Cosmopolitan Right: Rolling Around and Coming to a Stop

The entitlements of visitors, immigrants, and refugees are often in empirical terms as claims to some equitable distribution of the world’s actual resources, or to reparations for grievances that actually took place in the past. In this paper, I discuss how Kant in his presentation of Cosmopolitan Right explains these same rights metaphysically using the imagery of Newtonian physics. On this model, the rights of visitors and immigrants with a home State are to free movement. Those of refugees, on the other hand, are fundamentally rights to come to rest.