Immanuel Kant’s work on property is more formal and abstract than Locke’s and—at least until recently-it was less well-known. (But now see Byrd and Hruschka 2006 and Ripstein 2009.) Kant began by emphasizing a general connection between property and agency, maintaining that there would be an affront to agency and thus to human personality, if some system were not arrived at which could permit useful objects to be used. He inferred from this that ‘it is a duty of right to act towards others so th