KANT AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF VIRTUES: Two Conclusions from One Freedom: The Regress Argument, the Publicity Test, and the Limits of Sourcehood

Abstract Kant makes freedom the ground of moral worth and then denies, without exception, any right to resist the sovereign. There is no right of sedition, still less of rebellion, and least of all to lay hands on the head of state, however he has abused his authority. The Philosophy of Virtues makes freedom the ground of every virtue and concludes that under total institutional capture a population may act to restore its constitutional order. Two systems, one primitive, opposite conclusions — which is the most tractable shape a philosophical dispute can have, and the one this article exploits. Four confrontations, with tests fixed before verdicts. K1, the regress. Kant’s strongest argument is not prudential. A right of resistance would require a public law authorising resistance to the supreme legislation; determining when that law applied would require an authority above the sovereign; that authority would then be the sovereign. The argument is valid and this article does not dispute it. It shows instead that the argument’s target is a coercive right exercised against an authority, and that the remedy the programme actually proposes is the withdrawal of cooperation, which claims no right against anyone and requires no authorisation because nobody needs permission to stop signing. The regress does not obviously reach it — and §5.1 states why the qualifier is not decoration. K2, publicity — and this is the article’s central result. Kant supplies the test himself: an action affecting the rights of others is wrong if its maxim cannot bear publicity. He uses it against resistance, on the ground that the maxim of rebellion cannot be declared in advance without defeating itself. Applied honestly to the two remedies, Kant’s own criterion separates them: the maxim of rebellion is self-defeating when published, and the maxim of non-cooperation is not merely publishable but must be published to work at all. On Kant’s test, the programme’s remedy passes and the one he condemned fails. K3, content — and here Kant wins. Kantian autonomy is self-legislation under the moral law, so that a free will and a good will are the same thing and freedom needs no external justification. Sourcehood freedom is content-neutral: an act may be wholly the agent’s and vicious. The programme therefore owes an argument Kant does not owe, and it has one — the deprivation test — but owing it is a cost, and the article records the dimension as lost. K4, Willkür and Wille. Kant would say the programme has confused freedom with the elective will, and that acting from inclination is heteronomy however uncoerced. The reply is the asymmetry the deprivation test exhibits: what Kant calls heteronomy does not invert a virtue, and coercion does. This does not defeat him. It shows the two frameworks are tracking different quantities, and the article states which. One correlation is recorded rather than argued. Kant’s notorious combination — condemning the Revolution as an act while treating the spectators’ enthusiasm as a sign of moral disposition in the species — has the structure of the programme’s own act/state separation, in which an act may be inverted while the state of affairs it produces remains good. Whether Kant’s version is coherent is disputed and this article does not adjudicate it. Keywords: Kant; freedom; autonomy; right of resistance; publicity; civil disobedience; sourcehood; virtue; Philosophy of Virtues; Alguilas-AI