Abstract

This chapter rejects the assumption that Kant’s moral claims and racist claims contradict each other and reconsiders the place of raciology in his philosophical system. His raciology has two parts: racialism, which divides humanity into various races and assigns distinct characteristics to each; and racism, which systematically excludes some races from certain goods. Physical geography is a primary locus for the former. The racialist account presented there gets the racist upshot when Kant, having outlined a vision of human progress in his pragmatic anthropology, uses his geographic knowledge to determine which peoples can advance that vision as agents. He excludes nonwhite races from agential participation in this historical unfolding of human progress without contradicting his somewhat abstract moral or anthropologic claims about humanity. His pure moral philosophy, anthropology, and geography constitute three levels of discourse that are separated by real abstraction and so are not on the same plane for logical comparison.