Abstract
ABSTRACTAfter defining Cosmopolitan Right as being limited to the conditions of “hospitality,” Kant includes “Wirtbarkeit” in brackets, a word that connotes innkeeping. Moreover, significant similarities obtain between the relevant passages of the Perpetual Peace and those of the Digest of Justinian on the obligations of ships’ masters, innkeepers, and stable keepers. Unlike for ordinary householders, hospitality for innkeepers is a legal obligation, not a matter of philanthropy: they have traditionally been deemed public officials with limited discretion to refuse travelers, and as fiduciaries of their guests strictly liable for losses to their property. This article attempts to explain Kant's concept of Cosmopolitan Right by analogy to the private law of innkeeping, and ultimately engages in the central philosophical debate about Cosmopolitan Right by accounting for Cosmopolitan Right solely from the “innate” right to freedom, rather than from “acquired” facts such as land or resource distributions or historical injustices.
Highlights
After introducing it under the caption “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” Kant begins his discussion of the Third Definitive Article to the Perpetual Peace with the following comments: Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right, so that hospitality [Hospitalität (Wirtbarkeit)] means the right of a foreigner not to be treated with hostility because he has arrived on the land of another
This paper argues that Kant is referring to innkeeping, such that cosmopolitan right and the corresponding obligations of receiving states may be explained to some extent by analogy to the law of innkeeping
This paper agrees with the first camp: cosmopolitan right has nothing to do with property, proto- or otherwise
Summary
Translated into English, the string “hospitality (hospitableness)” seems tautological: the word in the brackets does nothing to explain the italicized technical term preceding it. Can we begin to talk about how to be a good person, because unless you are free, your choices are not yours to be praised or blamed for This basic idea is illustrated by the remark that cosmopolitan right is the “rational idea of a peaceful, even if not friendly, thoroughgoing community of all nations on the earth. The corresponding sentence in the Draft is emphatic about this: it speaks of faraway atrocities that set the mother country ablaze with war.[26] Kant’s “poor and minimal”[27] definition of cosmopolitan right is not a bug in his legal-political theory; it is the feature It permits a clean break from earlier writers who, by formulating thick rights to visit, trade, and proselytize, effectively supplied the intellectual foundations for European colonialism, and the conditions for endless war. Recall his observation that Wirtbarkeit is suggestive of “the café, the cabaret, the inn. . . .”
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