ABSTRACT
The civil union marks the transition to public right from the property regime of the state of nature. Immanuel Kant’s theory of property rights necessitates not only this transition but also — as part of it — the people’s duty to the poor. Although Kant’s notion of property completely conforms to corrective justice, it generates the distributive justice that consists in the alleviation of poverty through taxation. Kant’s inclusion of the public duty to support the poor among the effects of the civil condition suggests that the agreement of all would be impossible unless the state assumed this duty. This chapter views that the relief of poverty is not as something from which the state might contingendy benefit, but as a duty of the people that the state assumes, like all duties Kant describes, this duty presumably reflects a normative necessity rather than a prudential option.
