Hermann Cohen’s “neo-Kantian” critique of capitalism is primarily ethical. It is anchored in the principle that social relations must include people as ends in themselves, never merely as means. But Cohen draws on law to exemplify such inclusion: artificial legal persons such as cooperatives incorporate members as free and equal. I criticise Cohen for downplaying the constraints involved and, further, for only gesturing toward the role of law in capitalism. Kantian principles, if not Kant’s own views, can help address these flaws. I suggest that the form of capitalism rests on money, employment, and another sort of legal person, the business corporation.

Many have complained that Kant’s ethics provides little specific guidance as to how we should act. In contemporary healthcare, professionals act in large-scale organizational contexts, with complex reward structures, and in many cases belong to professional bodies that determine the ethical obligations associated with particular roles.

The claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples.