The Independence of Right from Ethics Allen Wood Right and ethics ...

the less rich and less powerful. If I must either face destitution or else live only by working foryou on your terms, then I am not free to choose how I live. If I have nothing to eat, nothing towear, no place to live, no protection from injury or disease, then I am profoundly vulnerable tothe coercion of others; I do not have a free life in even the most basic sense of the term. It istherefore the responsibility of the commonwealth (the state) to protect every citizen from such afate: not in the name of welfare, but in the name of freedom. That is truly good Kantianism.Kant does say that the rightful equality of citizens, which consists in “each having coerciverights against every other,” is compatible with “the greatest inequality of in terms of the quantityand degree of their possessions” (TP 8:291). So he does not object to economic inequality on anygrounds of equality. But he takes the rightful freedom of each to consist in being able to “seekhis happiness in the way that seems good to him, provided he does not infringe upon the freedomof others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordancewith a possible universal law (i.e. does not infringe on the right of another)” (TP 8:290). For thisreason, Kant also insists that the rightful independence of citizens depends on their havingenough property that each is “his own master” (sui iuris); no one must be forced to live only “bygiving others permission to make use of his powers – and hence that, in the strict sense of theword, he serves no one other than the commonwealth” [in its protection of the rightful freedomof all] (TP 8:295). The basic point here was made even earlier by Rousseau, who argued thatequality is needed because freedom requires it: “As for wealth, no citizen [should] be so veryrich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself” (On theSocial Contract, II.11). As Kant sees it, inequality of possessions, therefore, infringes right lessoften by infringing the rightful equality of citizens than by infringing their rightful freedom andindependence. It is to this that libertarian ideology is systematically (willfully) blind.19