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

0:07 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 295, part 2, talking about Kant's article Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch, as well as presumably in this part or in part three, we'll get to talking about reactions to that by Martha Nussbaum, who connects it to Stoicism and their very ancient idea of a cosmopolitan justice of a world order, that we're all, we're all world citizens. And then Habermas, who is using the 200 years of intervening history to actually reflect on how well he thinks these practically work. So I'm, I'm hoping, at least with Habermas, if something really related to one of these things comes to your mind. Chime in. I don't know if my notes or my memory of that Essay are good enough to just insert him at will,

0:57 Wes: but he could gotta insert some Habermas where needed. Sorry. He is the secret sauce.

1:06 Mark: He had a really great model of how politics actually works in terms of an ongoing discussion that there can be no. If I'm remembering, if I'm characterizing our past Habermas episode. Right. The guy who's about communicativity. That is how the ongoing. Not only local political situation, but international political situation. There is no final solution in terms of like a perpetual peace here that you could just say, now we have the right laws and as long as we impose that, like, no. Everything is always under ongoing negotiation. So there's some skepticism.

Not that it's not a good goal. It's a great goal. The second section, the definitive articles of a Perpetual Peace between States, is going to be very definitive. But, you know, at least in looking at the secondary literature, there seemed to be some tension, tensions in the text, things that he would like to happen. You know, he would like there to be some sort of world order, but he certainly doesn't want a world government. And Providence is going to bring us all toward this world order, but yet people are. Have warlike natures in them. Like they're good observations on both sides that I think Kant at least brings up, if doesn't bring to a smooth resolution.

2:16 Dylan: Just one point I would make is that, I mean, I think that these articles should be read. There should be a distinction made between these being effectively, like a constitution effectively, or the articles for the structure of relations within states and among states that will lead to perpetual peace in distinction to why these are the right ones and what would be the justifications for them and the supporting argument for it. Right. So, you know, separately, he's going to say, well, these things are undergirded by freedom as being the good to be maximized. And these structures will do that. And the whole issue with Providence is an argument for why we think this might be reasonable, which is distinct from it being a principle for going forward.

3:09 Wes: Right.

3:10 Dylan: I would make the distinction between those two parts of the argument.

3:13 Mark: Yes. Given that the Providence part is brought up in one of those.

3:17 Dylan: It's an extended footnote.

3:18 Wes: There's the definitive articles. He gets us into the nuts and bolts here. And so, you know, he wants to say more about, well, what is a civil constitution and to what extent does that supply us with a template for what's going to happen internationally at the level of relationship between states. And so he gets us into a very Montesquieuian account of what a republic is. So to begin with, he tells us there are these three principles for republican constitution freedom, dependence on common legislation and legal equality as citizens freedom. He gives a very Kantian definition of that in a footnote.

Not just, not just liberty to do what one wants. As long as we observe the harm principle, it doesn't cause injustice to others. Rather it's a warrant to obey no external laws except those which I have been able to give my own consent. And then with equality, it's basically equality under the law. You know, any legal obligation, any legal demand you make on others is also you're obligated in the same way to the other person.

4:22 Mark: Should we clarify that consent thing? Because that sounded. I'm not going to obey any law that I did not personally consent to, right? It has to be more abstract and social contract even that I'm not being somehow my consent is being represented somehow by whoever's making the the decision. It's not that I have to agree with every single thing. That would be a not a very law like state.

4:42 Wes: This is the whole Kantian people can listen to our groundwork for the metaphysics of morals episodes. But this is the idea that to truly be free, to truly be autonomous doesn't mean that we're not. We're simply not subject to any law. It means we're subject to our own laws, the laws of the will, right? Those are ethical laws. So it's precisely in being moral that we're being free. And then we ask the question in relation to external laws imposed upon us by the state. And to what extent can I actually give my consent? Consenting doesn't just mean I say okay, I don't want to get punished, I'm going to do it. Consenting means I freely give my consent, as in I recognize the ethical demand and that's what it would mean to consent to it. And that's an autonomous free act. And it's not possible to do that to immoral demands.

5:34 Dylan: Part of his argument for that is that operating under the right form of freely given constraints, where that freedom is the way of maximizing freedom for individuals and for communities. And so all of it is aimed at freedom maximization. And he would argue vociferously against like an anarchist tradition that in saying that actually you're reducing freedom significantly by not having laws.

6:03 Mark: So I see that real freedom in a moral sense involves recognizing that I'm self legislating. But I think maybe he's more influenced by social contract than I had previously recognized that in the idea of the categorical imperative, when you say because you are a reasoning being, because you are a human, you have assented implicitly to the categorical imperative, right? It's like your will. When you say the will, it's not your will like you've made a decision. It's no, it's the structure of will itself has assented to going along with this. And that is what defines its true freedom. Just like for the citizens under Hobbes or Locke social contract, those citizens have. Even if you never thought for one second I have agreed to obey the sovereign. Well, you actually have, because of the nature of your predicament as a human.

6:51 Wes: Well, let's go back to the moral part real quick. So with what it means to be self legislators, the way Kant begins metaphysics of morals, right? He says the only unconditionally good thing is a goodwill. I can will the good for its own sake. I can will to do what I ought to do, to do what I'm obligated to do. And in fact that's the only free type of willing that I can do. Everything else is heteronomous. I'm going to give in to some desire I've been prompted by some external object that's shiny and I want it. Those are external forces. The only thing that I can do that's truly free is to will something just because it is good for no other reason than that it is good.

And that is self legislation. So it's not as if I have these psychological pressures on myself to do good things and then I assent to that. That's not what's going on here. I'm not assenting to moral demands. In that case, in the way that I might assent to the demands of the state, I'm actually doing them just because they are good, not because they're required. So I don't know if that was consistent with what you were saying, Mark, but.

8:03 Mark: So awareness seems like it's a byproduct of that. Because if you do something for duty's sake, you have to realize that you're doing it for duty's sake. Right? You don't just. You're just a naturally dutiful person or whatever like. No, because that would then be an inclination that happens to align with duty, but you're not doing it for duty's sake. So I was sort of asking what is the relationship between, you know, self consciousness about being moral and then acting morally?

8:30 Wes: Wait, you're not doing it for duty's sake?

8:32 Dylan: I don't Understand?

8:33 Mark: Well, if you don't use your reason to consider what is duty and then do that thing, right? If you just happen to be. If you're just a soldier following along and you just always do what you're told, then you're not actually doing it for duty's sake or you're always doing

8:47 Dylan: the right thing because you happen to be inclined to do the right thing. That doesn't make it. I mean, this is the virtue argument that Aristotle makes, right?

8:54 Mark: So self consciousness about morality is a necessary condition for being moral. It is not a sufficient condition for being moral because there are lots of, as you were saying, inclinations that you have. And this was actually the view of freedom that, you know, we talked about, I think is Hegel's view of freedom. At least the Frankfurtian view of freedom. That you know, whatever inclination you have, as long as you identify it, as long as you have a second order design desire and you say, yes, I'm going with that, then it really feels free. Even if it's something that you have an uncontrollable desire to eat or whatever.

But it only feels like that's not free if you're fighting it, right? If you consciously embrace it and say, yes, this is actually in my interest to be eating right now. I'm not overeating, I'm not doing anything else irresponsible here. I'm not eating a sentient being or whatever, then you just have to be

9:41 Wes: attending to and motivated by what's good, regardless of what your other motives are.

9:45 Mark: Okay, I was trying to argue that that is not enough, that Hegelian or whatever is not enough for Kant. Because just the fact that you were assenting to it doesn't mean you're correctly recognizing that it is for duty's sake. I'm not. Maybe I need to think about this more.

10:01 Wes: This gets hairy very quickly with the whole deontology.

10:05 Mark: All right, well, we're not talking existentialism here, so we can, we can probably move on.

10:08 Wes: I think you're right. Existentialism is. That's basically the offspring of this Kantian view of morality. The question is, how do we apply that conception of freedom to the state, right? The freedom at the individual level. What's the applicability to political system? And here he's giving us a version of his maxim, right? The maxim is will only those things which I could will as a universal law, something like that. Here it's warrant to obey no external laws except those to which I can give my own consent. So this is like a political version of Kant's ethical categorical imperative.

That's what it's called. It's a political version of the categorical imperative. And I think that again, and maybe I'm wrong about this, so correct me if I am, but I think this whole idea of being able to give my own consent to external laws. He's going to give another version of this categorical imperative, like version of this, with the idea that whatever you do has to be public. You have to be able to affirm something publicly.

11:09 Mark: Whatever state policies there are have to be public.

11:12 Wes: Yes, at the state policy level. So in this case, I think unjust laws, it's not really possible to freely consent to those things. But anyway, maybe I'm confused about this. Am I getting this right?

11:24 Mark: I think we're going to have to have another episode on Kant's political philosophy simpliciter. Apart from like we're getting hints of it here. This was a great sort of warm up. But I don't think that is answered. I mean, we're talking about it right now. We're talking about a footnote that takes up the greater part of page 99. Right. It is the majority of a page in this already short article. So he clearly sees it as a digression to hook what he's saying to the rest of his system. And I think something that we cannot resolve right now.

11:54 Dylan: There's a lot more about these kinds of theoretical linkages in theory and practice.

12:00 Mark: We should say explicitly what you're talking about, Dylan. So there's another essay called on the

12:05 Dylan: Relationship of Theory to Practice and Morality in general.

12:09 Mark: Yeah. So maybe that's a next step rather than to jump right into the metaphysics of moral.

12:13 Dylan: Let me take that back because that's the first of two sections. So the title of the essay is on the Common Saying. This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice. That's the title of the whole thing. And after preamble, there's a section on the relationship of Theory to practice and morality in general. And then the second section, which is called on the Relationship of Theory to Practice and Political Right.

12:37 Mark: Both of these things that he wrote prior to even writing the first critique. Right. This is all prior to his big systematic works. And then the stuff actually about political right is a section in his Metaphysics of Morals, which is, after all, three critiques, right way at the end of his career. We got many years to traverse before we get to his full on political views.

13:00 Wes: So anyway, in this footnote on what freedom and equality mean. And this is in our. You know, we were in the first definitive article, which is that every constitution shall be republican. And again, that the three principles were for republican constitution were freedom, dependence on common legislation, and then legal equality as citizens. And then he's going to go on to say that the only basis for a civil constitution you can derive from an original contract is a republican constitution. And it's also the only one that can lead to perpetual peace, in part because republican constitutions involve the consent of the governed and people will be more hesitant to go to war if they know they're the ones who are going to feel the costs, as opposed to a head of state who's kind of the owner of the state, not really a fellow citizen, and so can just go to war as an amusement.

Not necessarily. It won't necessarily involve any sort of sacrifice.

13:54 Mark: I'm hoping that we could reclaim the term rhino to say that there are some states that are republican in name only. Like, maybe they have a democracy, maybe they have elections. But like, for whatever reason, maybe you've got a demagogue that's in power and the demagogue can go to war on a whim because everybody's just like, oh, we got to respect the president. We got to respect whatever the president wants to do that. Unless there's actual checks and balances, then it's not actually republican in name only

14:21 Dylan: with a little R. That's great.

14:23 Wes: I love it. I love it. So he'll tell us that a republican constitution. Right. Is not necessarily democratic. And in fact, later on we'll learn that democracy is the road to despotism. But he'll make this important distinction between the form of sovereignty. So that's the distinction between autocracy, aristocracy and democracy, and the form of government which is either republican or despotic. And as Dylan has already said, republican. Maybe we should mention this up front, and this is in the spirit of Montesquieu.

14:53 Dylan: Right.

14:53 Wes: The critical feature of a republican government is that executive power is separated from the legislative, whereas in a despotic government, laws are made and arbitrarily executed by the same power, whether that's the king, the aristocrats, the nobility, or the people. Right. In a democracy, if it's a direct democracy and the people, you know, you get a tyranny of the majority, potentially. Right. If the people are the legislators and the executors, essentially, not only is that a grounds for possible despotism, but that I think Kant, like Plato, thinks. Thinks is. Does he even Say direct democracy is necessarily despotic. I have it in my notes that he goes that far.

15:31 Mark: But no, because you could have the same thing. You could have a division between who makes the laws and who actually enforces the laws.

15:38 Dylan: Well, but that wouldn't be direct democracy.

15:40 Wes: Yeah, that's the thing. So I mean, just because you have

15:43 Dylan: people voting for the executive and people voting separately for the legislative doesn't mean that it's not a republican form of government.

15:52 Mark: For Kant, what about just having the judicial separate? Because that was another thing that even if you had direct voting by all citizens on all the laws and then representatives, you know, actually enforcing laws by necessity, you can't have just everybody. You can't have a militia, everybody's a police officer. You can't have that. You have to have some designated people. But then for sure a strict separation, that you have some judges that actually get to decide whether the particular law that the whimsical mob has passed on that day passes some constitutional muster.

16:24 Wes: Let me give you a quotation at the top of page 101 of the Three Forms of Sovereignty. Democracy in the true sense of the word is necessarily a despotism because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about and indeed against the single individual without his consent. So that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people. And this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself and thus also with freedom. I put in my notes direct democracy here, non representative. Because I just thought that must be implied.

You can't mean democracy in general. I thought that's why democracy in the true sense of the word, I don't think that can be taken to mean that he's against representative democracy. He just thinks whatever your form of government, it's got to be representative in one way or another if it's going to maintain the separation of powers.

17:18 Dylan: And I would just underline the separation of powers bit. Right. Because of having the executive separate from the legislative, I think that it's going to go to the impossibility of having non capricious execution and generation of laws. That's the essential problem with despotism.

17:35 Wes: Maybe he's imagining that if you have a pure democracy, so obviously that we understand how that works legislatively, how does that work in the judicial system? Or presumably part of the function of a judiciary is to put a constitutional check on the potential tyranny of the majority by saying, hey, here are certain rights and no legislation. Here's the Supreme Court, no legislation. Can contradict those rights. We're going to overrule legislation.

18:00 Dylan: The judiciary doesn't put in place rights at all. The judiciary is adjudicating whether or not.

18:07 Wes: I'm not saying they invent the Constitution. I'm just saying one of the ultimate functions of the judiciary is to say what it is the Constitution says. And the Constitution is there to. Maybe I was confusing because I was treating the Constitution as inherently part of the judiciary. That's the way I think of it. But anyway, part of the function of the constitution and the judiciary is just to say, yeah, there are certain rights with which no democratic majority can override. And maybe that's inherently representative, I don't know. This is another thing which we don't have a lot of detail on from Kant.

18:41 Mark: Well, and I'm imposing some thought from Montesquieu, who did not see the need for a constitution specifically. Right. That he was more in favor of, like English common law, which does not have a constitution. Because as we've seen in here, if you think that a people. That there's something organic about it. Right. This is the idea we talked about in our Herder episode, and that ultimately was taken forward by Heidegger, taken forward by the Nazis. Like it's a very German thing, that it's in Kant too, that there's something organic about a people.

So that there has to be. To reflect its general will. You can't just have really any group just come up with a constitution. Like a constitution would have to, as we talked about in our Montesquieu episode, be part of the fabric of that society. So, like it must be, we're using a constitution to note what we already do and what our standards already are, to document that and then use that self consciously through judicial means to judge things. But it can't be just a form of democracy or something like that, like to have everybody vote for the constitution, because then you could build into the constitution all sorts of unjust bullshit.

It has to be something that is in accord with reason and the logic of the people, or something like that.

19:55 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. It's almost like it's an emergent feature.

19:58 Dylan: We're drifting into sort of general political theory about the structure of constitutions and the structure of government.

20:05 Wes: We're just trying to get at this direct democracy thing that he does here

20:08 Mark: for Kant, that I think he is suspicious of merely saying you can have a democracy so long it's a constitutional democracy, because that produces a separation of powers. Because then if you have A constitution, what the crowd yesterday voted on, and some very difficult means to change that, then that seems like it's a check via the judiciary on the whimsical crowd now. But Kant does not trust that he'll

20:35 Wes: end this by saying the more representative the government, the more republican it is. The problems you have to worry about with democracy, you don't have to worry about that with autocracy and aristocracy because they are by nature representative, even if they're not, you know, or at least they're potentially representative. They're not just executing the whims of the people as a whole. An automatic kind of separation of interests built in.

21:02 Dylan: If we get down into that distinction, then you would just say that the United States isn't a democracy. Right, on those terms. It's a representative republic. There's no direct governance by individual people.

21:13 Wes: It's a rhino, democracy in name, which

21:16 Dylan: for large democracies is probably always true.

21:18 Wes: Yeah. So it's a representative democracy as it, I think is as it should be.

21:23 Dylan: There democracy is pointing to one person, one vote kind of thing. It's saying that the ability to choose rulers and affect legislation devolves into the people ultimately as individuals.

21:38 Mark: Well, and this is where I would just bring in, you know, refer folks to our Kant on Enlightenment episode. Because for Kant, you know, around the same time, five years earlier, he wrote his Enlightenment essay. It was really an open question, sort of whether people can handle voting, can handle, you know, whether they're rational enough that this is something that is an ongoing growth of the species. So that more and more the future people, they could have a direct democracy, maybe they'd be fine because they are all obeying the self legislating maxims of morality. It's just we don't have those kind of people now.

22:14 Dylan: Meaning back in 1784 when he wrote

22:17 Mark: Enlightenment, or perhaps still now.

22:20 Wes: Yes, as we discussed. So the second definitive article gives us a point of contrast between the relationship of the individual to the state and the potential relationship of nations to a federations of states. Because it's going to turn out, what he's going to tell us in this section is that we're not going to be able to appeal to a larger coercive power and still preserve the individual sovereignty of states. So because they're in a state of nature, right. There's no external tribunal for disputes between states and so they vindicate their rights in war, they still use the language of rights.

We can't do the same thing that we do in the state of nature with Individuals and say, hey, we all have to abandon our lawless condition and set up a civil society and a constitution, all that stuff. Because states have their own constitutions and they transcend any coercive right of others to subject them to a kind of uber constitution above and beyond their own constitution. So what we need instead is a kind of compromise. Not a universal state, but the federation of states.

23:33 Mark: But my family has its own constitution and that's why we don't pay taxes.

23:40 Wes: What is the name of your state? Lindsay.

23:44 Mark: Lindsay.

23:45 Wes: Lindsay Area. You're reminding me of that Family Guy. Do you ever watch Family Guy?

23:50 Mark: I don't know the reference that you're.

23:52 Wes: Peter establishes his own. His house becomes its own state. I forget the circumstances, but.

23:58 Mark: So I'm not sure bringing that up was not just a joke, but meant to be something of a reductio that, like, why. Why should those local states be able to. There must be some reason. And again, we can draw on like, well, because in keeping with Montesquieu, all states grow from different soils. And, you know, it's only proper that there be separate states. I'm not really sure that that holds. I mean, it's just what Kant says here about, well, if we did have a world state, it would probably become a horrible despotism. Like, okay, that I can go with.

24:27 Wes: So I don't know that he really comments on whether we ought to have a cosmopolitan state. One thing he's pro is cosmopolitan hospitality. But should we have a universal state for everyone in the world? I don't think he says much about either A, whether that's practical possible, or B whether it's desirable. What he says instead, he just assumes that we don't want to get rid of states and that there are natural forces that keep states as states, including language, culture. He mentions those when he's talking about the way nature works into all of this. So it seems like if we assume that states are either inevitable or desirable, then we have to figure out an approach to international law that will preserve the state and not simply dissolve it.

25:17 Dylan: I'm going to refer to the very end of the cosmopolitan rights section, the third definitive article. He concludes with. The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community. And it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic or overstrained. It is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity. Only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing toward a perpetual peace.

25:53 Wes: And that's specifically with regard to hospitality. So the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when they arrive on someone else's soil, you can turn them away, you don't have to entertain them, but you can't just kill them or be mean to them. What he's not saying is that this word cosmopolitan, it doesn't mean that we embrace cosmopolitanism outright, which is to say that we embrace a universal state per se. I just wanted to make that distinction for listeners. He's preferring the League of Nations or the federation of states to the universal state to cosmopolitanism. But he's carving out a little area where we can preserve cosmopolitanism. And that's with regard to hospitality.

26:39 Dylan: I think that's right. I guess the way I was understanding his cosmopolitanism was this notion of being a world citizen, but not in a formal sense in that there being a world government, but a world citizen. I guess this is the carving out the area of hospitality, that there are constraints on the way nations can treat the citizens of other countries. I guess this is what you're pointing at, is the hospitality aspect of it doesn't rise to the level of citizenry.

27:08 Wes: No, but I like the way you put it though, because not legally citizen of the world, but still citizen of the world and some other spiritually.

27:16 Mark: Yeah. I think this is the conceptual place that Kant is carving out in this essay that apparently was pretty revolutionary, that if you think along the lines of Hobbes, as I was saying before, that if there's going to be any talk of rights that are outside of a particular state, then there would have to be a world government. It seems pretty natural for us now. So this is one of the things Habermas criticizes this essay for, is that Kant is not expansive enough in what he could consider a cosmopolitan right. That, you know, we think, I want to say, pre.

Philosophically, but at our current point in history, it's in common parlance to talk about things like what the Geneva Convention outlines, like that there are just basic human rights that everybody just has morally. When we say that, are we committing to the nonsense on stilts of natural right that Mill rejected with that? No, because, you know, I think Kant is using, again, kind of like the idea of a regulatory ideal so that, okay, literally there aren't rights without some sort of authority to enforce them. But if we did have, you know, an authority that would enforce the things that according to morality, we all realize that we were all should be treated as ends in ourselves.

You know, just apply the categorical imperative, then we could come up with something, and we might as well just call them universal human rights or cosmopolitan rights. And so hospitality is the one that he brings to mind here. But Habermas, I think, correctly points out there are other things you could bring up. Why not say no torture? Why not encode a lot of these other things that he said in this essay that you shouldn't do. Kill civilians randomly and stuff like that, or prisoner of war rights and things like that, or even the right to not starve, that sort of basic human right.

I'm not even sure Habermas brings that up. I forget. I did find a quote. Wes, you said you didn't think he commented specifically on whether a universal state would be desirable. Page 113. In the Light of reason, this state is still to be preferred to an amalgamation of separate nations under a single. So in other words, the federation is to be preferred to an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy. For the laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range in a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy.

So maybe there is still a regulative idea of, like, what the best universal state, but the actual kind of universal state that we could get, which is like Germany takes over the world or the United States took over the world, that would be terrible. I think he's pretty definite about that. And I don't know if that's the kind of thing that, like, Zizek got all this flack for endorsing Trump, or at least not before 2016 or in 2016 before he was actually elected, because he was so afraid of. It's like a universal despotism. It's, you know, too much agreement among everybody that there was something he saw as corruptive that, you know, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are both kind of pro war, you know, have the same level of militancy, you gotta have just some sort of conflict to not have just a giant edifice that ossifies into something eventually terrible, as is being referred to here.

So the American hegemony or the Western. The end of history being a bad thing is the idea here.

30:36 Wes: Well, it's interesting in light of the first supplement, right? These are kind of Heraclitean reflections from the necessity of strife of some sort. And Kant says something very similar.

30:48 Mark: We're renaming the Podcast right now. Heraclitean Reflections. That is now the new Go ahead.

30:55 Wes: Is there anything more pretentious or is that basically

31:00 Mark: just to make it esoteric?

31:01 Wes: So only the first supplement on the guarantee of perpetual peace. He's going to say that. This is what I call the Adam Smith like argument, where it's kind of an invisible hand argument, where the operation of people's selfish interest and conflict with each other is actually going to work mechanically to move us progressively towards more peace. So some of that is just that the way he puts it, he says politically. So when it comes to getting out of the state of nature, we're forced to set up a government. That's what the state of nature and people's individual wickedness forces us to do.

But that's, you know, we get something positive out of that, which is we get that level of organization and everything that goes along with it, including, I think, culture and all the rest of it. And then the idea is that, you know, if you have a Republican government, you can organize that with the balance of the checks and balances and the opposition between the legislative and the executive and all the rest. You could basically organize that government in such a way that self seeking energies oppose one another and cancel each other out. So that even though each individual is not themselves necessarily morally good, structurally, the emergent phenomenon is that people begin to behave better.

So lots of wicked little atoms vibrating and doing their wicked things leads ultimately to the emergent phenomenon of people behaving more morally because they have self organized into a Republican.

32:34 Mark: Because we're all a giant vibrator vibrating the clit of God.

32:38 Dylan: Exactly. This is very reminiscent of Madison's argument in Federalist 10, or something like that. If all men were angels, no government would be necessary, and government is the emergent feature that leads to peace. In the bottom of 112 he frames the problem of setting up a state even by a nation of devils. And he states the problem is in order to organize a group of rational beings who together require universal laws for their survival, but of whom each separate individual is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them. The Constitution must be so designed that although the citizens are opposed to one another in their private attitudes, these opposing views may inhibit one another in such a way that the public conduct of the citizens will be the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes. This whole section is worth quoting.

33:30 Mark: This is just a flip side of what we pointed out as the secret thing of in the Enlightenment essay that we read before he distinguished the public and private expressions so that you could allow private differences or wickedness in this case, or just a complete freedom of expression so long as in the behavior that actually comes out of that, we're all just good little citizens. And those two things are separable. So those are just two realms, two aspects of that separation, the free speech thing and what you're talking about.

34:03 Dylan: So he continues on. He says such a task does not involve the moral improvement of man. It only means finding out how the mechanisms of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the antagonisms of their hostile attitudes will make them compel one another to submit to coercive laws, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be enforced. That mechanism of nature by which selfish inclinations are naturally opposed to one another in their external relations can be used by reason to facilitate the attainment of its own end the reign of established right. We may therefore say that nature irresistibly wills that right should eventually gain the upper hand.

34:43 Wes: Yeah, very interesting.

34:44 Mark: I mean, this is going to be the ongoing problem with this is we should have a federation. But he says no government wants to submit to a federation. Right. We see that right now, this whole America first.

34:56 Wes: Just so we have, using the same language, the federation is what he's advocating. That's the loose collection of states that doesn't have a higher coercive power over them. That's like the League of, of nations of the United Nations. What he's saying is we shouldn't have a cosmopolitan universal state.

35:12 Mark: Right? But even the federation, because it requires some sort of abrogation of the complete unrestricted right of every state to do whatever the heck it wants, is going to be something that natively leaders are not going to want to go with. So he's giving all these reasons why despite that, prima facie. Oh no, no, we don't want anything to do with that. We don't want to be part of the European Union. We don't want to be part of any international organization. America, for whatever country you're in. First, first, first. That's such a primal thing.

That's sort of comparable to man's selfish nature, the inability to cooperate. But in the same way we were saying on the individual level is that by this invisible hand sort of thing, individuals acting selfishly, a pattern will emerge that will enable them, you know, sort of by providence, that will enable public good. Same thing is going to happen with the different states that it might look like we're just always going to be scrabbling at each Other's eyes. But he's going to give these various reasons, economic reasons, cultural reasons, why there's sort of an inevitable historical progress.

36:16 Wes: Yeah, with number two, I mean, it's a really interesting idea that he has here, which is that in the case of states, the attempt of one state to do world domination is always thwarted by linguistic and religious differences. We could add to that cultural differences. Right. All the whole mix. And he thinks that those differences are actually a good thing, despite the fact that they are themselves predicates right for hatred and war. But as culture grows, they go from just being ways of defining the other and our hostility towards the other to things that can lead to mutual understanding and peace.

So those differences actually, I think, he thinks, become strengths moving forward and so actually help us establish a federation of states. Right. Because the federation presupposes that the states remain individual states. They don't simply collapse into. Into one another. And those differences are what help maintain that distinction. But again, as the culture grows and deepens, they also allow mutual intelligibility and cooperation.

37:18 Dylan: You have these individual strengths that nature wisely separates the nations. You know, along the lines of what you, you've described a kind of local self organizations that are distinct from one another, that have local stability. And then the spirit of commerce, of interrelation amongst the states. I think it's both commerce in that sort of generic sense of interacting with one another and commerce in the explicit sense of trade. Both those things will be the driver of stability.

37:49 Wes: This is the foundation for cosmopolitan. Right. Which is to say hospitality. So it's the foundation for saying, hey, you're not part of my state, you're not part of my society, but I'll allow you to visit, especially if you bring spices. And we will have obviously not just commercial exchange, but cultural exchange as well. It's an inevitable part of that.

38:12 Mark: And we conveniently have critiques of this so we don't just have to come up with everything ourselves. That Habermas points out that just like the critiques that we got of Adam Smith's optimism about we just should have unrestricted trade. That's the thing that's going to lead to peace, it's going to lead to connection, to coherence. As Kant pointed out earlier, the fact that some nations are more wealthy than others is in itself a threat. Not just in the way that he said that, well, I could just hire an army to kill you, but that it will create permanent trade imbalances and relations of de facto colonialism, even if there isn't like we're invading you and just taking over your government, you know, but basically we own you smaller countries and that's going to keep commerce from having this desired effect.

It's going to not make happy separate organizations joining together in a federation, but is going to create resentments. And so that's the thing. Habermas also points out, sort of what The Marxists discovered 50 years later, 50 years later, that yes, the work of the invisible hand. There might be sort of structural things, predictable structural things within societies and between societies that Kant wasn't aware that we needed to worry about. Things that might get in the way, sort of in an original sin sort of way, you know, structural things that might prevent this providence from coming to pass.

39:31 Dylan: One of the things that is this invisible hand is the fundamental tenet that we ought to be maximizing individual freedom. And I think Kant would say that that's just true. I don't know what he would say exactly about. I mean, he would say reason gets you to that. But it's clear that historically not every society thinks that the goal is to optimize individual freedom.

39:56 Wes: Yeah, I mean, Spinoza, Right. Says that's the point of the state. And Kant says very similar things. The whole function of the state is to ground freedom.

40:04 Dylan: Yeah, but historically not every ruling entity, not every state understands that the goal of maximizing individual freedom is the goal at some level. That's the hallmark of liberal democracy and

40:16 Wes: freedom also in the sense of moral and spiritual freedom, not just liberty, as in maximizing my choices.

40:22 Mark: Yeah. It would be interesting to explore more explicitly the difference between Mill's harm principle and the picture of maximum freedom that Kant provides. Because there's something more mathematical, just like in Kant's picture of the various formulations, the categorical imperative. What's the third one, the kingdom of ends, that there's something just by nature. The way that individuals fit together the best is if they're each exhibiting their own freedom, which means internalized, self conscious attention to duty, moral action. That's what true freedom is. And that is the way that every human being will be able to live in fundamental harmony. Presumably you could still have some areas of competition, but they would not be. They would increase the conditions of life rather than being an ongoing source of corrosion of harmony in the state.

41:13 Dylan: I'm a liberal democrat, so it's hard for me necessarily to take this completely seriously. But human history is not ruled by liberal democrats. Right. There are whole cultures that for hundreds and hundreds of years were not dominated at all by optimization of human Freedom of individual freedom as the good. And they would not be recognition of that being the dominant goal of society or the good of it. You know, raiding cultures, Mongols, the Vikings. That's not what they were about.

41:44 Wes: Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentations of the women, the Spartans.

41:50 Dylan: Right. I mean that there would be just a flat out not recognition of that. And sometimes I try to remind myself there's something of that, that people like Kant and folks earlier, there's an environment, they're arguing for this maximizing human freedom. Because I think, my guess is that there isn't anybody in the monarchies of Europe in 1400 that would have basically agreed with that either that they're not about maximizing human freedom either. So in that way it's kind of an amazing thing that almost all governments now at least have to play lip service to something like that idea. Close to it.

42:27 Mark: Yeah. It's too easy to set up some criteria by which your own group is the only one that happens to pass. And so they're the only ones who get included in the moral community. And Kant at least from the start, said rationality is the thing. And so he could still early in his career be super racist about that. I think it was the Stanford article pointed out that he actually had a change. So by the time we get to this article even he's already saying colonialism is not okay. Oh yeah.

42:55 Dylan: At the end of this, like yeah, yeah. He's hardcore anti colonialist. Yeah.

42:58 Mark: There are people already living in those areas. In fact, even if they're not living there, if they just hunt there, if they're using that land, we do not have the right to just go in and say we're the only ones who are rational. They're a bunch of stupid savages. So the fact that Kant was, you know, even though he had this notion of full members of the moral community, citizens versus those who are merely passive citizens. Right. They have rights but they don't get to vote and things like. So, you know, he was, come on people. He did not. He had, don't be crazy though apparently pretty regressive views about women even for his time.

But he in the scheme sort of left open the idea that people could graduate. You know, again, this idea of enlightenment that like I'm just going to set out objective criteria of what counts as rationality and enlightenment and if you can then prove to me whatever the group is, that like actually those people should be included too. Like it was a nice open ended thing that could overcome his own the biases of his time. Well, I think we reached the end of our public part here. So the way that this works now, you've now reached the end of part two.

There is a part three. We're going to record it on a different day. We're going to be fresh. Maybe Seth will even be here. He read the stuff. He just didn't happen to be available today. Supporters are going to get that next week, so just keep an eye out for that. We would love to know what you would like us to cover. As usual. You can reach out to us through the website partiallyexaminedlife.com through Facebook, through Twitter, through LinkedIn, probably through Instagram or just, you know, through your psychic waves. Just throw them out there.

We'll probably catch them eventually. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks guys for, for being here. Good night, everybody.

44:38 Wes: Good night.

44:38 Dylan: Good night.