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rightful or juridical condition as a kind of beneficial transaction; he does not recommend that we
leave the state of nature on prudential grounds. Rather he says only that if we want to understand
ourselves as making legitimate use of any object, we must understand ourselves as having left the
state of nature and accepted the claim that each person is entitled to the maximum amount of
freedom compatible with similar freedom for all others. The difference between rightful or
juridical possession and empirical possession is just the idea of normativity: empirical
possession is simply physical possession of an object, while juridical possession is physical
possession accompanied by the socially acknowledged claim that one is entitled to that object.
Kant does not tell us what we gain from making this kind of normative claim; he simply assumes
that we will make it, at least about some objects. And having made the normative claim, we are
expecting others to limit the use of their external freedom, so that their actions do not impinge on
our use of the objects we understand as rightfully ours. So the basis for any normative claim
about the use of objects is that each person ought to limit his or her external freedom to the
extent that this is needed to protect the external freedom of others. Just as the categorical
imperative is supposed to be the sole basis of any normative claim about the use of our internal
freedom, about the maxims of our actions, so the principle of maximal equal freedom, the
principle of Recht, is understood by Kant to be the sole basis of any normative claim about the
use of our external freedom, of our bodies and of external objects.
So far we still have not reached the idea of the original contract. There is no contract that
marks a transition from the state of nature to a rightful or juridical condition, because as we have
just seen, there is no act that can be described as intentionally making this transition. That kind
of act would be an invention of normativity, and Kant follows Rousseau as understanding this as
Convention