ABSTRACT
However, I want to take the quirky Kant seriously. Much as we might want them to be, the embarrassing applications are not dogmatic naps. The exoneration o f maternal infanticide and the strict duty o f obedience are, I argue, consistent with Kant’s theory. (I do not consider the cases o f lying or of sexual relations, as they are less relevant for my purposes here and have been discussed at length by Christine Korsgaard and Barbara H erm an, respectively.3) T he payoff from showing this to be the case is a picture o f Kant that is richer and more nuanced than stock accounts and perhaps a little surprising as well: In both ethics and politics, Kant turns out to be a historicist. How we solve moral and political problems depends on contingent, historical facts about the world. To be sure, Kant’s historicism is not relativist all the way down; the categorical imperative still grounds the apparatus, but at the social level, it does not generate immutable, eternal, universal prescriptions.4
