Abstract

This paper focuses on Kant’s Towards Perpetual Peace famous statement according to which the problem of the State can be solved even for a race of devils. Its first aim is to show that coercion exerted via positive laws is pivotal to the understanding of Kant’s main thesis regarding this nation of devils and the correspondent accomplishment of reason’s ends through the “mechanical course of nature” (ZeF, AA 08, p. 367). According to this reviewed version of Kant’s hypothesis, however, by refraining from violating the laws of a republican State out of self-interest, a devil would have to be taken as genuinely righteous according to rational principles and, more particularly, the moral concept of right. To make sense of this statement, Kant’s hypothesis shall be developed and interpreted as coherently enclosing a general thesis regarding the normativity of right and its source on the external use of free choice independently of each agent’s moral virtue.