The Ultimate Ground of Morality (and Law) in the Naturrecht Feyerabend

The chapter focuses on the idea, famously expressed in Naturrecht Feyerabend, that freedom, neither reason nor rational nature, makes humans ends in themselves and as such endowed with dignity and rights. Kant means by ‘freedom’, even if strictly understood as a capacity and not as a good, different things depending on the context and depending on the stage of his philosophical reflection. In the first part of the paper we reconstruct two main notions of freedom Kant operates with at the time of these lecture notes. On the basis of this analysis, in the second part we explain why Kant is keen on clarifying that freedom, not reason, confers dignity on humans. In the third part, we use this result to enter the on-going debate between those who believe that right is for Kant dependent on some fundamental moral claim and those who deny this thesis. We find rather unequivocal evidence in favor of a qualified ‘dependentism’ in these lectures.