What Does it Take to Achieve Perpetual Peace?

In this paper, I want to compare the notions of the Highest Good from Kant’s moral philosophy with perpetual peace, the highest ‘political’ good, in his political philosophy. In doing this, I want to argue that we can understand perpetual peace, quâ highest political good, not only as the supreme good, on analogy with virtue in moral philosophy, but also as giving conditions for the complete good, analogous to the fulfilment of happiness. In the first section I will show the textual ground for the distinction between the supreme and complete good with regards to the highest good, drawing on Kant’s discussion of the theory of the highest good in the Critique of Pure Reason, which introduces the distinction between the supreme good and the complete good, as well as the Critique of Practical Reason, which reconciles the apparent contradiction in the opposition of virtue and happiness by postulating the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as required for achieving the highest good. In the second section I will discuss a problem that arises from this consideration of the highest good in moral philosophy when compared to perpetual peace. Given that perpetual peace as a political notion is supposed to be possible solely from the universal principle of right (MM 6:230-231, 6:354-355), there is no space or even need to specify what the complete good is: laws governing possible external actions alone do not and cannot specify an end-state that would realize the best possible outcome constitutive of the complete good. We only have to be able to think that they are possible In the third section, I want to challenge this with reference to a number of passages and considerations from Towards Perpetual Peace itself, as well the philosophy of history. Looking at the preliminary articles for perpetual peace, one can notice that the specific prescriptions against war, foreign intervention, as well as economic prescriptions against amassing either debt or excessive wealth, we can see that these prescriptions do not just affect possible actions that can be undertaken by states, but also determine boundary conditions that must be fulfilled in order for perpetual peace to be achievable. Turning to the philosophy of history, if human progress so far has been brought about by the natural mechanism of unsocial sociability, which includes amongst other things war, and if some of these things have to be abolished in order to achieve perpetual peace, then Kant has to be able to specify material conditions that would go some way of replacing these natural mechanisms with legal-juridical ones. Finally, I will address possible objections to this understanding of the role of the preliminary articles.