such.[1] This answers the question, Has a beast rights? He is the object of duties, not the subject of rights. Right is the universal in its relation to a will capable of recognizing it as such, whether it remain mere command or is also carried out in act.
Wherever in the moral world you have law you have also right and rights. These may be real or ideal. The first are the will of the state or society, the second the will of the ideal-social or nonsocial ideal. (Vide Essay VI.)
It is in order to secure the existence of right in the acts of particular wills that compulsion is used. But compulsion is not necessary to the general and abstract definition of right, and it can not be immediately deduced from it.
What is duty? It is simply the other side of right. It is the same relation, viewed from the other pole or moment. It is the relation of the particular to the universal, with the emphasis on the particular. It is my will in its affirmative relation to the objective will. Right is the universal, existing for thought alone or also carried out. Duty is my will, either merely thought of as realizing this universal, or actually also doing so. ‘This is my duty’ means ‘in this I identify, or am thought of as identifying, myself with right.’
Duty, like right, implies possible discordance of particular and universal. Like right, too, it implies more than this. It implies the consciousness (or presumed capacity for consciousness) of the relation of my will to the universal as the right. Hence a beast has no duties in the proper sense. If he has, then he has also rights.
Right is the universal will implying particular will. It is the objective side implying a subjective side, i.e. duty. Duty is the particular will implying an universal will. It is the subjective side implying an objective side, i.e. right. But the two sides are inseparable. No right without duty; no duty without right and rights. (To this we shall return.)
Right and duty are sides of a single whole. This whole is the good. Rights and duties imply the identity, and non-identity, of
- ↑ ‘I have rights against others,’ or ‘I have a right to this or that from others,’ means, (1) it is right, it is the expression of the universal, that they should do this or that in reference to me: I am the object of their duty. But this by itself does not give me ‘rights.’ To ‘have a right’ to anything from another, I must (2) be a subject which knows the universal as such, both (a) in its immediate relation to my will, in its expression through my acts; and (b) also here in its expression through the acts of others, which acts may concern me. When my will as the universal, and the universal as my will, calls for these acts, then I ‘have a right’ to them in the proper sense; but not otherwise.
