Stony Brook University

show, however, that pleasure and love are employed only to fulfill the psychophysical
requirements of action, and thus are the means for fulfilling the obligations of right
established a priori. Moreover, the foundation of right in its fullest expression leads to
the rational moderation of love. i.e., the virtue of justice. Justice ultimately consists in the
“spiritual disposition” to take pleasure in justice for its own sake.
Not only does justice, properly understood, resolve the apparent dichotomy
between utility and honor, but it establishes the moral limitations on power. Against the
voluntarist premises of Hobbes and Pufendorf, Leibniz’s practical philosophy depends on
“internal” sources of motivation (on right, right reason, and one’s own virtue) —rather
than on external sources, such as the command of a superior. Divine right as well
depends on what God “owes” to his rational-moral essence. In the end, right (jus) will be
understood to be the moral power, that is, the freedom and necessity of an agent to
determine herself according to objective moral ends. Overall, Leibniz’s “science of right”
provides complex and well-grounded responses to foundational moral issues of
considerable historical and contemporary relevance.
I argue for these claims through a detailed examination of Leibniz’s most
important writings on natural right, from earliest to latest (1666-1706). Most of the earlier
Latin writings have not previously been translated into English. I aim to determine the
philosophical basis for his arguments, their systematic relation, to evaluate their cogency,
and to understand them in relation to their historical context and development. I also
engage the relevant English, French, and German commentary. The dissertation, I argue
in general, should lead us to place Leibniz’s “science of right” in a central rather than
peripheral relation to his practical philosophy, if not to his metaphysics as a whole.