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2 The Kantian Conception of the Person I. Introduction In chapter 1, I discussed Rawls’s Kantian conception of the person and the way in which it is reflected in particular features of the OP. To recapitulate, Rawls conceives of persons as free and equal rational (i.e., moral) beings, with the moral quality being primary, the other two mostly derivative. As moral beings, we have the two moral powers of reasonableness (moral autonomy) and rationality (personal autonomy); to be more precise, competent adults possess the capacity to develop and exercise the two powers. Agents in the OP consider the development and exercise of these powers to be highest-order interests, which guide their selection of principles of justice and take absolute priority over other interests, including their higher-order interest in “protecting and advancing their conception of the good, whatever it may be” (KCMT 313). As I will demonstrate over the next several chapters, this conception of the person—in its current form, at least—is inadequate to the task of grounding the chief features of Rawls’s justice as fairness, namely, the lexical priorities and the DP. First, in order to ground the priority of FEO, this conception must be extended to include a third conception of autonomy—self-realization—as we shall see in chapter 5. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Rawls never explains how the two moral powers are related to one another (if indeed they are) or why rationality is deemed a moral power at all; Jeremy Waldron, for example, contends that there is “a discontinuity between moral autonomy and the pursuit of an individual conception of the good,” one that threatens to make all principles of justice seem “alien . . . from the personal point of view.”1 1. Waldron (2005, 308, 319). See, however, the congruence argument of Theory §86, which I discussed in chapter 1. Thus, any adequate Kantian conception of the person must address the relationship between its constituent parts, whether it is taken to include two component conceptions of autonomy (as Rawls suggests) or three (as I shall claim below). To anticipate somewhat the arguments I will make in part 3: unless we can tie its component conceptions of autonomy and the lexical priorities they underwrite back to a Kantian conception of moral autonomy, we will be unable to give a solid foundation to justice as fairness as a whole, which must ultimately rest upon Kant’s practical postulate of freedom as a necessary presupposition of finite rational agency. Given the inadequacy of Rawls’s conception of the person, I will extend and explicate it in this chapter so that it can ground the three priorities and the DP in chapters 3–6. This extended conception consists of three hierarchically ordered conceptions of autonomy (Kantian variants of moral autonomy, personal autonomy, and self-realization, respectively—see section III) linked together by both deductive and inductive methods. The first method (see section IV) utilizes a procedure analogous to Rawls’s four-stage sequence to derive lower conceptions of autonomy from higher ones along with their associated plans and rules, while the second (see section V) constructs an ideal cognitivedevelopmental psychology, an epicyclic system using an iterative model of agency to explain the emergence of higher conceptions from lower ones. By revealing this tight relationship among the three Kantian conceptions of autonomy , which jointly constitute a unified Kantian conception of persons, I offer a Rawlsian theory of internal autonomy capable of bridging the gap between the practical postulate of freedom and the complex form of external autonomy yielded by justice as fairness, namely, the rights and powers that its principles support.2 As I shall show later in this chapter, this extension makes Rawls’s conception of persons more methodically Kantian, that is, more consistent with Kant’s own model of finite rational agency as it was presented early in chapter 1. In Kant’s model, we ascend a ladder of necessitation from rules of skill and counsels of prudence (hypothetical imperatives) to commands/laws of morality 60 Reconstructing Rawls 2. My distinction between internal and external forms of autonomy follows Alfred Mele’s in the following passage: “The capacities involved in . . . autonomy are of at least two kinds, broadly conceived. [external:] Some are directed specifically at one’s environment. Assuming some autonomy for Prometheus, he was considerably less autonomous bound than unbound; chained to the rock, he possessed only a severely limited capacity to affect his environment. [internal:] Others have...

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