Kant on Human Progress and Global Inequality

In this article I discuss whether from Kant’s philosophy we can determine a moral duty to deal with global inequality, a problem that in Kant’s time was inexistent since it is a modern trend resulting from the industrial revolution. In doing this, I consider three main issues related to Kant’s thought and partially re-developed by contemporary authors: the individual moral duty to collaborate with nature’s purposiveness, which is aimed at attaining perpetual peace through humans fully developing their capacities, the normative requirement to reform the global economic structure so as to prevent cases of coercion and deception suffered by vulnerable economic agents, and the validation of global property titles, in the same way as occurs at the national level when people leave the state of nature and enter a civil condition. The aim of the article is to investigate whether in Kant’s philosophy of history and of right, which can be considered as the theoretical connection point between the ancient cosmopolitan aspiration and a modern and articulate cosmopolitan philosophy, we may find some first moral insights regarding the contemporary debate over the existence of global duties of socio-economic justice.