Forced to be Free, Not Free to be Slaves

Abstract

A social contract removes individuals from the violence of a state of nature, but there remains a state of nature between nations because there is no binding contract among nations, only among individuals and nations. In Toward a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Immanuel Kant addresses the problem of continuing violence between nations. He seeks to ‘‘solve the problem of violence for a second time and emerge from the state of nature of among nations with a new form of cosmopolitan law and a ‘peaceful federation among all the peoples of the earth.’’’ In the third of the preliminary articles for perpetual peace, ‘‘Standing Armies Shall Be Gradually Abolished,’’ Kant writes that it is inconsistent with the rights of humanity to pay soldiers to kill and be killed. His argument is surprisingly complex, because while it is clear that killing itself violates the categorical imperative, and that it certainly violates the rights of the person killed, it is not entirely clear why paying soldiers would violate the rights of the soldiers themselves, or the rights of all of humanity. The discussions of freedom and slavery in central works of Henry David Thoreau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Civil Disobedience and On the Social Contract, illustrate how paying human beings to kill leads to a contradiction, both in the concept of a human being and the concept of the state as an association of free human beings. Kant’s argument against standing armies is grounded in his a priori concept of personhood and his interest in avoiding inconsistency in the concept. The reasoning for abolishing standing armies is straightforward. Standing armies, Kant says,