“Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.” - Immanuel Kant, 1797
Kant claims there is only one innate right: freedom, that is, our independence from being constrained by choices that others have made. Rights in Kant’s philosophy are therefore not wishlists of things it’d be nice if everybody had (as they have become through a steady corrosion of principle over the centuries since). Rather, as sentient beings capable of reason and communication, we are entitled to our innate right to be our own masters, and thus equal in the sense that we cannot be bound arbitrarily by the commands of others.
This leads Kant to conclude that when we act in ways that are a hindrance to the like freedom of others, we act wrongly. Attempts to coerce people will be wrong except in one situation: coercion that opposes the disruption of a like freedom for all. The sole justification for force that Kant allows is when someone undermines our independence from each another, or infringes upon what is ours (property). To prevent such interference in our freedom is the only legitimate justification for legal systems using force: preserving a like freedom for all. He calls the circumstances where this ideal holds the rightful condition.
For Kant, the rightful condition within a single country is civil right, and between several nations the right of nations. This international rightful condition can be fostered solely in the context of a congress of free states, such that nations can address their grievances without resorting to war. He even calls this a ‘League of Nations’, which not coincidentally is the name of the precursor to the United Nations after the Great War. Beyond these two tiers of rightful conditions lies a third he calls cosmopolitan right, or a right for all nations.
‘A right for all nations’ seems to foreshadow the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which indeed was clearly inspired by Kant since its first Article invokes his concept of human dignity and equality. Yet there is a vast chasm between Kant’s political philosophy and the way that the Universal Declaration has been abused in the decades since its drafting. How many times have the United States and its allies invoked ‘human rights’ to excuse warfare...? While Kant fully accepts that nations will make war against one another (although he doesn’t like this at all), he denies this could ever be justified in the manner that legal force within a nation can be justified. Forcing the rightful condition onto another nation sets up one state as the superior to another, which is inherently wrong (i.e. violates the rightful condition). Hence Kant’s ‘right of nations’ is separate from, and prior to, any conceivable rightful condition ‘for all nations’.
For Kant, the rightful condition begins with each nation accepting our singular innate right (to freedom), which he associates with the concept of a Republic. After this, the rightfully-founded countries can form a federation to establish an international rightful condition between nations. Above and beyond this, the goal of Kant’s cosmopolitan right is not to enforce any one nation’s laws everywhere else (as US foreign policy has vainly pursued), but rather to ensure that even outside their home nations, people can encounter one another without violence. By confusing a merely possible ‘rightful condition for everywhere’ with the legal strictures securing a rightful condition within an individual nation, we have tragically betrayed Kant’s incredible vision for political freedom.
The limits to force that Kant traces are less about restricting the freedom of the citizens than they are about limits to each nation’s infringement upon the freedom of its citizens. Only when this freedom from government bullying is secure can it even make sense to move on to a rightful condition between nations, or for everywhere. Until our own governments recognise these limits to force, we are as far from the rightful condition as could be imagined. It is solely in the pursuit of a like freedom for all that any use of force can be justified. In the dark mirror world we now inhabit, governments coerce their citizens to obey, and this is the antithesis of the rightful condition. It is tyranny becloaked in the hollowed out skin of what once were called human rights.
Please also see the follow-on piece, "Bloc Rights Are Not Rights":
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/bloc-rights-are-not-rights
This exchange happened on Notes, but I wanted to include it here for completeness:
From Thomas P. Balazs:
I have not read Kant since college, and not much then. Can you explain how he justifies the “innate right to freedom?” Seems to me that right has been nullified by 98% of history. I mean, it’s a nice idea but how does he defend it as an innate or absolute idea?
My reply:
Hi Thomas,
You’re quite correct that history does not demonstrate anything of the kind, but I take Kant’s philosophy as creating a rational foundation for our living together at the time when the prior regime of the divine right of kings is collapsing. So we shouldn’t expect Kant’s take to be evidenced in the past.
Indeed, Hannah Arendt, as I’ll be discussing next week on Stranger Worlds, makes it clear that the ‘self-evident’ claims of natural rights (which precede and differ from Kant’s approach) faced significant challenges about how self-evident they could be if most of history passed without a trace of them!
Kantian philosophy, you’ll be unsurprised to hear me say, gets complex in the corners, but in some respects Kant’s position is simple. I might put it like this: if we have rights at all (Kant reasons), the only right that we could rationally possess would be our own freedom. Indeed, at one point in The Metaphysics of Morals he talks of “the inexplicable property of freedom itself”. Much of that book is him exploring the implications of that tack for the organisation of a republic. Kant claims that since we are sentient, rational, communicative beings, we end up in a state of existence that calls for us respect each other’s freedom.
Personally, I have always felt this to be true, even before I read Kant. There is no doubt that Kant is influenced by the Abrahamic traditions (he’s painfully protestant at times), but because his focus is on rationality he offers an account that does not require the invocation of God. Yet, at the same time, his approach is compatible with, and could be grounded upon, divine will for anyone who is a believer.
I am, I confess, a Kantian heretic, in that I reject one key tenet of Kant’s that the mainstream Kantians have insisted is crucial. This is the idea that we can count on rationality converging for all people. I don’t believe this is necessary to Kant’s system at all, and further that his approach becomes stronger if it ditches this requirement, not least because in practice it has led to this idea of ‘forcing rights onto others’, which is incoherent (and expressly condemned by Kant).
As with any philosophical argument, we can reject Kant’s account. The abyss of nihilism is always hungry for more victims. My core claim in this month’s pieces at Stranger Worlds is that if we reject Kant’s ‘rightful condition’, we can’t be calling on ‘rights’ at all, and certainly not to justify invasion. If we want to assert rights, Kant’s account is the best available account for what they ought to be.
Hope this is helpful!
Chris.