Abstract
In the texts in which Immanuel Kant discusses the principles governing international relations—including texts explicitly dealing with the sources leading states to armed conflict and the circumstances enabling its cessation—he does not directly engage the question “What constitutes victory in war?” This should not be surprising, given that Kant’s treatment of war may be read as consonant with just war thinking for which victory seems an unproblematic concept Yet there are elements in the tone and the substance of his discussion that destabilize a placement of his views as unproblematically part of that tradition. The mordant tone of his dismissal of the Realpolitik guiding “political moralists” suggests a trenchant skepticism about almost any justification offered for leading a state into war. More substantively, an antinomy is at work in the contrast Kant makes, in the two sets of articles for perpetual peace, between a “state of nature” that, construed from the standpoint of the theoretical use of reason, defines the order of international relations as necessarily one of constant war, and the radical transformation of that order, enacted by moral reason in the definitive articles of perpetual peace, into a cosmopolitan order that heeds the categorical imperative “there shall be no war.” In consequence, one may construct a Kantian answer to the question “What constitutes victory in war?” by framing it in reference to this cosmopolitan hope for an international order securing enduring peace. Within the moral horizon of cosmopolitan hope, victory in war—like war itself—is unmasked as morally unintelligible.
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Notes
Among the key texts dealing with war are “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of no Use in Practice” (1793), Perpetual Peace (1795), The Metaphysics of Morals; The Doctrine of Right (1797), and “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” (1798). Page references to Kant’s text are to appropriate volume and page numbers in the standard German critical edition of his works, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Bd 1–22 hrsg. von der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1900–), usually referenced as the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA), and currently published by De Gruyter, Berlin. Page references to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the original pagination of the 1st (A) and the 2nd (B) editions of the Critique. English translations are from the appropriate volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1995–).
Most notably in Perpetual Peace, Appendix I: On the Opposition between Morality and Politics with Respect to Perpetual Peace. He draws a distinction in this section between the “moral politician…who so chooses political principles that they are consistent with those of morality” and the “political moralist…who forges a morality in such a way that it conforms to the statesman’s advantage” (AA 8:372).
It may be useful to note that this essay does not claim to present Kant’s “definitive view” about what constitutes victory in war, especially since it is a question he neither frames nor explicitly addresses. This essay presents, instead, an exploration of consequences for Kant’s account of war and the place of “victory” in war that would follow from giving interpretive primacy to the most fundamental moral claim he makes with respect to war. That claim is that “there shall be no war” is a categorical imperative to be constantly heeded by the human moral subjects whose agency gives human society its concrete historical shape.
This reading of the “two standpoints” is part of a larger interpretive account of Kant’s critical project in which the fundamental dynamic of human reason is construed in anthropological terms: human finite reason is constituted by a drive to render intelligible, to “make sense of,” what it is to be human. A provocative discussion of this anthropological thrust in the critical enterprise can be found in Neiman (1994), Chapter 5, “The Task of Philosophy,” 185–206.
Kant speaks of reason’s “peculiar fate” in the first sentence of the Preface to the 1st edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, A vii.
Two key passages in which Kant identifies “there shall be no war” as a categorical imperative are found in Perpetual Peace (AA 8: 355–356) and The Metaphysics of Morals (AA 6: 354–355).
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, AA 6: 47.
See Mertens (2012) for a probing criticism of efforts that have been made to place Kant squarely within the traditions of just war thinking. A more extensive treatment of Kant’s relationship to just war thinking that also disputes his placement within that tradition is Howard Williams, Kant and the End of War: A Critique of Just War Theory. Williams notes at the outset (p. 3) that “one of [his] major concerns is to re-establish Kant’s reputation as a critic of just war thinking.”
The Metaphysics of Morals: Doctrine of Right §42, “The Postulate of Public Right” (AA 6: 307–308).
This principle, as enunciated in The Metaphysics of Morals is: “Every action is right which in itself, or in the maxim on which it proceeds, is such that it can co-exist along with the freedom of the will of each and all in action, according to a universal law” (AA 6: 230).
The Metaphysics of Morals: Doctrine of Right, Conclusion (AA 6: 355).
There has been a long standing discussion among commentators about whether Kant takes the definitive form of the relation among states needed to provide conditions for perpetual peace to be a confederation in which individuals states retain sovereignty or a single world state. One recent attempt to chart the varied readings that Kant’s views have been given from the mid-nineteenth century onward is Easley (2004). Kleingeld (2012), Chapter 3, “Kant and Cloots on global peace,” 40–71, provides a useful account of the development of Kant’s thinking on this point.
Metaphysics of Morals, §53, AA 6: 343.
My discussion here elides over a significant question about the relationship between Kant’s presentation of two sets of “Articles” for perpetual peace in his 1795 essay and his later, condensed presentation of 1797 in §61 of The Metaphysics of Morals: The Doctrine of Right (AA 6: 350–351) of his proposal for a permanent congress of nations as the vehicle for perpetual peace in which there is no mention of “preliminary articles.” Williams, Kant and the End of War, extensively discusses the overlap and the differences between these two texts in Chapters 2–5, 40–112.
Perpetual Peace, AA 8: 354.
Perpetual Peace, AA 8: 343.
Perpetual Peace, AA 8: 357.
A crucial difference between the two sets of articles—though one that Kant does not explicitly state—is that compliance with all (or any) of the preliminary articles does not require that the state that agrees to them has a republican form of polity. The importance of this difference for the transformational character of the definitive articles is underscored, I believe, by the fact that the first of the Definitive Articles is: “The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican” (AA 8: 349).
AA 8: 357. The play on the word “right” is in the original; the vast grave is an allusion back to the image with which Kant begins the essay: a graveyard that a Dutch innkeeper used on the sign for his establishment (AA 8: 343).
The Metaphysics of Morals: The Doctrine of Right, §62 (AA 6: 352–353).
AA 6: 354.
To the extent that Kant’s account invests the agency of the state in respect to the international order in the sovereign ruler, it is the sovereign who then has primary responsibility for a social envisioning that accords with the moral hope that a cosmopolitan perspective offers. This is one of the features of Perpetual Peace that suggests that a key part of the audience for this essay that Kant had in view were the monarchs of Europe, perhaps in the hope of inviting their transformation from “political moralists” into “moral politicians.”
To the extent that the highest good, as it pertains to individuals, consists in forming a “good will,” it may be construed, as G. Felicitas Munzel argues in Kant’s Conception of Moral Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), to be the shaping of one’s good moral character.
References
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Kleingeld, P. (2012). Kant and cosmopolitanism: The philosophical ideal of world citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mertens, T. (2012). Kant and the just war tradition. In W. A. Barbieri Jr. & H.-G. Justenhoven (Eds.), From just war to modern peace ethics (pp. 231–247). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Neiman, S. (1994). The unity of reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Rossi, P. J. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the interests of reason: A social framework for human action in history. In V. Rohden et al. (Eds.), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants: Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Vol. 4 (pp. 65–75). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Rossi, P. J. (2013). Cosmopolitanism: Kant’s social anthropology of hope. In S. Bacin et al. (Eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010, Bd. 4 (pp. 827–837). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Williams, H. (2012). Kant and the end of war: A critique of just war theory (pp. 85–86). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Rossi, P.J. Peacemaking and Victory: Lessons from Kant’s Cosmopolitanism. Philosophia 43, 747–757 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9615-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9615-5