Suppose someone wrenches the apple out of my hand. In this case, according to Kant, we may say that my freedom to use the apple (assuming the apple is unowned) has been violated, but we may not say that my property right in the apple has been violated unless I own the apple in question. Similarly, suppose someone forcibly carries me off a parcel of unowned land. Again, we may say that my freedom to use unowned land (a right I share with everyone else) has been violated by the aggressor, but “he would not injure me as far as my external property is concerned unless I could also claim to have possession of the object even without detention [possession] of it; in the present case, I cannot call these objects (the apple and the camp) mine (MEJ, p. 54).

Here and in similar passages we see Kant engaged in what he called the “deduction” of a concept. Kant used the term “deduction” in an idiosyncratic way. By this word he did not mean, as we normally do, a process of reasoning from premises to conclusion. Rather, by “deduction” Kant meant breaking down a concept into its constituent elements and then examining each element in turn for its source and soundness. I mention this unusual usage because it is far from the only instance that may confuse readers unfamiliar with Kant’s technical vocabulary but who attempt to read Kant first‐​hand. Another possible source of confusion is the distinction Kant drew between “understanding” and “reason.” For Kant “understanding” signifies our ability to form concepts based on our sensory experiences, whereas our “reason” is concerned solely with a priori concepts, that is, only with concepts that are rooted in “pure reason” without any reference to sense perception.

Failure to appreciate Kant’s distinction between “understanding” and “reason” can easily lead to misunderstandings about what he was attempting to say. Such misunderstandings are often found in the criticisms of Kant written by Objectivists who, following Ayn Rand’s lead in viewing “reason” as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses,” quote Kant on reason to “prove” that he wished to drive a wedge between reason and the external world. Well, this is true in a way, given Kant’s specialized concept of “reason” as dealing solely with a priori knowledge, but it is only fair to acknowledge that Kant and Rand used “reason” to mean different things, and that the function served by “reason” in Rand’s philosophy was called the “understanding” by Kant. Although I happen to believe that Kant’s distinction between “reason” and “understanding” is artificial and ultimately unjustified, our agreement or disagreement with a philosopher should not warp our attempt to understand, as objectively as possible, what that philosopher meant to say. It will not do to quote a few passages from Kant about “reason” and then make sweeping, negative generalizations, as if Kant and Rand used “reason” with identical meanings. Right or wrong, Kant deserves the same fair hearing that we expect from readers and critics of Rand.

I apologize, more or less, for this bit of preaching, but some broader issues are involved. Most importantly, as I noted in a previous essay, we needn’t agree with everything a philosopher had to say in order to benefit from some features of his philosophy. We can be selective, after all, rejecting some of his arguments while agreeing with others. Moreover, even if we disagree with a particular point, that point, if presented intelligently, may cause us to think more rigorously about our own beliefs and thereby motivate us to fortify our own doctrines with better reasoning. This lesson, I believe, is especially applicable to Kant’s discussion of property. So far I have covered only Kant’s distinction between physical and intelligible possession, but as Kant delved deeper into this distinction he hit on a number of points that deserve serious consideration. So in my next essay I shall pick up where I left off in Kant’s treatment of property rights.

Kant’s conception of property rights was the foundation of his argument that a government is absolutely necessary, even to the point that we may coerce people to submit to a government against their wills. This position was a significant departure from the Lockean strain in classical liberalism, according to which the founding of a civil society requires the unanimous consent of every member. Kant, in my judgment, fudged on some key issues to get where he wanted to go, but Kant was not alone in this. Lockeans, for example, fudged to avoid the anarchistic implications their individualistic theory of rights and government by consent by invoking the notion of “tacit consent,” which served as a rationale for all occasions whenever the legitimacy of the state was called into question.