Ep. 295: Kant on Preventing War (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 295 is something like, how can peace on Earth be possible? We read Immanuel Kant's essay Perpetual Peace, a philosophical sketch from 1795, plus commentaries on that article from 1995 by Martha Nussbaum and Jurgen Habermas. For more information, please visit partially examinedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, regrettably asserting my rights by force within a state of nature in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying not to prey on my smaller neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey sharpening the knives of conflict between morality and politics on the Whetstone of Virtue.

0:52 Wes: Before we begin, Mark accused me of being borderline misleading in saying optimistic seminar optimistic to borderline. It's even worse than misleading, actually. Kant talks about this difference between just being misleading being borderline misleading. But no, you're right, which is I shouldn't promise that I'm going to do a seminar after every show again. I'll advertise them on Weston1.com and at partiallyexaminedlife.com seminars. Just go there to see if there's going to be a seminar for the show. Sometimes there's not going to be enough interest. I don't think there's going to be enough interest with Kant to actually do a seminar, but occasionally those will be available.

1:30 Dylan: So the strategy is to dangle out the seminar and then if you get some bites, then you'll reel it in.

1:36 Wes: Exactly. It's hard to have a seminar with just me. And it's also a lot less lucrative.

1:47 Mark: Well, let's talk Kant. There's a war going on. Did you hear? Not our war, so who cares? But it's going on.

1:56 Wes: Well, yeah, I've been obsessed with it.

1:58 Mark: Thus you suggested that we do this.

2:00 Wes: Yeah. You know, I wasn't aware of the specific content of this, and I think we were all probably thinking more along the lines of the sources of human destructiveness and why people go to war and how to stop that. And that's not quite what Kant is onto here. He's not quite so interested in that psychological aspect. He's thinking in very practical terms and describes something that sounds a lot like the United Nations.

2:28 Dylan: I see why you would say that. He's not thinking about it in that psychological way, but the way I was thinking, he's not diagnosing it so much as trying to sort of the way in which you would talk about creating a government of an individual state. What would we require to regulate conflict satisfactorily in the world? I guess the closest thing is we live in a state of war amongst each other, absent the coercive nature of the state. And that maximizes our freedom, that whole discussion. And in that way, his conclusion extends from that Enlightenment philosophy.

3:07 Mark: Right. It's a conversation that we had seen in Hobbes, that Hobbes says, of course, it's human nature to not want to be in a state of war. Therefore we all tacitly assent to being in a society. But he acknowledges, right then and there, nations are in that state of war with regard to each other. I guess we're safe enough in a state that Hobbes didn't think that the Leviathan, the heads of all the states, tacitly agree to being in some sort of international coalition or world government or anything like that. He doesn't go that far. We don't necessarily need that to just escape the nasty, brutish, in short, state of nature. But war still seems pretty bad. It seems like this is a dangling thing that Hobbes left there that Kant is now taking up.

3:50 Wes: And by the way, so just to remind listeners, state of nature and state of war doesn't mean people are necessarily literally fighting at any given time, whether we're talking about individuals or states. It just means there's always the threat of that and there's no security against that. There's no contract, there's no agreement, there's no civil society.

4:08 Dylan: There's no authority that can be appealed to.

4:11 Wes: Yep. No higher coercive authority. Although it turns out Kant's not going to recommend that either for his League of Nations. It doesn't think that's practicable. But, yeah, just, you know, if people are near us, we know that they can hurt us. And that in of itself is a threat that actually, on Kant's view of this, entitles us in a state of nature to do whatever we think is necessary, simply not to feel threatened. Which is really interesting to reflect on because this is the way often despots like Putin justify their own preemptive strikes, which Kant gets into a little bit as well.

But this nation is a threat to me, and therefore I have a right to jump on them. That's state of nature, state of war logic. And the idea is that once we're in civil as individuals, once we're in a civil society, we hand over the power to do that sort of thing to the state itself. And to the law, and we give up any power to retaliate or to preemptively strike. So how do you do that with nations? It's a difficult question because you're not going to get, as Kant points out, nations to submit to some kind of higher constitution. Even if they did, you would end up with a cosmopolitan universal state.

Right. It's kind of meaningless, except unless you think of all the people in the world as subject to one individual constitution belonging to one big nation state. If you're going to preserve the status of states within all of this, you need a different solution than civil contract theory. You need this federation of states, which, as far as I can tell, pretty ill defined. There's a commitment to maintaining the peace, but there's no enforcing authority.

5:53 Dylan: It's a rules of engagement. Things we agree are beyond the pale. I think you're right to point to something like the United nations as being the kind of thing we're talking about.

6:03 Wes: Can we say Kant invented the United Nations? Is that another thing that we can give a philosopher credit for?

6:09 Dylan: Well, philosophers are supposed to be the secret sauce.

6:12 Wes: That's right.

6:15 Dylan: According to the secret article at the end of Perpetual Peace.

6:20 Wes: I like that.

6:21 Mark: Say what the structure of this is. The essay is about 23 pages, but then there are some appendices and it's broken up. It's like a peace treaty that there are articles. So it's nice. 1, 2, 3. Here are the things I'm proposing. Strangely, it's like the articles of. Then the definitive articles, then the secret article. Like, it's as if he came back to it and added more stuff. I don't know exactly the publication history, whether, for instance, the appendices were originally included. They seem more detailed. We can talk about the specific policy proposals he makes here. And then we have this Habermas essay that responds to those. We can also talk about what it means for Kant as a political philosopher, which is not something we really talked a lot about. We did have an episode on another essay he wrote on enlightenment. Do you remember? What episode number do you want to estimate?

7:10 Wes: 203.

7:13 Mark: It is episode 200.

7:15 Wes: Whoa. That's pretty close.

7:17 Mark: It's been almost 100 episodes since we explicitly talked about Kant. Very surprising, given that he's one of Wes's favorite people. We must have been actively sabotaged.

7:26 Wes: Time flies. We had too much Locke to talk about.

7:33 Mark: That's right.

7:33 Dylan: It was such a Locke-y situation.

7:37 Mark: And Kant is of course known for these longer treatises. And we've even read the stripped down or introductory or summaries and simplifications of these. And they were still difficult texts. But looking as we did in the Enlightenment one, and here at just an essay, like, he's a pretty darn clear writer. There is really nothing to. He's no Hegel, I guess. Actually, Hegel has the same thing that supposedly he has essays that he wrote early in his career that are crystal clear. So the book that has the 200th anniversary publication, it is called Perpetual Peace Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal. And it was put together based on a conference that was 200 years after the initial publication of the article.

8:20 Wes: You know, as far as the structure of this goes, the first section, the preliminary section where he gives these first articles, that's when I thought, oh, no. It's like no independently existing state may be acquired by another state. I'm like, oh, God, this is going to be tremendously boring.

8:36 Dylan: Standing armies will gradually be abolished. No national debt.

8:40 Wes: Way too practical for my tastes. But it gets more theoretical as you go along. And in the second section, with the definitive articles of a Perpetual Peace, he gets into the structure of individual states. So the first definitive articles of the civil constitution of every state shall be Republican. And we can talk about what that means and then the implications of that for the organization of a federation of states. So he's always going back and forth between the analogy of the individual state and the civil contract that grounds it and. And what it's supposed to do, the guaranteeing rights to citizens and all that stuff, and then tries to lift that up to think about an overarching federation of states.

And to the extent to which that same structure will apply at a macro level where individual states are, on analogy to individual citizens. And of course, there are going to be big disanalogies. And then finally he'll get into the idea of cosmopolitan right, which has to do with the extent to which we go beyond his League of Nations, federation of nations idea to the idea of a universal state in which we are all citizens. And he wants to ask the question to the extent to which that's practical, and it turns out only practical, with the extent of something he calls hospitality.

And then finally he gets into these appendix, these supplements. He gives us kind of an Adam Smith type of account, an invisible hand type of account of how it is that nature is progressing us towards peace, naturally, inevitably, because there's a way in which our own selfishness motives, by coming into conflict with each other, produce an emergent, more peaceful world as an emergent phenomenon. Very Gradually. So he gives us some reason for optimism about attaining peace.

10:29 Mark: Yes, those are the supplements. There's first supplement and second supplement and then first appendix and second appendix.

10:36 Wes: Right, I forgot about that. Yeah, those are two different things.

10:40 Mark: Yes, the stuff, the supplements. The second one you already referred to the secret article of a perpetual Peace which says that philosophers have to have freedom of speech.

10:49 Dylan: Yeah, listen to your philosophers so they can help make things better.

10:52 Wes: They're not going to be in government, you know, there's not going to be any philosopher kings.

10:56 Dylan: No self respecting philosopher is going to

10:58 Wes: be in government because power corrupts reason. His essay on Enlightenment was about this sort of thing, free speech for intellectuals and a kind of plea where he says, yeah, if you think this is all impractical and harmless, then you should just admit that we're harmless and let us say our peace, so to speak, and take whatever you think is useful.

11:18 Mark: Right. And then the actual appendices I think we can get to when we get to them because they're a little off topic. But I did find in the introduction of that secondary source volume I was referring to, so there at least was a political occasion for this, that there's something in the news. The Treaty of Basel or Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, where Prussia ceded to France all territory west of the Rhine in exchange for which Prussia allowed. Expected to be allowed to join Russia and Austria in partitioning Poland to the east. So it's this kind of thing that we're going to get right in the second article. Divvying up other states in this way is a. No, no, this is not good.

11:54 Wes: What's Poland for then? Sorry, that's a terrible.

11:59 Mark: Go to number one.

12:01 Wes: No peace is valid if there's a secret reservation for future war.

12:05 Dylan: Peace is invalid if the reason you're having peace is so that you can go fill up your bunker with extra bombs so you can go do war later.

12:13 Wes: Which is what any peace treaty I think is on his view. In other words, you're still in a state of nature, in a state of war, even if you're not actually at war because you're still in this state of tension and fending against the possibility of attack and maybe in an arms race. I think what he's doing is he's telling us. When I say peace I mean something very specific. I don't just mean that there's not actual physical hostility going on. I mean something more structural and formal, something grounded in the same way that a civil contract grounds what we would think of as our state of peace within a civil society. It's got to be grounded in the same way.

12:54 Dylan: And the practical output of that is that people wouldn't be preparing for a future war to take advantage of their position or get resources by force or any of those other things. That peace is not merely a tactic in an ongoing war. I mean, that's sort of what number one to me means if we look

13:14 Wes: at it in practical terms. I mean, if you think about the way Europe changed after World War II, right. Not all of it, but, you know, you think about the big powers in Europe relative to the United nations, It's inconceivable just 70 or 80 years later that France and Germany would go to war, for instance. There's a different relationship between all of these great power European states in the United States than existed, I think, before 1945. Or maybe that's an illusion. My reading of history, yeah. Is that even when European powers weren't at war with each other, war was always on the horizon.

It was always a conceivable possibility. It was always not even something necessarily a bad thing, but an avenue to honor and to glory. And maybe nuclear weapons are a big factor here, but now in many cases it's inconceivable. And the economic, this is something Kant mentions too, but economic interests have taken the driver's seat in many ways. And Europe is in fact a big economic entity with the European Union.

14:18 Dylan: So it's the sort of thing that is a little bit at play. The distinction with the Ukrainian conflict right now, it's the national borders question, where you have an army invading across national borders with the point of taking their territory.

14:35 Wes: Genocidal intent to destroy Ukrainian ness. I don't know how closely you guys have followed this, but I've looked at a lot of translations of what's going on in Russian media and it's truly horrifying. Ukrainians aren't real. To be Ukrainian is to be a Nazi. The Ukrainian language isn't real. Why are they speaking this made up language? It's truly, in my opinion, genocidal. And you have a whole country that's been whipped up into a genocidal fury over the last eight years with incessant propaganda about how Ukrainians are Nazis and drug addicts.

15:10 Mark: So at the end of this section, he appeals to the vanity of rulers. These sentiments of, you know, holding out for future wars are beneath the dignity of a ruler, just as beneath the dignity of a minister of state to comply with any reasoning of this kind. But if it accords with Quote, enlightened notions of political expediency. We believe that the true glory of a state consists in the constant increase of its power by any means whatsoever. The above judgment that he just made will certainly appear academic and pedantic. So he's undercutting his own smarm by saying, okay, I can see why you might not agree with my being snarky there.

15:46 Wes: It reflects a recurring tension within the piece, which he ultimately, in that appendix, he addresses directly. But it's the conflict between realpolitik realism and morality. And there are a lot of people who want to say, look, let's be real. We're not leaving the state of war between nations, the state of nature between nations. Let's be realistic about human wickedness. And we need to protect ourselves, we need to arm ourselves, we need to operate on self interest. We need to think about empirical, quote, unquote rules, right? We need to think very practically and look at past experience. So take your hippie morality and put it to the side. And Kant's going to argue that actually no, morality has to be up front and center and that morality has to predominate over politics.

16:35 Dylan: I mean, he would frame politics as being the proper cultivation of human freedom and that that is the proper end of reason and that aligning a morality towards that will actually get us better politics.

16:50 Mark: Well, let's get the second one out there, because I think this even more clearly connects to what we already know about Kant morally. So that is the no independently existing state, whether it be large or small, may be acquired by another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift. And this comes down to, if you do that, you're just using the citizens of that state. So even though Kant was not directly pro democracy, in fact he was even more so than many of his contemporaries suspicious, you know, due to the tyranny of the majority and sort of the traditional critiques of democracy. And maybe didn't even think that even election of representatives was necessary, that we'll definitely talk more about that here. But somehow, in his accordance, maybe following Rousseau and the idea of there being a general will, maybe Napoleon, maybe one guy can know the general will. It's possible.

17:42 Dylan: I didn't get any of that. I got it. As for Kant as republicanism, it's a separation between the legislature and the executive, and that anything other than that is despotism, in which you have the person who makes the laws, enforcing the laws. And so the mechanism of republicanism, whether it is, I think you're right, he would view a monarchy as being a Potential mode of republican government as long as the monarch was the executive and there was a separate parliament that was creating the laws. And if you have that, then you have a will that's coming through through the. Not necessarily representatives, necessarily, but the people who are making the laws.

18:24 Mark: He'll consider them representative. But we wouldn't call them representatives.

18:27 Dylan: We wouldn't call them representatives because they're not being elected. But you're right that he would consider them representatives insofar they are the ones who are the part of the government that are making the laws as distinct from the ones who are enforcing the laws.

18:40 Mark: Yeah. So the overall thing we know about Kant, you know, don't use people, kingdom of ends and things like that. And so that rules out a lot of. Even like a utilitarian government, that I am a benevolent dictator and I will do things for the benefit of everybody. Like, that's not even.

18:58 Dylan: That's not going to happen.

18:59 Wes: We're going to find out that. Contra Sandel, Kant is a Kantian, he's a Rawlsian. And justice is prior to the good, and rights are prior to one's ends. And you think about what you ought to do. In fact, you think entirely about what you ought to do. And the ends will follow to the extent that they can, given the circumstances. But you don't prioritize the end. You don't prioritize the good over the. But I just wanted to say one more thing about his justification for number two here. I think there's an analogy, right, between the state and an individual subjectivity.

So this idea that individuals are ends in themselves, they are subjects. They're not just material things. They are not to be commodified. There's something structural in a state. He'll say states are not possessions, but they're societies of men. When we talk about society and the formal and structural aspect of that, there's something subject to like about that. And we could do a very Platonic thing and talk about the ways in which different types of states reflect different types of subjectivities in a way. But in any case, it means that we have a grounds for saying that states have to be treated in certain ways just like individuals, because there are properties of states that are subject, like in their political organization.

20:21 Dylan: You can see that that way of thinking is motivating the tightrope he's walking regarding the peace that you want to have between states and the principle of effectively maximizing the freedom of all the states in a way that you'd be maximizing the Freedom of the individuals under the right sort of agreement. In this case, it's not particularly coercive, but it's certainly, I guess you can imagine a lot of the things that happen right now in the un in the federation of states, where there is coercive power that stops short of boots on the ground war.

20:57 Wes: Right.

20:57 Mark: Like a tree, the state has its own roots. To graft it onto another state as if it were a shoot is to terminate its existence as a moral personality, make it into a commodity. And he talks about using marriage to marry one state to another, like all that stuff. Even if, like the rulers of the two states are like, yeah, let's merge, let's have a marriage, that sort of violates the autonomy of the state, its citizen like qualities, as you were saying.

21:23 Dylan: Yeah. So one criticism I think that you can have of this arrangement for Kant is just the extent to which it. It sort of snaps a line in history. And there is a sense that of just ignoring how we got where we got whatever states exist now. It feels like, well, the fact that this state was born out of you guys over there running rampant over us earlier, that you would ignore that. And I think that there's a kind of, you know, right nowism about it.

21:55 Wes: Yeah, there's, you know, if we want to talk about the prehistory of states and the way in which states come into being.

22:02 Dylan: Well, in some cases it's not super pre history. Right. I mean, if you take a look at the map of Europe and the map of the Middle east that was explicitly carved up post World War I, post World War II, and our modern borders were defined out of those conflicts by the winners of those conflicts.

22:17 Wes: Yeah. Which is, as all states are at some point in history.

22:21 Mark: What you're calling the right nowism, I think, is also just trying to make the best of what we have right now. And if that changes, we're not going to undo the change. We could even say it was wrong. So revolutions are a comparable thing. I was reading in the Stanford article about his political views. I guess this is a different essay, but that he never says it's okay to rebel, to have a revolution, but if they do go through with a revolution, you don't try to undo the revolution. Like, that actually is the state with which you have to, as an international entity, have to deal going forward. So I agree.

22:55 Dylan: There's actually a remarkable amount of pragmatic activity going on in this whole thing on Kant's part.

23:00 Mark: We have to look at specific examples because I would think that if Two states with different languages, with different cultures have been married in this unnatural way. According to him, then even though we might not as a third party state be justified in intervening, we would be justified in saying it would really be better if those would become their former autonomous selves.

23:24 Dylan: No, there's a grounds for having that discussion.

23:27 Wes: So I think we can move pretty quickly through the remaining ones. Unless you guys, this is something that you wanted to pause on because these just seem very. Just stay with practical. Yeah, I mean, he has the idea that standing armies will be abolished. I guess that's the idea that they'll gradually be abolished. Will commit to them gradually being abolished.

23:46 Dylan: And this is like number one. Right. You're just getting rid of the preemptively creating the conditions for war.

23:52 Wes: Yeah. Their existence brings with it the danger of war. You know, there's an arms race. People can see them as a threat. He also, you know, he mentions at the end of that that alliances and wealth are also seen as threats by other states. And said wealth. I'm like, hmm, that's not really a problem that you can solve. You can't commit saying you eventually are unless you think eventually all states will be equally wealthy.

24:13 Dylan: Well, and also alliances.

24:15 Wes: Right.

24:15 Dylan: I mean, alliances go to why you might have a standing army. Right. For mutual protection. And it's easy to see how that depending upon what side of the alliance you're on, could feel like. Depends on where you're at. About how threatening that feels like no

24:29 Wes: national debt in connection with external affairs. He's basically just saying the use of credit makes war easy. So he shouldn't be using credit to do external affairs of state stuff.

24:40 Mark: Well, I think both this and the wealth thing have to do with the point that he had concluded, number two, with which is about mercenaries. You have to just say having mercenaries. The only legitimate kind of war there would be is really a defensive one, but one in which all the citizens themselves rise up, become the militia and they fight because this is something that they have to do, you know, for whatever reason. Maybe there. There's some argument to be made for an aggressive war of this sort that there's something so bad that's happening over there that we need to go and put a stop to it.

25:13 Dylan: But it's an activity of the state through its citizens.

25:15 Mark: Yes, yes. Whereas if you say you can just hire mercenaries, then having wealth is enough to do that. Or you don't even need to have wealth. Let's go into debt and hire the mercenaries. That means just anybody can do anything. And that's just too much power.

25:29 Wes: I just got my Discover card. I'm going to start a. Everything is outsourced.

25:37 Mark: I forgot about that ad.

25:41 Wes: It's a $3 trillion credit limit.

25:46 Mark: I mean, he's just talking about foreign things here. So I guess debts for other things, like we want to grow our infrastructure, we want to take care of our people. I'm not sure that he's just against debt altogether, but at least foreign debts.

25:57 Wes: Yeah, I think specifically says in connection with external affairs. So I think it would be awfully naive of him to say that he shouldn't use it and internal affairs, because debt is about more than borrowing money. It's about liquidity. And so anyway, if he knows something about finance, then he would not advocate

26:12 Mark: that any country should. Needs to be able to go liquid and leave town really fast in case the heat gets too hot.

26:20 Wes: Can't interfere in the Constitution or government of another state.

26:24 Mark: Yeah, that seems an important one. So that even if there is injustice in other states, at least prima facie, we are not allowed to go in and fix that.

26:32 Wes: Yeah, it's an interesting. We don't get a lot of theoretical reflection on that. But of course, it's a basic conflict to which we've been subjected in our lifetimes. Right. So in the case of Iraq, the whole idea of, well, there was the ruse of weapons of mass destruction. But then even if you thought that eliminating a dictator and democratizing a country were a practical goal, is it legitimate to do that? And then you have intuitions about sovereignty. You say, well, no, states are sovereign entities and we can't interfere in that way. And then there are much more murky cases as in the war in Bosnia and everything went down.

When you have a. Speaking to Dylan's point, you have a conglomeration. You have states which have basically been part of an empire and they're now falling apart. And then there are just civil war or strife between. With Yugoslavia. Right. Between states that were formerly part of the same big state. And in that case, the UN, I think, intervened at a certain point and then again NATO did with Serbia. So those questions of intervention get very complicated because you get into questions about are you interfering between two states? Are you interfering in the interests of a state if there's a civil war?

27:47 Mark: Yeah, I think he's opening a can of worms here. It is really not going to be easy, but I guess it's kind of like the Prime Directive. I just started watching some. The new Star Trek show and it doesn't matter how messed up they are. Kant is going to later in this essay in the supplement, talk about Providence. And I think that's what's behind here too, that individual states, they might be despotic right now, they might be war torn, they might be oppressing their people, but the natural tendency is going to be for those things to resolve themselves.

And it's just going to be much better all around if you just let them do so, even if it takes them hundreds of years to do so, rather than to interfere directly, because then we're going to have the start of World War I. Wasn't that like the assassination was a piece of local politics and like, oh, no, well, we're on one side and Germany's on the other side. And then, you know, the whole world is at war. So the same thing. Like, according to this, I think even though clearly Russia was wrong to do the invasion, we should not, according to this, be getting in.

That would just escalate. That would make world war.

28:51 Wes: Yeah, I don't agree with that. I personally don't agree and I don't.

28:54 Mark: You don't think Kant would think that?

28:56 Wes: I'm not sure what he would think, but I don't think this commits him to that view. Because, you know, see, this is the thing Russia can say, you know, this is our country, right. What are you. We're a sovereign state. Ukraine is part of it, and therefore you're interfering with us, just trying to take back our own historical land. But Ukraine is getting punished because it was on its way. You know, it's becoming a Westernized liberal democracy that we've been assisting. We generated commitments to Ukraine. We absolutely ought to be interfering.

In any case where we can prevent genocide, I think we should be interfering. I think we should have interfered. We should have intervened. I mean, intervened in Rwanda prevented hundreds of thousands of people from being machete to death. I don't think that would have been difficult to do in all these cases. I'm an interventionist in cases where it involves nation occupation and nation building. No, that, as we've seen, has always gone wrong. Which does not mean, by the way, that if you've been in a country like Afghanistan for 20 years and built up a liberal society, you have a generation of people who are living in cities which, where essentially liberal democracy predominates.

You have women going to university that you suddenly pull the rug out from under them and say, fuck you. Go back to the Stone Ages now, because we don't want to be in a forever war. You generate obligations once you've actually occupied a country and created a different type of state there. So there are a lot of very complex considerations, but Russia's attack on Ukraine is an attack on Europe, it's an attack on the United States, and Ukraine is getting help from us, but it's essentially fighting a European war alone. It's doing the work of Europe, only putting its own soldiers at stake for that.

I think it's very, very naive to think that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just some sort of local. Not calling you naive, Mark, but anyway, sorry for the rant.

30:40 Mark: I was just trying to say what Kant's view is. I'm not expressing mine at all. Number six. No state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual confidence impossible during a future time of peace. For instance, assassins, poisoners, breach of agreements, the instigation of treason within the enemy state, etc. These are dishonorable stratagems. So I was rolling this together with number one. Part of the reservations went into the Cold War is not just arms race, but spying.

31:09 Wes: Of course, I don't think he says you can't spy. No assassins, no assassination, poison, breach of agreements, treason. I find his justification the most interesting part of this, because he gets into the idea that if you let this sort of stuff happen, then wars become wars of extermination. And then he also gets into the idea that if the war gets moralized in any way, if wars become wars of punishment for injustices, you say this country did this unjust thing and we have to go to war to punish them for the injustice, then they become wars of extermination. And this is something we'll get into more with if we get to the Habermas, this idea. But that's another really interesting topic that Kant is broaching here, which is how dangerous it is to moralize war. So if you assassinate, do all the rest, you're nudging them in the direction of moralization and therefore extermination.

32:02 Mark: Acts of hostility that would make mutual confidence impossible during a future time of peace. I guess I had read that as including spying, because that's sort of the definition of we don't trust you, you don't trust us. I would think that even if that is not a direct implication of this, Kant should not be okay with that. That's part of respecting others. Sovereignty is you don't go and spy on them and do the things that spying entails, which involves killing at least guards.

32:32 Dylan: If they have red shirts. If they have red shirts on, you gotta.

32:35 Wes: You know, at least once you're gonna use that pen, which just shoots out a poison dart. Exactly. So that's assassination, poison and spying and all, all in one thing.

32:45 Mark: And the instigation of treason within the enemy state, like, that is like, our prime goal with Russia is, okay, fine, we won't send people in to actually assassinate Putin, though that has been raised. Does it really, as Kant says, make mutual confidence impossible in the future and lead to a genocidal sort of attitude that if we were like, we don't want to attack Russia. We just know that you are being. This is like Saddam. We just know that you are being ruled by a dictator. And so we're going to use whatever clinical means our smart bombs from space, we're going to use a laser that's just going to turn Putin into ash and say, there you go, you're welcome. Now you're free Russians. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I don't know that would lead necessarily to a genocidal attitude.

33:32 Wes: Kant is writing before modern warfare, in which it's hard to make the distinction between wars of extermination and. Because look at what happened to Germany, right? And look at what happened During World War II and to Japan, where you're bombing, you're carpet bombing civilian populations, you're trying to kill everyone, and you're trying to kill Hitler, you're trying to kill the troops, and you're basically trying to kill anyone who lives in the target city. So I think with modern weaponry, and this started with World War I or maybe a little bit before it, when you have machine guns, essentially, I'm not sure how you can make the distinction between honorable and dishonorable war. And the things that will say, hey, I'm not going to trust you anymore. Germany was eviscerated.

34:18 Mark: Yeah, I think Kant would have been against all of that. Any targeting of civilian populations whatsoever, that would be using those people. We're going to basically using terrorism, as we've talked about, that terrorism doesn't have to be just, you know, the thing that the weak do when they can't do anything, but the thing that the strong do to get you to do what they want. Like, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to all these cities that we could easily bomb. Why don't you change your policies?

34:42 Wes: I mean, to be fair, I think war planners during World War II, they would say, we're not actually targeting civilians, we're targeting infrastructure that happens to be in the city. You know, and it's the rest is collateral damage and all that. So.

34:53 Mark: But, yeah, well, yeah, so that's what makes it difficult, as you're saying, to make the distinction.

34:58 Dylan: You know, it's worth, in trying to answer specific questions about given acts and to make the effort to at least get back into what were the alternatives and ways of thinking at the time. I'm not saying that it answers the question either way, but it certainly makes it a lot more complicated. And maybe this is part of where, you know, Kant would say, you know, this is where you got to be using your reason and thinking about what the just thing to do is as opposed to the other reasoning. But the local historical times are often very complicated.

35:30 Mark: He says a war of punishment between states is inconceivable since there can be no relationship of superior to inferior among them. So you can't use morality to say, Putin's been bad, that was clearly aggressive, and he needs to be punished, and so we need to go to war to, like, that is just not the appropriate term. This is sort of getting into the Hobbesian difficulties that Kant is really taking seriously, that for Hobbes, there is no such thing as justice. There's such a thing as right. Really no ethics at all, which, of course, is something Kant doesn't follow, but no idea of right unless you have an authority to decide something right unless you have a mechanism.

So Kant is separating out morality, which, yes, is in the structure of reason itself from the idea of right, which is going to have a relation to reason itself. And he's going to have a lot of things to say, you know, as we see in here, about what states should and shouldn't do. But still, as a matter of, like, what do you have a right to do? That implies some sort of international law or something like that. So, you know, this is all pushing us toward. I guess if we do want to say that Putin is objectively doing something wrong and he can be punished, then we have to have some organization that he's a member of, like the League of Nations or whatever.

The United Nations.

36:50 Dylan: League of Nations, Yes.

36:52 Mark: Whatever the different attempts that have been.

36:55 Wes: It used to be the League of Nations.

36:57 Mark: No, I'm saying there have been attempts over time in his to come up with this thing. I'm not confusing the two.

37:03 Wes: Okay, sorry. Yeah. I don't think anyone thinks the war, Ukraine is about a punishment.

37:08 Dylan: The thing that comes to mind is World war, the end of World War I.

37:12 Wes: Right.

37:12 Dylan: And the terms under which that peace was wrought is basically universally understood to have caused World War II, it set the conditions of punishment for Germany when that war was much less clear cut in terms of the relative moral standing of the combatants.

37:32 Mark: Well, maybe just to make a domestic analogy, this is why we don't see a lot of action about, okay, we had an attempted coup. We could somehow put Trump and everybody that advocated for the coup in jail. But if, like Germany at the end of World War I, I don't see how there could be even more resentment by that side of the political spectrum to the way things played out. But you could see how the people in the Justice Department or whatever, one of the considerations that might be guiding them is we don't want to have a situation that is just going to explode later because we've declared them the loser.

38:08 Wes: They would charge people. It's just an exaggeration to say that there was an attempted coup.

38:12 Dylan: But the way that's playing out right now along these lines is trying to be very clear about articulating actual laws that were broken. And it seems to be the goal right in recognition that if that isn't clear, then it's going to be fall into that kind of mere punishment category. It's merely political as opposed to part of the rules that govern our society.

38:35 Mark: We've now finished the first section. The second section is going to be the definitive articles of federal peace between states. Why don't we get to that in part two of the discussion? If you're a supporter, you'll see that is the next thing in your feed. Thanks so much for supporting us. Hey folks, I wanted to remind you all that my new book, Philosophy for Teens, which is not just for teens, is being released on Tuesday, June 7th. Go look it up on Amazon or follow the link from our episode@ partialexaminelife.com Thanks.