Kant and Political Obligations

This chapter outlines key interpretive traditions in the existing scholarship on Kant’s theory of political obligations and discusses how women and minority scholars in the field have transformed it through their analyses of situations confronting people whose lives are characterized by serious and systemic oppression. I propose that these discussions give us reason to rethink the assumption in much philosophical theory—namely, that the question of whether or not political obligations exist in a particular society can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.”