The current worldwide pandemic has once again made global inequalities visible. While the wealthy countries in the Global North move ahead, vaccinating their populations against the deadly coronavirus, the Global South finds itself at the mercy of international arrangements to receive sufficient medical supplies and protect their frontline personnel. The virus, like other global problems, does not recognize or respect state borders. Even countries with few or no cases have suffered with the stagnation of the world economy, halted international travel and the spectre of protectionism. The pandemic has validated Kant’s famous saying that ‘a violation of right in one place of the earth is felt in all’ (TPP, 8: 360). At the same time, it has demonstrated how persistent national sentiments of ‘us against them’ are in our globalized world – illustrated powerfully by developed countries storing up vaccines beyond their domestic needs.

Sylvie Loriaux’s Cambridge Elements title on Kant and global distributive justice is a timely contribution to our thinking of the condition of right for this unequal world. The main argument is that, while Kant’s political thought does not address the issues of global poverty and inequality as we currently understand them, his formal system of right nonetheless provides a conceptual and normative approach to consider our socio-economic duties and, in particular, the duties of states (p. 2).

In this accessible and provocative publication Loriaux shows us how Kant offers the duty of right, in addition to a limited duty of beneficence, to assist states that are unable to fulfil their core functions. She also suggests a framework to (re)consider our duty of right towards individuals in need globally. By applying her interpretation of Kant’s condition of distributive justice to world poverty, free trade and migration, Loriaux makes an appealing case for Kant as a philosopher of global justice.

The Element is divided into three sections. In the first Loriaux discusses the question of global poverty through Kant’s conception of the duty of beneficence. She illustrates how the duty to assist those in need is both universal and moral for Kant, therefore requiring that we look to inequalities in our societies. The second section expands this into Kant’s idea of the original contract, which provides grounds for the principle of formal equality of opportunity as well as for the redistributive principle according to which the rich in society are required to pay taxes to support those who are unable to maintain themselves. At the global level, Kant’s public right requires the establishment of both international and cosmopolitan law and a progressive reform towards the ideal original contract. In the third section, Loriaux argues that, through the duties of justice deriving from the system of right, rich states may indeed have the duty to assist those states that are unable to fulfil their core functions. Kant’s cosmopolitan right, finally, requires us to fill the loopholes of contemporary international order by creating more fair international trade relations and rules regulating human mobility.

Loriaux’s overall approach is convincing, and she provides a balanced account of the advantages and limitations of Kant’s formal system of right as a foundation for global distributive justice. Her discussion of the moral personality of the state is important as it highlights the state both as a rights-holder and the agent of duty in Kant’s thinking. Her proposal of duties of global redistributive justice is appealing, even if one could arguably read less in the way of solidarity and enforceable inter-state duties into Kant’s system of right. The reason for this, I believe, is that Kant makes a stronger distinction between the state’s duties to oneself (as a state, to its citizens), and its duties towards ‘distant strangers’ than Loriaux’s reading proposes. A shift from domestic to international justice, therefore, is not quite as straightforward as she suggests.

I wholeheartedly agree with Loriaux that Kant’s system of right assigns strong ethical duties to political and moral agents, states and individuals alike. Her ideas regarding the duties of states being based on the state’s duty to maintain its civil condition are similar to what I call the state’s right to exist as a state (Vaha Reference Vaha2021). What is less certain, however, is that – in an echo of Rawls’ duty to assist burdened societies – the state’s duty to maintain its own civil condition would necessarily lead to the proposed duty of right of richer countries to assist the poorer ones. According to Loriaux:

When it comes to the state’s duty not to collapse back to the state of nature, I find no problem with this statement. The state as an agent of right has a perfect duty to protect its civil condition, to guarantee the lawful order it protects and, consequently, maintain its own existence. All this is necessary in order to protect individual freedom and morality itself. I also agree with Loriaux’s empirical observation that the wealthy nations indeed ‘owe their existence, and a fortiori their wealth, to the establishment of an international public law which protects their territorial rights, and to which all states equally subject’ (p. 47). Global inequalities illustrate the stark gap between the poor (developing) and the wealthy (developed) states in the contemporary international order of power, more or less following the historical division to colonies and colonisers. Whether Kant would actually demand correcting those injustices of the past – and here it may well be the case that the mere voluntary assistance of the poor is not sufficient for correcting the historical wrongdoings that stem from colonialism – is a difficult question that has provoked various interpretations of Kant’s view on the matter (see Flikschuh and Ypi Reference Flikschuh and Ypi2014).

Kant, it seems to me, requires states to focus on their own progress towards the ideal form and provides them a wide freedom to do so. It is true that he requires all states collectively to reform towards the condition of right internationally (MM, 6: 344), but also emphasises that no state can be forced to this process (TPP, 8: 357). He underlines the right of non-interference, both from the citizens and other states (TPP, 8: 372). Kant also permits voluntary dissolution of the state (MM, 6: 333). While there is a strong vision in Kant’s thought of the ideal, republican form of the state, he nonetheless recognizes this to be only an ideal (CF, 7: 91). The question, of course, is to what extent can other states interfere in ‘helping’ the state to fulfil its ‘core functions’? Even Kantian universalism, it seems, cannot truly escape the ‘problem’ of global justice (Nagel Reference Nagel2005: 133).

The danger of paternalism is great when one is proposing a duty to assist the poor, and Loriaux acknowledges this when she discusses the duty of beneficence and its vulnerability to abuse and arbitrariness (pp. 11–12, 15). By providing international aid to poor states, are the rich states also enforcing their notion of ideal statehood by adding conditions on that aid, such as requirement of good governance? If so, is it not the case that the aim to help the state to fulfil its core functions is nothing but a form of neo-colonialism, strongly embedded in the ideals of the Global North regarding the form and functions of the modern state? Or are the rich, former colonisers in fact correcting the historical wrongdoing through global distributive justice? As Loriaux asserts:

It is true that Kant’s account of the duty of justice might help us to understand how what is owed to the poor states is not merely a matter of beneficence. That said, it may also be that Kant’s understanding of the state and its duties to itself cannot help us to successfully tackle these injustices either.

This, I propose, is due to the strong emphasis Kant gives to the state as a guarantor of its own existence, rather than that of other states (the priority of public right to international and the cosmopolitan right). I believe that Loriaux’s argument is strongest at the beginning of the work where she discusses the distributive duties within the state. It becomes weaker, however, at the global level. This is partly because, as Loriaux herself acknowledges, assisting the state to maintain its existence is a more complex task than fulfilling the basic needs of an individual. More importantly Kant himself cannot escape the ethical importance of state borders in the manner he perhaps wanted to.

Loriaux’s discussion of Kant’s criticism of hereditary nobility and wealth is important, and could have been extended to explore the role of colonialism to current global inequalities. As she notes, according to Kant, what should be ‘neutralised or eliminated are rank inequalities that are said to be innate and that therefore depend on the irresistible will of another’ (p. 23). Later on, when discussing Kant’s global position, she states that ‘we cannot but admit that Kant makes no explicit reference to any duty of right to reduce global inequalities or to assist the global poor’ (p. 44). An argument can be made that the citizens of the developed states have inherited their wealth and their position in the world through injustices of the past and, in that sense, the global setting is a setting of hereditary nobility Kant would reject. When discussing the duty of beneficence in relation to the background injustice, Loriaux illustrates Kant’s position by stating that ‘there can be no merit in giving the poor person the money we previously stole from them since this would only amount to returning what already belongs to them’ (p. 17, emphasis mine). If it is the case, as I suggest above, that many – if not all – current global injustices stem from imperialism and exploitation of colonies throughout world history, a case could be made for restorative justice. Loriaux discusses surprisingly little of Kant’s stand on colonialism in general (pp. 51, 53, n. 26), but her proposal for global distributive justice could have been made stronger by looking at the rights-claims deriving from the colonial past of today’s global poor.

To conclude, Loriaux successfully draws our attention to elements of Kant’s system of right that encourage eliminating global injustices. I agree with her that there is a strong moral compulsion in Kant’s work to transform the international society we have today to become fairer to all citizens of the world. Moreover, Loriaux has done an excellent job in identifying some of the gaps in Kant’s own proposal that need to be taken into account. I share with her the idea that Kant’s formal system of right can provide us with important tools to think about contemporary questions of justice, and her discussion of migration, for instance, is one such important question. Her final observation that the duty of right and the duty of beneficence (p. 59) are complementary approaches to poverty and inequality is an observation of both theoretical and practical relevance in a world struggling to convince those who can assist to secure the basic subsistence of those in need within unequal structures of power.