Kant on Property

This chapter provides an entrance into central discussions regarding Kant’s account of property. The first section shows how Kant engages and transforms important, related proposals from Hobbes and Locke as well as how the ‘libertarian’ and ‘liberal republican’ interpretive traditions differ in their readings on these points. Since Kantian theories for a long time didn’t focus on Kant’s Doctrine of Right but instead followed Rawls’s lead by developing Kantian theories grounded on Kant’s (meta-) ethical writings, the second section focuses on property discussions found in the Rawlsian tradition. The final section shows how important contemporary work in the Kantian tradition goes beyond Rawlsian, libertarian, and liberal republican concerns of distributive justice among free and equal citizens, to include questions central to, for example, the philosophy of care, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of sex and love, and environmental philosophy.