The Science of Right

Summary

The Science of Right is W. Hastie's name for the Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre, 1797), the first half of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals; the second half, the Doctrine of Virtue, followed later the same year. The library's text also includes Kant's general Introduction to the whole Metaphysics of Morals, which distinguishes juridical duties, enforceable by outward law, from ethical duties, which concern our inner ends and can be commanded only by ourselves. Right concerns only external actions and their effect on others' freedom. Its universal principle is that an action is right if it can coexist with everyone's freedom under a universal law, and because a wrong is a hindrance of freedom, coercion that hinders that hindrance is itself right. There is only one innate right, freedom, which includes innate equality and being one's own master. Part I, Private Right, asks how anything outside me can be rightfully mine. Kant postulates that practical reason must allow external objects of choice to be owned, and argues that such possession is merely provisional in the state of nature: it becomes conclusive only under a public authority that can secure it. He then analyses three kinds of acquired right: rights to things (beginning with the original acquisition of land), rights against persons (contract), and a novel category, rights to persons akin to rights to things, which governs marriage, parents and children, and the household. Children, brought into the world without their consent, may not be treated as their parents' property. Short episodes treat money, the unauthorized reprinting of books, inheritance and the right to a good name after death. Because right cannot be secure without a judge, Kant derives a postulate of public right: everyone ought to leave the state of nature and enter a civil condition. Part II, Public Right, describes the state as a union of people under laws, with legislative, executive and judicial powers, in which the legislative power belongs to the united will of the people. Kant denies any right of rebellion even against an abusive ruler, while allowing reform through the sovereign itself. He defends punishment as a categorical imperative governed by retribution (the jus talionis), including the death penalty for murder. The right of nations treats war as the means by which states, still lawless toward one another, prosecute their rights and calls for a congress of states; cosmopolitan right grants every person a right to visit, but not to settle, other lands. The book ends with reason's veto, 'There shall be no War', and names perpetual peace as the whole final purpose of right. A 1798 appendix answers a reviewer.

Top Lessons

• Right is not virtue: what law may and may not command

  Kant draws a sharp line between the external law of right and the inner law of virtue. Law can require that I not interfere with another's freedom; it cannot require that I adopt that duty as my motive. 'Act externally', the universal law of right says, so that your freedom can coexist with everyone else's. This gives students a clear tool for civic questions: which goods can be enforced by courts, and which must be left to conscience, family and church? It also invites a classical Christian response. Scripture distinguishes the sword given to rulers (Romans 13) from the law written on the heart, but it does not treat virtue as merely private.

• Mine and thine: why property needs a state

  Kant argues that we may take possession of things in the state of nature, but our claim is only provisional, because no one is bound by my unilateral will. Only under a public authority, which represents the united will of all, can rightful possession become secure. Hence his postulate of public right: everyone ought to leave the state of nature and enter a civil condition, and may compel others to enter it with him. Compared with Locke, who grounds property in labour before government, Kant makes the state a condition of rightful ownership rather than its mere protector. Students can test both accounts against a simple case of a disputed field.

• Retribution, the island and the last murderer

  In Remark E, Kant insists that punishment may be imposed only because a person has committed a crime, never merely as a means to deterrence or reform. The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, measured by equality (the jus talionis). He imagines a people on an island deciding to disband: the last murderer in prison must be executed first, lest bloodguilt rest on them all. He calls the maxim that one man should die rather than the whole people perish 'Pharisaic', and refuses to let physicians use a condemned man for dangerous experiments in exchange for his life. Students should state the argument fairly, notice its biblical echoes (Genesis 9:6; John 11:50), and weigh it against the claims of mercy and the pardoning power that Kant himself limits.

• No right of rebellion: obedience, reform and the execution of kings

  Kant denies the people any right of sedition or rebellion, even against a sovereign who abuses his power, because a law permitting resistance would make the people judges in their own cause and dissolve the supreme authority. He reads 'All authority is from God' not as a claim about historical origins but as the principle that one must obey the existing legislative power. He writes that the formal execution of a monarch, as with Charles I and Louis XVI, horrifies a soul filled with ideas of right. Yet he also teaches that a defective constitution should be reformed by the sovereign itself, and that once a revolution has succeeded its new order must be obeyed. Written in 1797, after the Terror, the argument can be compared with Locke's right of resistance and with the Reformation debates over lesser magistrates.

• A veto on war: peace as the end of right

  The book ends where Toward Perpetual Peace began. Between states there is still a state of nature, so war remains the way states pursue their claims, governed by rules for its conduct and its ending, including a ban on wars of punishment or extermination. Practical reason pronounces its veto: there shall be no war. Whether perpetual peace can be achieved is not the question; we have a duty to act as though it can, and to work toward it by gradual reform rather than violent overthrow. The lesson pairs well with the classical just-war tradition, which also treats peace as war's only lawful aim, while differing from Kant in its account of who has authority to wage war and why.

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Medical Lens

A treatise on law with a few passages of interest to the history of medical ethics and of institutional care. In the theory of punishment Kant takes up a proposal, apparently current in his day, that a condemned criminal might be spared on condition of surviving dangerous experiments useful to physicians, and rejects it as a corruption of justice: an early and explicit refusal to trade a prisoner's life for medical knowledge, grounded in his principle that no one may be used merely as a means. In the General Remarks on public right and the 1798 Supplementary Explanations he treats the state's duty toward the poor, foundlings and the sick, preferring money relief and boarding with relatives to costly institutions such as Greenwich Hospital, but making lunatic asylums an exception. These are policy judgements of a philosopher, not clinical observations.

• Part II, § 49, General Remark E. I. The Right of Punishing

  Kant rejects keeping a condemned criminal alive in exchange for submitting to dangerous experiments proposed by the medical faculty for the public good.

• Part II, § 49, General Remark C. Relief of the Poor, Foundling Hospitals, The Church

  The sovereign may tax for poor relief and foundling asylums; Kant weighs current contributions against permanent endowments and asks whether foundling hospitals are the right means of preserving exposed children.

• Supplementary Explanations, VIII. A. Hospitals

  State hospitals for the poor, invalids and the sick may be reformed: money relief and boarding with relatives may serve better and more cheaply than great institutions like Greenwich Hospital, with lunatic asylums excepted.

• Part I, § 28

  Generation brings a person into the world without his consent, which grounds parents' duty of care and forbids treating a child as a product or property.