Seminar with Sari Kisilevsky (Department of Philosophy, Queens College CUNY)

War and Peace in Kant’s Political Philosophy

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 110 on Bracka 12, Kraków and Teams on October 19, 2023 (Thursday, 16:00 GMT+2). 

Abstract:

In his groundbreaking new book, Kant and the Law of War (OUP 2021), Arthur Ripstein develops a distinctively Kantian argument governing the law of war, and with it a Kantian conception of an international world order and the role of the state within it. Ripstein argues that

peace is the internal norm of Right. The distinction between force and freedom under law just is the distinction between war and peace. (Ripstein, p.84)

It is only once our disputes can be settled under law - both domestically and internationally - that people can be said to be truly free and the freedom of each can be reconciled with the freedom of all. Peace, for Kant, consists in the establishment of a global legal order in which the rights of all are secured.

This argument stands in sharp contrast to the regular war and just war traditions as they have been historically conceived by placing law, not might, at the centre of the account of war. It is also contrasted with contemporary discussions of just war theory that adopt an instrumental and at times eliminativist understanding of the state, and that model jus in bello rules on the ethics of individuals killing in self-defense.

I argue that Kant’s account of the law of war not offers a novel account of war, but also of peace as a global legal order. Though law of war has a long historical tradition in philosophy and is widely debated in contemporary discussions, peace is an under-theorized concept in philosophy. I aim to develop Kant’s legal theory of peace and locate it within existing conceptions.

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow