The Innate Right as empirical self-possession

The paper aims to consider Kant’s ‘highest division’ (6:237) of the doctrine of right between an innate right and acquired rights. I am mostly referring to the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant divides the doctrine of right into the innate right, i.e., ‘the internally mine or yours’, and acquired rights, connected to an act of acquisition of ‘something external’ from me, the ‘externally mine and yours'. In the paper, I engage with scholars (Höffe, Ripstein, Flikschuh, Byrd and Hruschka) who have focused on the distinction between the innate right and acquired rights. I will argue that human beings, having a capacity for choice, are engaged in a relationship with themselves, a self-relationship or empirical self-possession that constitutes our Innate Right.