La utopía kantiana de la comunidad ética

Abstract

This article proposes a contemporary revisiting of the texts of Religion within the Limits of Bare Reason in which Kant outlines the idea of a universal ethical community. The author holds it that it is possible to approach or to confront this kantian idea with the ideas of other thinkers of Enlightenment who anticipated the emergence of new cosmopolitan social subjects different from the political subject framed within the formal structures of the modern State and which, even when they do not constitute themselves with truly political aims, acquire a significant political relevance of first order, as soon as they attain presence in the public space. The ethical community, without which we could not become moral persons, is in Kant's view, something already existing as informal, particular, fragmented communities and independent from the system of the juridical-political institutions. The aim is to become reflective about these communities moral goals, so that they may open themselves up to the unity of the whole of humanity. The significance of this kantian idea is rediscovered and can be more adequately valued only today, in the context of the actual debates in political philosophy, based on the decentralization of the State and the return of civil society, or the recovery of its autonomy, and of integration nets that represent alternative forms of globalization.