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Kant on Just War and ‘Unjust Enemies’: Reflections on a ‘Pleonasm’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Susan Meld Shell
Susan Meld Shell
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

The following remarks are intended to help clarify Kant's position on international right and, specifically, the so-called ‘right of war’. They are part of a more general study of Kant's politics; but I also make them here in the hope that Kant's view of international law (or right) can furnish us with some much-needed practical help and guidance. More specifically, I will try to show that Kant is less averse to the use of force, including resort to pre-emptive war, and far more attuned to possibilities for political catastrophe, than he is often taken to be. A greater appreciation for Kant's actual position can, I hope, make a small contribution toward mending the growing rift between so-called ‘Kantians’ who underrate the need for force, and self-styled ‘Hobbesians’ who underestimate the power of moral principle.

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Articles
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Kantian Review , Volume 10 , January 2005 , pp. 82 - 111
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Copyright © Kantian Review 2005

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References

Notes

1 For the original statement of the now famous depiction of Europeans as ‘Kantians’ and Americans as ‘Hobbesians’, see Kagan, Robert, ‘Power and weakness’, Policy Review (June/July 2002)Google Scholar. For a more recent version, see , Kagan, ‘America's crisis of legitimacy’, Foreign Affairs (March/April 2004), 65–87Google Scholar.

2 Brian Orend makes this point forcefully in War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2000), pp. 51ffGoogle Scholar.

3 See also Theory and Practice, Part Three (1792), which anticipates important elements of Kant's Perpetual Peace, and in which Kant's fundamentally anti-misanthropic purpose is especially in evidence.

4 Antonio Franceschet gets this half right in insisting on the a priori rather than experiential basis of the duty to leave the state of nature. But the reason he gives – the malevolent tendency of men to exempt themselves from laws they would apply to others – ignores Kant's stipulation that the duty in question applies regardless of how ‘justice-loving’ and ‘benevolent’ we may be. See , Franceschet, ‘Sovereignty and freedom: Immanuel Kant's liberal internationalist “legacy”‘, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), 219Google Scholar. Bernd Ludwig's otherwise very careful consideration of Kant's argument also ignores this crucial point by suggesting that for a small and ‘very peace-loving people’ the duty in question might not immediately apply. See , Ludwig, ‘Whence public right’Google Scholar, in Timmons, Mark, Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 182Google Scholar.

5 On Kant's general relation to Hobbes and the tradition stemming from him, see Williams, Howard, Kant's Critique of Hobbes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 While these factors make Kant attractive to many left-leaning liberals, his detachment of the obligation to respect the rights of others from any necessary link with the desire for happiness also makes him a potent ally of the libertarian right. The poor are bound to respect the property rights of the rich – even in the face of the ‘greatest inequality in quantity and degree of possession’ (8: 291) – not even in part (as with Locke) because they, too, benefit. From a strict Kantian viewpoint, the complaint of the poor that they do not materially benefit from the unequal distribution of property falls on deaf ears (though there are other Kantian arguments in favour of the redistribution of wealth in favour of the poor). In short, Kant's argument as to the obligation to enter civil society, like his treatment of rights more generally, has had a complicated political and philosophic legacy about which one should not be in a rush to draw definitive conclusions.

7 See, for example, Metaphysics of Morals (6: 230-31,235-36).

8 See, in this regard, what Kant calls the only ‘innate right’ of a human being, namely, ‘independence from being constrained by another's choice’ consistent with independence of everyone else ‘according to a universal law’ (6: 237).

9 On the ‘sublime’ character of the republican constitution, and the consequently ‘abysmal’ character of regicide, see also 6: 320ff.; 8: 366; and, on the equality, in terms of right, of human beings with the most ‘sublime’ of beings, short of God himself, see 8: 350n. For a fuller treatment of the ‘sublime’ character, for Kant, of a republican constitution, see , Shell, ‘Organizing the state: transformations of the body politic in Rousseau, Kant and Fichte’, International Yearbook of German Idealism, vol. 2, 2004, pp. 49–75Google Scholar.

10 An alternative translation would be ‘something based on a deed’.

11 Cf. Kant's comments in Perpetual Peace on putative ‘possession in good faith’. Such ‘putative’ possession in the state of nature is prohibited only ‘after it is recognized as such’. In other words, as long as I think I am right, in a state of nature, no one can coercively gainsay me without doing me a wrong (8: 348n.).

12 See Metaphysics of Morals (6: 312-13). Individuals who ‘feud among themselves’ in the state of nature ‘do each other no injury’ (for one harm cancels the other), but they do do injury ‘in the highest degree’ to right itself.

13 Cf. , Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13Google Scholar; , Locke, Second Treatise of Government, chapter 2Google Scholar; and , Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Cress, Donald (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 58Google Scholar.

14 Compare Kant's stipulation, at the beginning of Perpetual Peace, that his opponents (the political moralist) be ‘consistent [consequent]’ – by which means he ‘secures [himself], in the best form, against all malevolent interpretation’ (8: 343). The crucial conclusion of Perpetual Peace – that peace is not a ‘chimerical’ goal (8: 386) – rests, finally, on two claims: that ‘malevolent’ political moralists cannot avoid ‘paying homage’ to the concept of right, at least verbally’ (assuming they do not merely speak in scornful jest) (8: 355, 375–6n.), and that the concept implicit in the language of right can be ‘consistently executed’: A union of the will of all (contained in the concept of right), if only it is consistently executed, can bring about the required union of morality and nature (8: 377,378).

15 Why this might be so Kant does not here make fully clear; in the Anthropology, however, he calls the ‘inclination to freedom’ (or, alternatively, the ‘passion to freedom’) the ‘most vehement [heftigste] of all in the natural human being who cannot avoid [a situation of] reciprocal claims toward others’. He ‘whose happiness depends upon another's choice’, however ‘benevolent’, ‘rightfully feels himself to be unhappy’ (7: 268). In a rational being who thinks consistently – even a malevolent being (like us) – concern for freedom (independence from another will) trumps a merely animal concern for life or comfort. Similarly, the ‘one innate right of a human being’ concerns independence from the choice of another, not self-preservation per se (6: 237). Hence, if the concept of right can be acted on consistently, morality and nature can, indeed, come together.

16 See also §42 (on the ‘transition’ from what is ‘mine or yours in a state of nature to what is mine or yours in a rightful state in general’):

From private right in the state of nature there now proceeds the postulate of public right: you should – in relations of an unavoidable living side by side – pass over with the others to a rightful condition, i.e., one of distributive justice. – The ground of this allows itself to be developed analytically from the concept of right in outer relations in opposition to violence [Gewalt] (violentia). No one is bound to refrain from encroaching on the possession of another if the other gives him no symmetrical assurance that he will observe the same restraint toward him. He therefore need not wait until he learns from sad experience of the latter's opposing frame of mind [Gesinnung]. For what binds him to become prudent only after suffering a loss, when he can sufficiently observe in himself the general inclination of human beings to play the master over others (to not respect the superiority of another's right if one feels the superiority of one's own might [Macht] or cunning)? And it is not necessary to wait for actual hostility; one is authorized to use coercion against someone who already by his nature threatens him.… With the intention [Vorsatz] to be and remain in this state of outer lawless freedom, men do to one another nothing unjust [unrecht] if they feud among one another; for what is valid for one is reciprocally valid for the others; but they do injustice to the highest degree in wishing to be and remain in a condition/state in which there is nothing rightful, i.e., in which no one's property is secure against violence [Gewalttiitigkeit]. (6: 305-8)

I do not have space here to enter more fully into the question of what Kant means by ‘ideal consent’.

17 See his critique, in the Conflict of the Faculties, of the British constitution as nominally an example of republican separation of powers but actually a disguised despotism (7: 90n.).

18 ‘The Platonic Republic has become proverbial as a striking example of visionary [ertraumter] perfection, which has a seat only in the brain of an idle thinker; and [Plato has been ridiculed]… for maintaining that a prince can govern [regieren] well only in so far as he participates in the ideas. We would do better, however, to follow up this thought, and (where the great man leaves us without help) to place it, through new exertions, in the light…. A constitution of the greatest human freedom according to laws, which makes it so that the freedom of each can stand together with that of all the rest, (not of the greatest happiness, for this will follow of itself) is yet at least a necessary idea, which one must lay as foundational [zum Grunde legen] not only in the first plan/projection [Entwurfe] of a state constitution, but also in all laws…. Indeed, nothing can be more harmful or less worthy of a philosopher than the vulgar [pobelhafte] appeal to supposedly adverse experience…. Whether or not [a perfect state]… can ever come into existence, the idea remains entirely correct, which advances this maximum as an archetype, in order to bring the lawful constitution of men ever nearer to its greatest possible perfection. For what the highest grade may be at which humanity must remain, and hence how large may be the gap necessarily remaining over between the idea and its execution [Ausfiihrung]– that no one can and should determine, because the issue on which it hinges is freedom, which can overcome every specified [angegebene] limit’ [Critique of Pure Reason, A/317=B/373-4].

19 On the distinction between ‘idea’ and ‘ideal’ see Critique of Pure Reason, A/569=B/597f. Kant's fear would seem to be that what proposes itself as an ideal (of some version of a lawful international condition) is merely a ‘monogram’ of the imagination – that is, the sort of ‘wavering sketch’ at which painters aim, rather ‘than an “original image” based on an intelligible concept that can be executed according to a practical rule’. ‘Securing’ the executable ‘consistency’ of the concept of international right is crucial to establishing the rational status of the image ironically invoked in the ‘satiric’ tide of Kant's essay. It is in this context that we can best understand Kant's seemingly hyperbolic claim that if no consistent meaning could be given to the term ‘international right’ ‘all would be lost’. On the ‘executability’ of the idea of growing federalism among states as equivalent to its ‘objective reality’, see 8: 356. On reason's practical authorization to regard ideas as immanent and constitutive in so far as they ‘are grounds of the possibility of making real the necessary object’, see Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 135; cf. Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 221. For a more optimistic reading of Kant on this point, see Cavallar, Georg, Kant and the Theory and Practice of International Right (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 113–31Google Scholar. While I agree with Cavallar as to the ‘transitional’ character of the federation Kant envisions, I am more inclined than Cavallar to emphasize Kant's insistence on its ongoing (if declining) catastrophic potential.

20 Cf. Kant's claim (8: 354) that states ‘can and ought t o ask [fordern]’ others to enter with them into a constitution similar to a civic constitution. In light of Kant's repeated insistence elsewhere on the free or voluntary character of the federation in question, ‘ask’ seems a more accurate rendition of ‘fordern’ than ‘demand’ or ‘require’ (as it is sometimes translated). For a useful list of alternative views as to whether or not Kant's federation is coercive, see , Cavallar, Kant and the Theory of International Right, p. 113Google Scholar.

21 Hans Reiss misleadingly translates this as ‘their present conception of international right’ [emphasis added], as if the idea of international right as such did not need to be somehow overcome (as well as preserved) if true perpetual peace is to be fully realized. From a Hegelian point of view, a state of nations would be the Aufhebung of the idea of international right, a deliverance that, for Kant, can never temporally arrive. This dynamic tension is reflected in Kant's very designation (in writing) of the idea in question (“the idea of a [not rightful] condition”) in terms of a negation that potentially contains the resources of its own progressive overcoming.

22 Cf. Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason (6: 33-34). As Paul Guyer observes, the goals of Perpetual Peace cannot be fully achieved without a radical moral transformation. (, Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 408–33.)Google Scholar

23 On the conceptual ‘impossibility’ of international right, see also Mulholland, Leslie, ‘Kant on war and international justice’, Kant-Studien (1987), 32Google Scholar.

24 Kant is thus, as Orend persuasively argues, a kind of ‘just war’ theorist. The stipulation against punitive war, however, places Kant firmly outside the just-war tradition as formulated by Augustine and Aquinas, for whom ‘punitive’ (and hence retributive) intent is not only permitted but itself a sine qua non (see Summa Theologica 2: 2, question 40). Even Grotius, who is in other respects a less than faithful follower of scholastic teaching, considers punitive war legitimate (see On the Law of War and Peace, book 2, chapter 1). It might be more accurate, then, to call Kant a ‘modern’ (or post-Hobbesian) just-war theorist. This punitive element is rarely stressed in contemporary descriptions of ‘traditional’ just-war theory. Matthias Lutz-Bachman, for example, in an otherwise careful analysis of Perpetual Peace in its historical context, treats Kant's rejection of punitive war as altogether in line with ‘classical international law’, rather than as the significant departure (and remarkable concession to Hobbes) that it actually is , Lutz-Bachman, ‘Kant's idea of peace and a world-republic’, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 63Google Scholar. For Kant, the stipulation against punitive war is not primarily addressed, as with Pufendorf, against belligerent action undertaken by third parties (for third parties may deem themselves at risk), but at belligerent action undertaken with retributive intention. Right in war, for Kant, is ‘unlimited in quantity and degree’, precisely because its rightful purpose is not ‘punishment’ (where retributive proportionality comes into play) but self-preservation, the limits of which each state may determine for itself, subject to the qualifications discussed below. These qualifications have nothing directly to do with ‘proportionality’ in either a retributive or a prudential sense, but hinge, instead, on the possibility of future mutual trust. For other examples of discomfort among contemporary just-war theorists with its traditional punitive component, see Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 62–6Google Scholar; and Ramsey, Paul, ‘Just war according to St Augustine’, in Elshtain, Jean (ed.), Just War Theory (New York: NYU Press, 1992), pp. 15–17Google Scholar. Elshtain notes this discomfort in Just War Against Terror (New York: Basic Books), pp. 23–4, 108Google Scholar.

25 Cf. Anthropology [7: 270]: the passion for vengeance ‘arises irresistibly from the nature of man’. Justice distinguishes itself from vengeance (which it is, nevertheless, ‘analogous') by its essential independence from conditions of time.

26 Thus ‘no one can be declared an unjust enemy’ and a punitive war is not even ‘thinkable’ (8:346-7 (emphasis added)).

27 On difficulties in conceptualizing a Kantian ‘right in war’, see Orend, pp. 56-7.

28 For a fuller consideration of this paragraph, see , Shell, ‘Faith and freedom in Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Naked Reason’, in Velkley, Richard (ed), Essays on Freedom and Religion, Catholic University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming. Competition (Wetteifers) is literally a kind of bet or wager, in which we risk failure in an attempt to prove ourselves. In the Anthropology, Kant highlights ‘competition’ as the site of passion ‘of the most intense and enduring kind’ – a passion attached to what Kant calls ‘the inclination to illusion’. This inclination has the natural purpose of ‘stimulating the vital force’ to ‘make us more active’ and ‘prevent our losing the feeling of life completely in mere enjoyment’. This tendency to take objects of imagination for real ends is a ploy on nature's part to arouse the lazy to healthy exertion. The ensuing sense of bodily well-being, Kant notes, makes illusional passions (such as that for gambling, an activity that he himself is reputed to have enjoyed as a younger man) especially intractable.

29 Compare his description, in Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Intention (1784), of a cosmopolitan (weltbiirgerlicher) condition as the ‘womb’ in which the original ‘Anlagen’ of the huma n race can develop’ (8: 28).

30 Compare Perpetual Peace (8: 366-8,385) an d Religion (6: 34n.):

If one looks at the history of these [so-called states] as phenomena of for the most part hidden predispositions of humanity, one becomes aware of a certain machine-like course [machinenmdβigen Gang] of nature toward ends that are not the ends of nations but of nature itself. Each state strives, as long as there is another next to it that it may hope to compel, to enlarge itself by subduing its neighbor, and thus strives toward universal monarchy – a constitution that must extinguish all freedom and with it (as its consequence) virtue, taste and science. Yet after this monster (in which laws gradually lose their force) has swallowed up all its neighbors, it ultimately dissolves of itself, and divides through rebellion and factionalism into many smaller states, that, instead of striving after a union of states (a republic of free united peoples [freier verbündeter Völker]), begin the same game again in turn, so that war (this spur [Geisel] of the human race) will never cease. War, though not so incurably evil as the grave of universal despotism (or even a union of peoples [Völkerbund] pitted against despotism coming into disuse in any state), nonetheless, as an ancient said, produces more evil men than it takes away.

Kant makes use of the same phrase in Perpetual Peace in reference to the relative nobility of savage, as distinguished from civilized, war (8: 365).

31 As Kant famously asserts, ‘the problem of establishing a state… is soluble for a nation of devils if only they have understanding’ (8: 366).

32 Hence Perpetual Peace's extended comparison, to their disadvantage, of the rulers of Europe to savage cannibals: ‘Thus a Bulgarian prince gave the following reply to the Greek emperor's goodhearted offer to settle their conflict through a duel: a smith who has tongs will not pull the glowing tongs out of the coals with his bare hands’ (8: 355n.). For further discussion of the comparison, see Shell, ‘Cannibals all: the grave wit of Kant's Perpetual Peace, in Vries, Hent de and Weber, SamuelViolence, Identity, and Self-Determination (eds), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and ‘Bowling Alone: On the Saving Power of Kant's “Perpetual Peace”‘, Idealistic Studies, 1996. The trope invokes, of course, themes first raised in Montaigne's famous essay ‘On cannibals’.

33 The issue, for Kant, is less the nominally ‘republican’ character of the states in question than the government's real acceptance of the Tightness of republicanism in principle, an acceptance that makes mutual trust more likely than amon g states in general. (Thus Kant's special opprobrium for the deceptively ‘republican’ constitution of Great Britain.) For a fuller treatment of why this is so, see , Shell, ‘Organizing the state’.Google ScholarCf. , Cavallar, ‘Kantian perspectives on democratic peace: alternatives to Doyle’, Review of International Studies (2001), vol. 27, 229–48Google Scholar.

34 ‘The craving of every state (or of its head) is to attain a lasting condition of peace by ruling the whole world if possible’ (8: 367).

35 On the ‘unwritten code’, see (8: 360); by way of contrast, the peculiar perversity of a falsely ‘enlightened’ politics, lies in identifying the ‘true honor of a state’ with ‘the continual increase of its might by whatever means'(see 8: 344,375).

36 Cf. the anticipation of this argument in Theory and Practice at 8: 311.

37 Cf. Kant's claim in Perpetual Peace (apropos of the slogan ‘let justice prevail though [all the rogues in] the world perish’) that ‘the world will by no means perish by there coming t o be fewer evil human beings’ (8: 379).

38 On the ‘Lucretian’ resonance of the entire passage, see the long note at 8: 361-2.

39 In the final analysis, the ‘objective reality’, or ‘executability’ of ‘pure principles of right’ is described as an ‘assumption’ we must make to avoid ‘conclusions of despair’ (8: 380).

40 Cf. Religion, 6: 41.

41 O n other dimensions of such trust-building, see Anderson-Gold, Sharon, Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 85–100Google Scholar.

42 See 8: 347: a reference to the (false) promise of Augustus, whom Virgil ironically praises. The many references to Virgil throughout Perpetual Peace, and not least at 8:357, can be profitably examined as a model of the sort of irony that Kant exploits in his ow n essay. Likewise, Kant's torturous effort to trace the Latin ‘pax’ to an ‘ancient community between Europe and Tibet’ serves to undercut, by virtue of its spiritual antiquity, the more famous pax romanus (8: 360-ln.).

43 On the fundamental ambiguity of Kant's doctrine, see Franceschet, pp. 209-28. Unlike Franceschet, I trace the source of that ambiguity not to Kant's confusion as to the character of freedom, but to his probing analysis of the difficulties inherent in the very concept of international right.

44 On the general inclination of human beings to lord it over others when they feel superior in might, see the discussion of Religion (6: 27) above, and Metaphysics of Morals (6: 307): ‘everyone can quite well perceive within himself the inclination of human beings generally to play the master over others (not to respect the rights of others when one feels superior in strength or cunning).’ As Kant puts it in Perpetual Peace, ‘possession of power [Gewalt] unavoidably corrupts the free judgment of reason’ (8: 369).

45 For a useful discussion of this passage, see Cavallar, 91-2,105-6.

46 Ordinary lying in the state of nature, on the other hand, is apparently permitted. In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant observes that, in a mutually acknowledged ‘state of nature’, knowingly telling a falsehood (or ‘lying’) under duress is not true deception (27: 448-9). The highwayman who demands to know the location of one's purse does not expect an honest answer. As for the dishonourable activities that make one unfit to be a citizen: Kant allows, both in the Metaphysics of Morals and within the narrower constraints sketched by the articles of Perpetual Peace, for the employment of spies other than one's own fellow citizens – a fact rarely noted. This moral limit on the use of one's own citizens (and the apparent freedom of an immoral politician to ignore it) may help explain Kant's conviction that in a war between republic and a non-republic, the latter, all things being equal, has the advantage (see 7: 86n.). (As Kant is at pains to point out, the immoral politician loses in the long run by the corruption of his people's way of thinking (Denkungsart) (8: 346); but the immoral politician may not have the long run in mind.)

47 On the ‘ambiguous’ status of right that lacks a true public to enforce it, see the ‘appendix’ to the ‘Introduction to the Doctrine of Right’ (6: 233ff.).

48 On the importance of ‘tone’ to Kant's overall political and philosophic project, see also the roughly contemporaneous ‘On a newly uplifted noble tone in philosophy’, and ‘Announcement of a near conclusion of a treaty [Tractats] toward eternal peace in philosophy’ (both published in 1796).