Allen Wood argues against the view that Kant’s principle and duties of right are based in his ethics. He argues instead that right and ethics have distinct foundations, but that both are part of morals (Sitten) and are unified through their shared conception of obligation, namely, conformity to universal laws. Over the course of his discussion, Wood advances several arguments against the view that ethics serves as the foundation for right in Kant’s thought. In place of that view, he argues that the only foundation for Kant’s principle of right is a question about what can justify coercion. The answer to this question, Wood argues, simply involves the formal consistency of freedom according to a universal law. But he argues that this does not transform imperatives of right into hypothetical or pragmatic imperatives. Rather, the rightful authority rests upon a rational response to the categorical command of reason.