Gottfried Achenwall, Natural Law: A Translation of the Textbook for Kant’s Lectures on Legal and Political Philosophy. Ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. Corinna Vermeulen, with an introduction by Paul Guyer, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, Pp. xxxvi + 254, ISBN 9781350022843 (hbk) $252.00

Abstract

even when genuine virtues toward suchwholes are not in play. The extinction of species and the collapse of ecosystems will reliably harm the individual plants and animals that need them. In chapter , Svoboda claims that we have good reason to prefer the Kantian environmental virtue ethic. It works better than many standard approaches to environmental ethics, and it avoids the difficult problems found in the approaches analysed in chapter , such as problems related to intrinsic value and deontic conflicts. He claims that his Kantian environmental ethic can preserve intuitions concerning environmental cases while also relying on intuitively plausible moral principles. This book is well worth reading and has the merit of making a careful study of Kant’s position on human duties to non-human nature. Svoboda’s interpretation of indirect duties shows that Kant’s moral theory as a whole is not a failure, and more importantly, it is not simply a form of human chauvinism. It implies a more robust position and can provide reasons to show why cruelty to animals and the destruction of the natural world in its own right are morally forbidden. In addition to this interpretation of indirect duties, Svoboda develops his environmental ethic taking into account the direct duty to increase one’s own moral perfection by cultivating virtuous dispositions. This makes the book insightful, and it may even contribute to the revival of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue and consequently of his theory of virtue, which has been neglected in recent studies of Kantian moral theory.