Educating Honorable Warriors

Abstract

Kant is not typically considered a major figure in the just war tradition's canon, although his work has informed recent discussions about international justice and just war theory. More specifically, philosophers have suggested that Kant's work may provide a coherent, normatively practical just war theory, basing this claim, in the main, on his views on the goal of peace and its purpose of establishing a cosmopolitan civil society.1 Such discussions are mostly concerned with jus ad bellum and jus in bello constraints on nations and how Kant's writings can guide deliberation and, perhaps, the considered policy and practices of governments. Yet, the fact remains that it is embodied men and women and not the metaphysical ‘nation’ who actually conduct war. Hence, this paper seeks to determine the extent to which Kant's thought might contribute to the moral deliberation of those individuals who a fortiori will be bound to jus in bello constraints. To this end, the idea of moral learning will be explored, emphasizing the Kantian idea of autonomy. The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how some aspects of Kant's thought would contribute to ethics education in a military academy.

Keywords:

• Ethics education
• Kant
• autonomy
• moral development
• moral exemplars

My thanks to JME reviewers for their comments and suggestions as well as to members of the 2004 NEH Institute on ‘War and Morality’ for their encouragement and inspiration, particularly John Lango, Harry van der Linden, and Major Michael Brough. I also thank David Sullivan for his support, including editorial and substantive comments.

Notes

1. For example, see Brian Orend (1999), Kant's Just War Theory, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 37(2), pp. 323–353 and Lawrence Masek (2002), All's Not Fair in War: How Kant's Just War Theory Refutes War's Realism, Public Affairs Quarterly, (16)2, p. 151.

2. I thank John Lango for this point. For present purposes, rules are understood more generally as principles, regulations, or maxims governing individual conduct. One might argue that there are very different kinds of rules – for example rules of strategy, moral rules, and legal rules – and, therefore, what constitutes the ethics of rule-following might be different given a particular sort of rule. Questions such as the relative normative importance of how rules are formulated might arise when imagining such differences. If one looks at games such as checkers or chess, we see that rules determine how a game should be played. The creation of such rules seems to have relatively little normative importance; however, rules of military strategy and engagement are different. Moral rules are explicitly normative; they tell us what we should do (even if we fail to follow them). Legal rules might be seen as a hybrid of rules of strategy and moral rules, in that legal rules often assume an existing underlying normative or moral structure; for example, the law and justice are often understood (sometimes, unfortunately, incorrectly) as synonymous. For present purposes, rules are understood more generally as principles, regulations, or maxims governing individual conduct.

3. I thank Bård Mæland for this observation.

4. There is a structural similarity within this text that reflects the unity between Kant's thoughts on moral agency and moral education. It is the existence of actual historical examples, such as the Anne Boleyn example suggested explicitly by Kant in the ‘Methodology’ and implicitly in an earlier section of this Critique, that supports the possibility of true moral agency and the freedom which follows from the moral law.

5. The student, in her exercises, also has two perspectives and two standpoints from which she sees and learns morality. She assesses moral actions of others and herself. In her initial judging of these actions, she moves from seeing that non-moral (or heteronomous) reasons do not obtain. She strips away sensuous motives from the particular example. She sees that when such motives can not be the reason why she or another has acted in a morally acceptable manner, she realizes that the agent of the action must have acted as an autonomous agent. As in the structure of the Grounding, the move is from recognition of negative freedom (i.e., constraint from sensuous inclinations and the empirical world) to positive freedom (i.e., autonomy, the ‘Supreme Principle of Morality’). However, she also, when analyzing such actions, in some sense recognizes, the fact of the moral law; that is, she becomes conscious of the moral law and then of her freedom. In this case, as in the earlier sections of the Critique of Practical Reason, the move is from the fact of reason as consciousness of the moral law to negative freedom. The point of the two ‘Methodology’ exercises is to alert us to the real freedom associated with our intelligible natures.

6. I thank Shannon French for her counsel on this point.

7. This paper has relied primarily on the lesser-known of Kant's works on morality, viz., the Critique of Practical Reason. The more familiar Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals investigates morality, starting from the perspective of experience and what people hold to be moral knowledge and ultimately leads to principles and laws such as the moral law and freedom. In contrast, the Critique reverses the investigative order, moving from the principles themselves to an interrogation of those principles in light of experience.