Kant's Global Juridicial Condition and Its Enforceability

On Kant’s account, the “universal cosmopolitan condition” is the result of the realisation that war is such an “artificial” and “dubious” undertaking that it needs to be eliminated. (Idee 8: 28) The cosmopolitan project is therefore a global juridical condition which takes shape together with the project of perpetual peace. Kant calls this condition the highest political good. (MS 6: 354-5) In spite of the fact that this seems to be a crucial notion for Kant’s moral philosophy, the highest political good remains largely a neglected, mysterious and misinterpreted concept. Two recent edited collections on the highest good in Kant, for instance, almost make no reference to the highest political good. (Höwing 2016; Aufderheide and Bader 2015) This may not seem surprising, if we take into consideration the fact that, in the current literature, the highest political good is considered a type of ethical good and discussed as such. Far from clarifying the notion of the highest political good, however, this emphasis on the similarities between the highest ethical and political goods increases confusion. In previous texts, I discussed some of the problematic implications of an understanding of the highest political good by analogy with the highest ethical good. (Baiasu 2013; 2017) My aim in this paper is to continue the discussion of the universal cosmopolitan condition from the perspective of the distinction between the highest ethical and the highest political good by reference to some recent work on cosmopolitanism (in particular Guyer 2015, Cavallar 2015 and Willascheck 2016). One issue in particular is especially significant and will be the focus of my chapter, namely, the issue of the enforcement of the cosmopolitan condition. As for international law, for cosmopolitan law, the issue of enforcement raises specific issues for which it may seem doubtful Kant has the needed conceptual resources.