Kant - The Doctrine of Right

“If someone cannot prove that a thing is, he can try to prove that it is not” (123).
This quote pretty much represents what we just read. Even if Kant was not sure what he was talking about, he tried to prove it through example.
I found his discussion of possession and property to be very involved and detailed. I had never thought about that topic, but after I did I found it rather confusing. For example, last year my grandma found out that her father owned property in Arizona (my grandma lives in Illinois), and now she owns it. How is it that you can be in possession of something that you don’t know exists? I would like to ask Kant how he would explain that.
I really liked this quote. I thought that it made a lot of sense and helped me understand what Kant was trying to say.
“If I am holding a thing, someone who affects it without my consent affects and diminishes what is internally mine, so that his maxim is in direct contradiction with the axiom of right. So the proposition about empirical possession in conformity with rights does not go beyond the right of a person with regard to himself.” (39)
This is all really randomly written, but I am just following my notes:
Can we only have protection of our possessions under law?
We have to have others to understand the concept of possession. If you were all by yourself you would have no understanding of “owning” something.
I found this quote interesting, but also confusing. - “So someone can be his own master but cannot be the owner of himself” (56).
I wonder what people in support of gay marriage would say to Kant’s assertions: “Even if it supposed that their end is the pleasure of using each other’s sexual attributes, the marriage contract is not up to their discretion but is a contract that is necessary by the law of humanity, that is, if a man and a woman want to enjoy each other’s sexual attributes they must necessarily marry, and this is necessary in accordance with pure reason’s law of right” (62).
I found it odd that he promoted separation of church and state but acknowledged the need for the state to make sure that there is a church (I could have also just misunderstood).
Wow. That was a really long section of reading.