War As Morally Unintelligible: Sovereign Agency and the Limits of Kantian Autonomy:

Abstract

I. WAR: RADICAL CHALLENGE TO HUMAN RELATIONALITYKant's discussions of war are most often located in texts that articulate the framework of his political philosophy1 or sketch elements of his philosophy of history.2 In consequence, most accounts of his thinking about war tend to bypass questions about the location of war within the basic conceptual taxonomy of his moral philosophy. These accounts often concentrate instead on questions or topics that place war as a subject falling within the specific purview of political philosophy or the philosophy of history. They thus engage questions such as the extent to which Kant's discussions align him with the traditions of just war thinking,3 constitute an element in his theory of political sovereignty,4 provide a basis for later accounts of an international cosmopolitan order,5 or enable him to negotiate the pitfalls of a Hegelian dialectic that would make war morally instrumental to the achievement of the ultimate ends of human history.Pursuing these questions continues to yield useful results; for instance, recent work along these lines has drawn attention to Kant's initial adumbration of some elements anticipating the articulation of a set of post bellum conditions that are now often incorporated into just war theories and to the application of Kant's discussion to international interventions in the case of a 'failed state'/ My goal in this essay, however, is not directly to engage these questions or other ones arising primarily from the contexts of political philosophy and the philosophy of history, as instructive as those tasks may be. This essay's more fundamental concern arises from the fact that questions such as these (perhaps with the exception of ones similar to that posed in terms of Hegel's historical dialectic) seem to presume that 'war' functions conceptually in ways that can be unproblematically located with respect to the key concepts structuring Kant's moral philosophy. It is thus taken for granted that there is little need to provide a detailed moral account or analysis of war itself in terms of the fundamental conceptual structure of his moral philosophy. On this presumption, war is taken to be a course of action (or an array of various courses of action) that, at least in certain circumstances, could rightly be incorporated into the maxims of autonomous decisions made by moral agents in accord with the dictates of moral reason.8Over against such a presumption I will be arguing in this essay that Kant's writings, particularly those from the 1790s, provide substantial indications that war had started to take on a deeply problematic status in relation to the central concepts of his moral philosophy. War is no longer just one particularly complex moral issue arising from conflicting claims to right that arise between states in the international arena and within which various courses of actions need to be weighed with respect to the demands of moral reason. It starts to become as well a key marker of the deep tensions inextricably embedded in the moral circumstances of humanity's efforts to extirpate its self-incurred propensity to evil, i.e., the propensity to invert the fundamental maxim for determining one's action: one subordinates the maxim that articulates the universally applicable demands of moral reason to a maxim that serves self-preference and self-exception in the face of reason's universal demand. This problematic status arises to the extent that Kant's discussions of war in these later writings indicate that he has begun to consider it as a social counterpart to the radical evil that, in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, he had articulated as lying deep within the structure of autonomous moral agency.9 War no longer presents itself simply as a possible object that can be determined to be fit (or unfit) for autonomous moral choice; it looms now, instead, as a thoroughly destructive social expression of the dynamics of the fundamental moral disorder of self-preference and self-exception that Kant calls 'radical evil'. …