Kant and the Natural Law Tradition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
In his Doctrine of Right, Kant claims that freedom is the only innate right. The Feyerabend Lectures, in contrast, contains a list of many innate rights. I compare Kant’s conception of innate right with Achenwall’s as well as those of Heineccius, Meier, and Hutcheson. Although in Feyerabend Kant lists various innate rights (plural), they roughly correspond to the “authorizations” that Kant develops in the Doctrine of Right from the single innate right of freedom, and even in Feyerabend they are linked to freedom. Not only did Kant have a different basis for right in freedom, his explanation of what the others call innate rights in terms of freedom better explains their importance.
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