Human Rights jurisprudence seen through the framework of Kant's legal metaphors

Abstract

The article “Human rights jurisprudence seen through the framework of Kant’s legal metaphors” treats Kant’s use of legal theory and natural law theory as imagery in the Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of conceiving of the legal analogies as serving a merely expository purpose, Sofie Møller proposes to investigate which concepts of laws and judgment we find in these analogies. Part of Kant’s legal imagery in the first Critique is the parallel between original acquisition of property in theories of natural right and the original acquisition of the forms of intuition and the categories of understanding. This metaphor from the Critique of Pure Reason is compared to Kant’s later exposition of the original acquisition of property as being only provisional in a state of nature in the Doctrine of Right. In particular, Kant’s use of the notion of a state of nature as parallel to the pre-critical state of reason shows that the aim of the critique of pure reason is to establish a public authority that realizes reason’s innate right to autonomy.