics must be understood as an exercise of power,

34 Kant, RL, 388-389 [6:231-233].

35 As Kant explains at TP, 294-295 [8:294-295]: “All Recht, that is to say, depends on laws.
But a public law that determines for everyone what is to be rightfully permitted or forbidden
him is the act of a public will, from which all Recht proceeds and which must therefore itself
be incapable of doing wrong to anyone. But this is possible through no other will than that
of the entire people (since all decide about all, hence each about himself); for it is only to
oneself that one can never do wrong. But if it is another, then the mere will of one distinct
from him can decide nothing about him that could not be wrong, and the law of this will
would, accordingly, require yet another law that would limit its legislation; hence no par-
ticular will can be legislative for a commonwealth … This basic law, which can arise only
from the general (unified) will of the people, is called the original contract.”
The argument is repeated at RL 457 [6:313-314]: “The legislative authority can belong only
to the united will of the people. For since all Recht is to proceed from it, it cannot do anyone
wrong by its law. Now when someone makes arrangements about another, it is always pos-
sible for him to do the other wrong; but he can never do wrong in what he decides upon with
regard to himself (for volenti non fit iniuria). Therefore only the concurring and united will of
all, insofar as each decides the same thing for all and all for each, and so only the general
united will of the people, can be legislative.”
56 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

as the allegedly worldly “statesman” would like to tell us, and in the realm of
power politics, the morally earnest “academician” like Kant has no place.
Again, it is important to emphasize that Kant does not try to respond to
the objections that structure this essay by denying the empirical fact
emphasized by his opponents. Politics really is the exercise of power, but
this does not invalidate moral claims in politics. The united will of the peo-
ple is both a moral ideal and an exercise of power, and even if no actual
government can ever be said truly to reflect the united will of the people, it
is nonetheless true that this is what every actual government must at least
claim itself to be. For every actual government can and must present itself
as more than a coercive force, as qualitatively different from the criminal
acts it seeks to punish. And there is no way to make this distinction without
making the moral claims that the “statesman” would like to deny. State
power is not, and cannot be, outside of the moral framework that is estab-
lished in the original contract. It is precisely this point that is the occasion
for Kant’s explicit criticism of Hobbes.
Hobbes argues that the covenant that establishes a government by insti-
tution creates a moral framework in which individuals have transferred
their rights to a sovereign power, and are therefore obligated to obey the
sovereign’s laws, at least as long as the sovereign is able to protect them. But
the sovereign, Hobbes insists, is and must be outside of that moral frame-
work. “According to him,” Kant explains, “a head of state has no obligation
to the people by the contract and cannot do a citizen any wrong (he may
make what arrangements he wants about him).”36 For Hobbes, this free-
dom from obligation follows from the sovereign’s special role as the guaran-
tor of the laws of nature, of all contracts.37 For Hobbes, the laws of nature
are grounded in contract, and contracts are not valid without the reason-
able expectation of performance on the part of the other party, an expecta-
tion that does not exist in the state of nature, where individuals are free to
defect without fear of punishment. The sovereign’s role is to punish defec-
tors, but just for that reason, the sovereign cannot be bound by any contrac-
tual obligation, because if the sovereign were to defect, there would be no
one to punish that defection (without creating a kind of super-sovereign,
who in turn would pose the same problem). Kant agrees with this last line
of thinking: he spends a good many pages just prior to his discussion of
Hobbes denying that anyone is ever justified in resisting the sovereign.38

36 Kant, TP, 302 [8:303].

37 See Leviathan II.XVIII, 111-112.
38 Kant, TP, 297-301 [8:297-303].
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 57

But he denies that the incoherence of a right of resistance frees the sover-
eign from all obligation: “[Hobbes’] proposition would be quite correct if a
wrong were taken to mean an injury that gives the injured party a coercive
right against the one who wronged him; but stated so generally, the propo-
sition is appalling.”39 As the only legitimate use of coercive force, state
power cannot be legitimately resisted, but precisely because state power is
supposed to be legitimate power, it must present itself as the common will
of the citizenry, upholding the idea of Recht. Otherwise, argues Kant, our
obligation to obedience makes no sense: “A nonrecalcitrant subject must be
able to assume that his ruler does not want to do him any wrong.”40 This
assumption has an important consequence. It admits the possibility of the
ruler’s wronging his or her subjects – while always understanding this as
something that the ruler would not desire. Hence it is always appropriate
and even necessary for a subject to call attention to the injustice of any
laws, to correct the “error” or “ignorance” of the sovereign, who ought to be
grateful for the opportunity to correct his or her mistakes.41 Restrictions on
freedom of speech, then, which Hobbes had accepted as part of the sover-
eign’s absolute authority, are thus illegitimate: “freedom of the pen … is the
sole palladium of the people’s rights.”42
Let’s summarize the results of this reading. The “statesman” is wrong that
the essentiality of power to politics makes morality irrelevant to politics,
because an equally essential feature of political power is its claim to author-
ity, which in turn implies an acknowledgment of the idea of the original
contract, the idea that laws are the product of a common will. If this is so,
then Hobbes is wrong that the sovereign stands outside of the moral frame-
work of the contract that applies to its citizens. Instead the sovereign must
accept the obligation to legislate in a way that is consistent with the possi-
ble consent of all citizens, and permit and even welcome the advice and
criticism of the public.

4. Conventionalism and Voluntarism in Kant

What are the implications of this reading for the contemporary debate
about Kant’s relation to Hobbes’ voluntarism? On the one hand, it is clear

39 Kant, TP, 302 [8:303-304].

40 Kant, TP, 302 [8:304].
41 Kant, TP, 302 [8:304].
42 Kant, TP, 302 [8:304].
58 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

that Kant does not regard the original contract as an act of any group of
people at any given time. Rather, it is a moral idea that attaches to the very
idea of legal authority. By contrast, it seems clear that Hobbes does regard
the establishment of government and the moral requirement of obedience
as a voluntary act, as the making of a contract by the citizenry. The volun-
tary act is of course clearest in his description of government by institution,
but precisely for this reason, Hobbes is at pains to argue that other forms of
government are sufficiently analogous to a government by institution. Thus
he argues, in his account of government by acquisition, that even submis-
sion to a conqueror is the making of a valid contract, since it proceeds, just
as the contract to institute a government does, from the fear of death.43
And he also argues that paternal dominion, the authority of a parent who
protects a child in the helplessness and vulnerability of infancy, is analo-
gous to the authority of a conqueror: in each case, it is rational for us to
accept the dominion of a powerful protector to escape an immanent
death.44 The consent of an infant to paternal dominion is clearly hypotheti-
cal rather than actual, but Hobbes does mean for us to conclude that we
would have consented to the choice that was made for us in infancy. If that
argument is allowed, then we could equally allow an analogous form of
consent to the actual governments that had already “conquered” us when
we were put into their dominion as infants. Even if we did not institute our
own governments, Hobbes is arguing, we are obligated to obey their laws
through a contract of our own making, through a kind of voluntary act.
All of this would seem strongly opposed to Kant’s views. But on the other
hand, we also need to recall, from our opening discussion of Hobbes, that
his voluntarism is also a form of conventionalism. That is, what is estab-
lished when something is made good or obligatory is a kind of convention
that defines, using language, a normative standard for a given audience. To
focus just on the political level: for Hobbes, the act of making the social
contract is an act of designating certain speeches of a certain person, or
group of people, as legally binding standards of conduct. To be a member of
a commonwealth, then, is to understand the convention that those speeches
have the power to command obedience. Now though he denies that politi-
cal authority needs to have been brought about by a voluntary act of actual
citizens, Kant agrees with Hobbes that political authority is a convention of

43 Leviathan II.XX, 127-128. On Hobbes’ account, if covenants made under threat of death
were invalid, then all covenants would be invalid, since the fear of death is the original
impulse for covenant.
44 Leviathan II.XX, 128-131.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 59

just this kind. To understand this, we need only review the derivations we
have already sketched for the moral ideas of Recht and the original con-
tract. We have seen that Recht is the idea of the legitimate use of external
freedom, consistent with similar freedom for all others. As that last sen-
tence should suggest, that idea can be defined without reference to any
convention. But there is no state of Recht – that is, no act can be described
as in fact rightful – without a public convention that declares what is and is
not lawful.45
The reason for this is what Recht regulates is coercion, and every use of
external freedom is at least potentially an act of coercion. If I intend to
make use of an object, I thereby threaten to prevent others from using it. If
I am morally motivated, I will reflect before using the object whether my
use of the object could be consistent with a legal order that permitted oth-
ers to use similar objects in similar ways. But no moral deliberation in my
own head can eliminate the coercive effect of my going on to actually use
the object. For Kant, there is an essential asymmetry between the moral
and the political realms on just this point. In the moral realm, what is cru-
cial is the internal use of freedom, an agent’s adoption of maxims of
choice.46 Again, if I choose to make use of a particular object, I will do it on
the basis of some maxim that explains the reason for my choice, and if I am
morally motivated, I will go on to ask whether my maxim of choosing the
object for that particular reason could be consistent with all others’ adopt-
ing a maxim of using similar objects for the same purpose.47 That moral
question can be resolved within the private realm of deliberation, because
if the answer to the hypothetical universalization test is affirmative, then it
will be possible for another person to adopt a similar maxim, and nothing
in their internal freedom, nothing in their ability to adopt the maxims they
choose, will be affected by my adopting my maxim. But in the political
realm, what matters is external freedom, whether my use of coercive force
is consistent with equal use of coercive force by all others. That my use of

45 The argument that follows can be usefully compared with the reading of T. W. Pogge,
“Is Kant’s Rechtslehre Comprehensive?,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 suppl. (1997), 161-
188; this essay can also be found in revised form as “Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive
Liberalism’?,” in M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretive Essays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002) and in E. Ellis (ed.), Kant's Political Theory: Interpretations and
Applications (University Park: Penn State University Press, forthcoming, 2010). Pogge’s
description of Rechtslehre as a kind of “game” is quite analogous to what I am calling a “con-
vention” here.
46 Kant, RL 383-385 [6:219-220], 379-380 [6:225-226].
47 Kant, RL, 379-380 [6:225-226].
60 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

the object could be consistent with a legal order in which I was permitted to
use the object, and all others were permitted to use similar objects, does
not eliminate the fact that, in the absence of such an order, that I am simply
using the object, and thereby at least potentially coercing others.48 While
some maxims of using the object are consistent with others freedom to
adopt those maxims, any use of the object is a limitation of others’ external
freedom, a form of coercion, which can only be made legitimate by an
actual, coercive law that permits all to use the object in legally specified
ways.49 This is the argument that Kant makes, in the Rechtslehre, for the
claim that rights to objects in a state of nature are only provisional, even if
they are exercised by morally conscientious individuals.50 It explains why
Kant believes that Recht not only can but must be instantiated in an actual
legal authority, understood as having the power to coerce. Since coercion is
an ineliminable feature of any exercise of external freedom, the only right-
ful coercion is equal coercion, and there really is equal coercion only if every-
one really is equally coerced – that is, only if all uses of coercion, even the
acts of private and morally conscientious individuals, are backed with the
force of public law.
But this very same point implies that the sole difference between rightful
and wrongful coercion is the public convention designating an act as law-
ful. Since all my uses of my external freedom are potentially coercive, even
if my maxims conform to universal law, what legitimates my use of coer-
cion is the shared understanding that I am acting within the limits of what
I and my fellow citizens acknowledge to be the authoritatively enacted
law. Just as Hobbes had argued, there are no juridical laws that are naturally
binding; the practical force of Recht comes from its enactment by an actual
sovereign. Both Hobbes and Kant hold a positivist or conventionalist view:
the law is what the sovereign declares it to be. But the sequence of Kant’s
argument is in an important respect different from Hobbes’. For Hobbes,
the conventions of law follow from an act of collective willing: the

48 Kant, RL, 401-402 [6:246-247].

49 Notice that this implies that even morally unimpeachable individuals would still need
law to govern the use of their external freedom. This is the reason that Arthur Ripstein is
exactly right to argue, in his superb readings of the Rechtslehre, that Kant’s understanding of
law is not corrective or remedial. See A. Ripstein, “Authority and Coercion,” Philosophy and
Public Affairs, 32 (2004), 2-35; “Kant and the Circumstances of Justice,” forthcoming in Ellis,
Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2012) and Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
50 Kant, RL, 409-411 [6:255-257].
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 61

sovereign’s word is authoritative because we have made a contract granting

him or her that authority. For Kant, by contrast, our willing is not needed to
ground the conventions of political authority; the nature of those conven-
tions are already implicit in the idea of Recht as rightful coercion. For the
same reason, the nature of sovereign power is circumscribed by the con-
ventions that define it. This is the significance of Kant’s account of the
social contract, and his accompanying criticism of Hobbes: because the
coercive force of sovereign power must be distinguished from other sources
of coercion, the will of the sovereign is not really his or her own. Rather the
sovereign is always speaking, and must be understood, as the voice of all
the citizens, considered as equals. The moral limits that Kant understands
as binding on political authority follow from the unique features of the con-
vention that defines it.
Ultimately what Kant is objecting to in Hobbes is not his voluntarism or
conventionalism. What Kant objects to is the order in which these are
understood. For Hobbes, voluntarism is prior to conventionalism: conven-
tions exist because human beings have brought them into being through
acts of willing. This may seem to make obvious sense – are not conventions
invented by human beings? – but in fact there is a deep problem about
understanding all conventions in this way. For how could the first conven-
tion have come into being? How can we lay down a convention without
having conventions that we are already following, such that we all under-
stand that what we are doing is laying down a convention? This is just a
version of the point that has been pressed against Hobbes’ contractualism
since Rousseau and Hume51: how can all our obligations be grounded in
contracts, without presupposing a prior obligation to uphold one’s con-
tracts? Norms that obligate us are shared standards, conventions that we
already share, and the idea of tracing them back to individual acts of willing
seems highly implausible. On Hobbes’ account, moral and political norms
are built up from individual judgments of goodness, which Hobbes sees as
establishing first-person linguistic conventions. But we do not have to go
into to the intricacies of Wittgenstein’s private language argument to recog-
nize that there is something puzzling about the idea of a first-person lin-
guistic convention, a form of speech that is recognizable and valid only for
oneself. Rousseau, who is very puzzled in the second Discourse about how

51 J.-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Basic Political Writings, ed.
D. A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 25-109; D. Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in
Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 452-473.
62 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

individuals could have freely chosen to live under conventions, is equally

puzzled by the origins of language.52 But Kant, like Rousseau in the Social
Contract, simply takes the conventional nature of political authority as a
fact, and then goes on to analyze the special nature of this convention – in
a distinctly voluntarist way.53 If there is to be a coercive force that we all
understand, conventionally, as distinct from simple coercion, this could
only be because that force is understood as speaking for all of us, as equals.
Law really is something that we collectively will, and in this sense Kant’s
political philosophy really is voluntarist. But this voluntarism follows from
conventionalism and not, as Hobbes would have it, the other way around.

5. Implications for Moral Autonomy

Can this analysis of Kant’s political philosophy have implications for the
contemporary debates about voluntarism and moral autonomy? It seems
much easier to accept a conventionalist account of politics, which requires
positive law, than of morality, which is supposed to be independent of any
legislator’s commands. It is true that Kant’s account of the convention of
political authority is independent of any positive law; the idea of social
contract is binding on any sovereign. But this may be just because moral­
ity itself is universally binding, and as we have already seen, Kant thinks
that moral deliberation can be conducted privately, in one’s own con-
science, without any shared recognition of any common standard. Kant of
course does think there is a common standard of morality, the principle
of universal law, but this standard does not seem to depend on any sort of
convention.
But once again this appearance is deceptive. If we reflect more deeply on
Kant’s principle of universal law as a common standard of morality, we can
see that it has a conventional structure that closely parallels the structure
of Recht as represented in public law. In the political case, public law is a
convention that by its nature stands for the idea of equal external freedom
for all persons. In the moral case, Kant’s categorical imperative, the princi-
ple of universal law, is a convention under which individual’s universaliz-
able maxims are allowed to stand for the idea of fully justified principles of

52 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 48-51.

53 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in Cress, 141-149. I take my reading here to show how
Kant understands Rousseau’s claim that the social contract is a “first convention.”
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 63

practical reason. I have developed and discussed this point more fully in
other contexts; here I will only be able to provide a brief sketch.54
The main problem with Ameriks’ and Kain’s realist objections to
Schneewind and Korsgaard is that it is very difficult (and I suspect, ulti-
mately impossible) to provide a realist interpretation of Kant’s claim that
rational beings have unconditional value. For what is the fact to which the
realist can point to support this claim? It cannot be the fact of our having a
will, because this would lead to the kind of subjectivism that Ameriks and
Kain are trying to resist: that the principles adopted by rational beings have
value because they willed them. Agents’ choices are not of value in them-
selves; rather they are of value only if they are rationally chosen, i.e. chosen
according to universal law. So a realist Kantian has to say that what is of
unconditional value are universal laws themselves; there are principles of
practical reason that are true in some independent sense, and persons have
unconditional value insofar as they are able to grasp and act on these prin-
ciples.55 The problem with this view, or at least with a realist version of the
view, is that it is not clear that Kant ever identifies or establishes his cate-
gorical imperative as a universal law in itself, as opposed to a principle that
affirms the value of conforming to universal law. That is, there is an impor-
tant gap between the idea of a principle that is binding on every rational
being, and the idea expressed in the categorical imperative, which tells us
to act only on maxims that could serve as principles for every rational being.
Universalizable maxims are only potential candidates for universal laws,
not universal laws in themselves. When Kant derives his principle of uni-
versalizability, he never shows it, through any sort of argument, to be a uni-
versally valid principle. Rather he simply points out that this principle
appeals to nothing more than the idea of being a universal law, with no
extraneous content. But possible conformity to universal law is merely a
necessary condition of being a fully valid (universally binding) principle of
practical reason. By identifying the principle of universalizablity as the
sole categorical principle, Kant is effectively treating this necessary condi-
tion of practical reason as also a sufficient condition. And there is no realist

54 Most prominently in my “Constructing Practical Justification: How Can the Categorical

Imperative Justify Desire-Based Actions?,” in S. Baisu and M. Timmons, Kant on Practical
Justification: Interpretive Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also the
briefer discussions in my “How Kantian is Constructivism?,” Kant-Studien 90 (1999), 402-403;
and in my Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press,
2008), 154-155.
55 See Ameriks, “Kant on the Good Will,” in Interpreting Kant’s “Critiques”, 193-211.
64 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65

argument, no appeal to any independent principle or fact, that can justify

this move. Kant tells us only that if principles of practical reason are going
to matter to us, this is what we must do.56
Kantian morality, then, is not grounded in an independent principle of
practical reason. What it really is is a kind of convention, under which we
all have agreed to treat the universalizable maxims of particular agents as
fully justified principles of practical reason. The convention applies only to
an agent’s own maxims, which is why moral deliberation can be done indi-
vidually. All that matters is whether an agent’s maxims could be adopted by
all others; the actual effect of the agent’s action on others’ external free-
dom, their ability to act, is beside the point. But the convention is public in
the sense that we all understand that what morality requires is respect for
each person’s (universalizable) maxims, and not simply individual, private
commitment to one’s own principles. As an individual rational being, I will
not see another person’s maxim, even if it could be a universal law, as a
justified principle of practical reason. But as a Kantian moral agent, I will
see that person as acting with justification. For that is what the convention
of morality requires of me. Just as in the political case, Kant’s conventional-
ism about morality leads him to a kind of voluntarism. The principles of
practical reason are not found in the world; they do not exist in any inde-
pendent sense. Rather they are found in the maxims chosen by individual
agents, insofar as they are made into candidates for universal laws. The con-
vention of morality itself is what allows us to see practical principles as
products of our wills.
We began with Hobbes’ view that claims about what is good or bad do
not refer to features of the natural world. Rather they refer to the conven-
tions that human beings have created for themselves, through acts of the
will. Among the most crucial of those conventions are the laws of nature,
Hobbes’ morality of covenant, and political authority, which implies a

56 See the passage deriving the formula of universal law in the first chapter of the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. M. Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56-57 [4:402]: “Since I have deprived the will
of every impulse that might arise for it from obeying some law, nothing is left but the con-
formity of actions as such with universal law, which alone is to serve the will as its principle;
that is, I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should
become a universal law. Here mere conformity to law as such, without having as its basis
some law determined for certain actions, is what serves the will as its principle, and must so
serve it, if duty is not to be everywhere an empty delusion and a chimerical concept.” Here
Kant speaks (twice) not of what the will’s principle is, but only of what must serve the will as
its principle.
 L. Krasnoff / Hobbes Studies 25 (2012) 43–65 65

moral submission to a sovereign power. For some contemporary readers,

Kant must be understood as rejecting all of these views, since he believes
that morality and the moral end of the original contract are valid for all
rational beings, no matter what anyone has willed, and what conventions
anyone has established. But as we have seen, when Kant criticizes Hobbes,
he does not make these more general criticisms. He does not argue that
Hobbes’ account of political obligation would not be universally applica-
ble. Instead he argues that just because Hobbes’ conventionalism is correct,
just because political authority can be distinguished from other forms of
coercion only through a convention that understands legal coercion as
morally distinctive, we need to understand sovereign power as equally
bound by moral norms. Those norms require us to understand our laws as
collectively willed, and in this sense a kind of voluntarism follows from
Kant’s conventionalism and not – as Hobbes would have it – the other way
around. Similarly, in the moral realm, Kant understands his supreme prac-
tical principle as a kind of convention that tells us to treat the universaliz-
able maxims of others as justified principles of practical reason, within the
realm of those agents’ internal forum of choice. The convention of morality
requires that we understand ourselves as legislating practical principles for
ourselves. Moral and political laws really are human conventions, not part
of the world, just as Hobbes had suggested. Kant’s criticism is only that the
distinctive nature of those conventions should teach us to see them not as
the acts of our individual wills, but as demanding that we will together, as
equals.