4 - Kant's innate right as a rational criterion for human rights

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Which rights, and even which sets of rights, are to be counted as human rights is a politically as well as a philosophically contentious issue. But the plural has now been settled on. Whether one recognizes only negative freedom rights, as does classical liberalism, or whether, referring back to Georg Jellinek's System der subjektiven öffentlichen Rechte, one distinguishes three types of claims a legal subject can make, granting them all the status of human rights – namely personal freedom rights (status negativus), rights to democratic participation (status activus), and social and cultural rights (status positivus) – in every case one speaks of several human rights. Under the heading “There is only one innate right” (MS 6:237:27f.) Kant defends the distinct opposing view. The plural is replaced by a decisive singular.

His Doctrine of Right argument is, however, so short that, if only because of its brevity, we cannot expect it to offer the kind of superior clarity that comes only when a thought is explained step by step, various ramifications are considered, and potential misunderstandings are taken into account. In order to understand Kant's excessively concise arguments and the occasional cryptic allusion, we must fall back on other texts, especially the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals and some of the differential-analytical definitions in the Doctrine of Virtue. I have arranged the requisite explanations in six sections. The first discusses Kant's distinction between two basic questions of right (section 2).