In the “First Supplement: On the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace” included in his famous article “Perpetual Peace”, Kant makes an argument for peace and the rights of man on the basis of prudence rather than morality. He suggests that human passions or selfish inclinations, rather than moral striving, will eventually lead us to the establishment of the republican forms of the state based on the rights of man and an international system of human rights. In this article, I will question both whether such a way of thinking about rights is compatible with the moral grounding of rights Kant provided in the Doctrine of Right where he presented his political and legal philosophy in a systematic fashion, and whether it is a promising way of thinking about human rights at all.
