AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that there is only one innate right: the right to be free from determination by another’s will. There and in his late political essays, Kant argues that the fact that human beings reside on the watery spherical surface of the earth (globus terraqueus) provides a rare instance of material fact conditioning right. As Jakob Huber has recently argued, innate right to be free of arbitrary determination combines with the material fact of the limited and interconnected nature of the planet’s surface to produce what Huber calls “a right to be somewhere” (Huber, Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism). In this essay I follow Huber’s focus on the physical conditions constraining the exercise of Kantian right, but I focus on the circumstances of the Anthropocene as even more demanding than the globus terraqueus. Humanity under Anthropocene conditions constrains the freedom of future generations to make choices about their own interactions, in much the same way that the would-be intergenerationally tyrannical church synod criticised by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” sought to constrain the freedom of future generations to inquire into the truth of their religious commitments. I argue that humanity’s new circumstances make Kant’s account of provisional right much more widely relevant than has previously been recognised, because the intergenerational equivalent of the civil condition is unavailable.