Kant on Laws by Eric Watkins (review)

Kant on Laws is a collection of papers that Eric Watkins published from 1997 to 2018, "lightly rewritten," as he says, and accompanied with a new Introduction that states the general thesis that Kant has a univocal conception of law that applies to both laws of nature and the moral law. "Kant's most generic conception of law… includes two essential elements: (1) necessity and (2) the act of a spontaneous faculty whose legislative authority prescribes that necessity to a specific domain through an appropriate act" (2). These conditions are satisfied by both laws of nature and the moral law. They differ, however, in that laws of nature apply ultimately to objects that are given to us through intuition—appearances—while the moral law applies to actions that we are to perform as rational agents: theoretical laws are to tell us how nature is, the moral law tells us how nature ought to be. Thus, Watkins writes that Kant "recognizes that 'necessity' comes in different forms, depending on the kind of law at issue. Though 'necessity' might well mean 'determination' (in the sense of 'natural necessity') in the case of laws of nature, in the case of the moral law, it amounts to 'necessitation' or 'obligation' in the case of human beings" (2–3). That is, although no empirical objects have any choice about complying with the laws of nature, human beings do have the freedom to choose whether or not to conform to the moral law (in their choice of particular maxims), so the moral law obligates us without it being necessarily true that we will always, or ever, satisfy those obligations.

The papers are grouped in five parts. The first part, "Kant's Concept of a Law," contains two papers, "What is, for Kant, a Law of Nature?" (2014) and "Kant on Transcendental Laws" (2007). The second part, "The Laws of Mechanics," begins with a paper on Kant's general principles of experience such as the universal law of causality (2010), and then contains three papers on Kant's more specific laws of physics: "The Argumentative Structure of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" (1998), "The Laws of Motion from Newton to Kant" (1997), and "Kant's Justification of the Laws of Mechanics" (1998). The second of these is of particular interest because it shows that Newton's three laws of motion were significantly revised by eighteenth-century German writers such as Wolff, Maupertuis, and Euler, and thus that Kant was by no means trying just to provide an a priori foundation for Newton's laws, but was also himself revising them. The third part of the book, "Teleological Laws," includes a 2008 paper on the "Antinomy of Teleological Judgment" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (previously published only in German) and a 2014 paper on "Nature in General as a System of Ends," which discusses the third Critique's culminating attempt to unify the laws of nature and the laws of freedom or moral law. Part four, on "Laws as Regulative Principles," includes two papers, "Kant on Rational Cosmology" (2000) and "Kant on Infima Species" (2013), which provide a more detailed account of Kant's derivation of the regulative principles of homogeneity, specificity, and continuity, and of the "maxims" that nature allows no chance, "blind necessity," leaps, or gaps, than one usually finds. The final part, "The Moral Law," includes two recent papers, "Autonomy and the Legislation of Laws in the Prolegomena" (2018) and "Kant on the Natural, Moral, Human, and Divine Laws" (2013). The first of these suggests that Kant's conception of our autonomy in imposing theoretical law upon nature in the 1783 Prolegomena prepares the way for Kant's discovery of moral autonomy in the 1785 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. The second argues that the Critique of Pure Reason argues for our theoretical "assent" to even if not "cognition" of the existence of God, while Kant's "moral theology" adds only moral predicates to our conception of God rather than Kant's sole...