In RL59 Kant lists the rights of peace, the right to remain neutral, the right to a guaranteed peace, and the right to form a federation for mutual defence. On what are these rights based, and what do they entail? Presumably they are based on the duty of states, like individuals, to leave the state of nature for a civil state. This duty rests on the innate right of all humans to equal freedom, impossible without peace, and involves mutual defence and international law, with courts to determine its application and states ready to enforce it. These “rights” Kant (RL61) calls “provisory”, because they cannot yet be enforced. Are they then rights? The paper will argue that if there are duties in the state of nature there must be rights, even if these duties and rights are at this stage moral and not juridical.
