[p. 251]
|251| side, however, they are wholly independent and autonomous of one another. Right is therefore not actual between them. They can thus break the treaties at will and must always remain in a certain mistrust of one another about this. As natural beings they behave toward one another according to force, in that they must maintain themselves in their right and create right for themselves, and thereby come into war with one another.
Second Section
Doctrine of Duties or Morals
Cross-reference: Morality in the Groundlines: § 105 ff.; the doctrine of duties itself belongs there to ethical life, § 142 ff., especially § 148.
§ 32
What can be demanded according to right is an obligation. Duty, however, is something inasmuch as it is to be observed on moral grounds.
Explanation. The word duty is often used of relations of right. The duties of right were determined as perfect, the moral ones as imperfect, because the former must in general be done and have an external necessity, whereas the moral duties rest on a subjective will. Yet one could equally invert the determination, because the duty of right as such demands only an external necessity, in which the disposition can be lacking, or I can even have a bad intention in it. For the moral disposition, on the other hand, both are required, the right action according to its content as well as, according to the form, the subjective element of the disposition.
§ 33
Right in general leaves the disposition free. Morality, on the other hand, concerns the disposition essentially and demands that the action be done out of respect for duty. So
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