I. The Duty to Seek Peace

Immanuel Kant declared that “seeking the state of peace” is “a matter of unmitigated duty.”Footnote ¹ He also maintained that “the argument that something has until now been unsuccessful” does not “justify abandoning” a “morally obligatory” intention unless its “attainment is demonstrably impossible.”Footnote ² Therefore, he must have believed that the attainment of peace was not demonstrably impossible.

There were prominent philosophers well known to Kant whose work seemed to imply that peace might be impossible—notably, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes's work, the main inspiration for present-day Realists, strongly suggested that, barring a world state which would be practically impossible to establish, the best we could hope for was a stand-off between countries deterred from attacking each other out of fear of devastating retaliation—a situation which was still a state of war.Footnote ³ Rousseau seemed to agree. According to Rousseau, barring a world of poor, backward, and isolated states—which might once have been possible, but was impossible in his time, as it is in our own—our best hope was the stand-off suggested by Hobbes's philosophy, though Rousseau seemed to believe that the balance of power on which this stand-off depended was liable to be much more unstable than Hobbes's work had implied.Footnote ⁴ But although Kant drew considerably from the work of both these philosophers, he made no attempt to directly rebut their arguments about the prospects for peace, presumably because such an attempt, even if it was successful, would not imply that peace was not demonstrably impossible. Yet Kant evidently felt that he had to do something to allay worries that someone might prove that peace was impossible, since such a proof would imply that we have no duty to seek peace. He took up this task in Perpetual Peace. In that book, he set out an elaborate set of arguments purporting to show that nature had given us a “Guarantee of Perpetual Peace,” and he declared that nature enables us to predict peace from a “practical” point of view and that it “makes it our duty to work toward bringing about this goal (which is not a chimerical one).”Footnote ⁵ Since Kant says that his arguments about nature “make” it our duty to seek peace, he must have believed that they showed that the attainment of peace was not demonstrably impossible, presumably because they showed that peace was possible.

If Kant's arguments in Perpetual Peace show that peace is possible, we are entitled to ask about the sense of “possible” in which they show this. The word “possible” is ambiguous; things can be logically or conceptually possible, physically or causally possible, or practically possible, for example. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claimed that we have a duty to act in conformity with the idea of a moral end, “even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either.”Footnote ⁶ This claim implies that peace need be only minimally possible to make seeking it a duty. Certainly, it must be conceptually or logically possible or perhaps also consistent with the known laws of science. But for seeking peace to be a duty, the possibility of peace cannot be required to be much greater than that; for example, it cannot be required that establishing peace must be consistent with known historical trends. If this were required, there would be considerably more than the slightest theoretical likelihood of peace being realized. But the arguments in Perpetual Peace that Kant says make it our duty to seek peace appeal to historical trends that Kant claims to discern. Consequently, even if these arguments “make” it our duty to seek peace by showing that peace is possible, we are entitled to suspect that Kant meant them to play some further role.

In the next section, I will argue that the further role Kant wanted his arguments to play was to cultivate a hope for peace that would support the duty to seek peace. In succeeding sections, I will argue that he tried to cultivate this hope by showing that there was a good chance that we would eventually establish peace because historical trends suggested that opportunities would arise for well-placed moral politicians to implement his plan for peace. However, current trends, especially the trend toward globalization, suggest that such opportunities are likely to become increasingly rare, and consequently that we can no longer rely on Kant's way of cultivating a hope for peace. Another way to cultivate such a hope would be to apply Kant's way to current trends and thereby devise a new plan for peace that such trends suggest we will have opportunities to implement. In the meantime, however, we need to sustain our hope for peace. Otherwise, we may not even be able to come up with a feasible plan for peace. One way to do this would be to reflect on the great value of peace, for hope is sustained not only by a belief that its object is likely, but also by the conviction that its object is valuable. In the final sections of the essay, I ask why Kant did not use this way to cultivate a hope for peace and why he never supposed that fear of war, and compassion for the victims of war, could be cultivated to support the duty to seek peace. I argue that he deliberately ignored these possibilities of securing peace because considering them could have endangered the establishment of what he took to be a peace worth valuing and hoping for—namely, not merely the absence of war, but the full and complete development of human talent. I conclude that clarity on these issues should persuade us to firmly set aside Kant's strategies to secure peace, and to rely more on compassion and perhaps a little fear to support the duty to seek peace.

II. Supporting the Duty to Seek Peace with the Hope for Peace

In this section, I argue that Kant wanted his arguments in Perpetual Peace to encourage a hope for peace that would support the duty to seek peace; that was the further role he wanted these arguments to play, besides establishing that there was a duty to seek peace. Consider the following passage, which comes at the very end of Perpetual Peace: “If it is a duty to make the state of public right actual,” and “if at the same time there is a well founded hope that we can do it,” then “perpetual peace” is no “empty idea,” but a “task” that “steadily approaches its goal….”Footnote ⁷ The passage says that if our duty to establish public right exists “at the same time” that we also have a well-founded hope that we can do it, then we will steadily approach the goal of peace. It suggests that Kant was committed to two claims. The first is that as we approach the goal of public right, we will also steadily approach our goal of establishing peace. This claim suggests that Kant must have believed that public right and peace are so closely related that approaching public right provides considerable assurance that peace is also being approached.Footnote ⁸ In that case, Kant's implication that he had given us a well-founded hope that we could establish public right implies that he also believes that he has given us a well-founded hope that we could establish peace. The second of the two claims in question suggests that the duty to do something and the hope to do it can work together to assure the goal of the duty. I say this because Kant writes as if the duty to establish public right, and the well-founded hope that we can do it, must occur “at the same time” to justify the inference that public right is being approached. But the idea that a hope to do something and the duty to do it can work together to assure the goal of the duty suggests that the hope to do something can usefully and legitimately support the duty to do it.

Attributing such a view to Kant may seem odd. On a standard view, Kant believed that emotion could not support duty. This standard view concedes that he allowed that the emotions sometimes motivate us to act in accordance with duty, but it maintains that he thought this merely accidental because even in these cases the emotions never motivate us to act from duty. Moreover, the view maintains that the emotions are unreliable because they cannot always be summoned up when needed, and they often motivate us to act wrongly. Recently, however, many leading Kantians have challenged this standard view.Footnote ⁹ These philosophers admit that some passages in Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals especially might make the view appear to be sound, but they insist that a broader study of his works shows that while he always disapproved of relying on the emotions as a guide to dutiful action, his considered view was that they could be cultivated to play important supportive roles in morality. Thus, in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that we have an “indirect duty” to “cultivate the compassionate natural … feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feelings appropriate to them,” and he goes on to maintain that it is “therefore a duty not to avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic necessities are to be found but rather to seek them out, and not to shun sick-rooms or debtors' prisons and so forth in order to avoid sharing painful feelings one may not be able to resist. For this is still one of the impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone would not accomplish.”Footnote ¹⁰ The last sentence in this passage suggests that Kant believed that the compassionate feelings can sometimes motivate us to act in accordance with certain duties if we ever find ourselves unable or unwilling to perform those duties for the sake of duty, and that we should cultivate the emotions for this reason. Some commentators prefer to read Kant as saying that sympathetic feelings are not themselves “directly motivating factors” but, rather, enable us to act from duty by negating inclinations that tempt us to violate our duty. I will not pursue the issue any further. Suffice it to say that contemporary Kantian scholarship indicates that it is at least possible that Kant intended his argument in Perpetual Peace to show that there were good grounds for hoping that we would succeed in our duty to secure peace, and that we could use this fact to cultivate a hope for peace that would support the duty to seek peace.

III. Cultivating the Hope for Peace

How can we cultivate a hope for peace? If hopes can be well founded, then presumably they may not be well founded. What distinguishes well-founded hopes from those that are not well founded?

On a common view, hoping for something involves a belief that there is a “good chance” that what one hopes for will be realized.Footnote ¹¹ The expression “good chance” is somewhat vague, but I think it safe to take it to mean that what one hopes for is likely. For example, if my friends are scuttling their plans for a picnic tomorrow because of bad weather reports, I will probably not start them hoping that they can have their picnic by persuading them that it is conceptually and logically possible that tomorrow will be sunny. A much better way to start them hoping for a sunny day tomorrow would be to persuade them that the meteorologists have changed their forecasts and now predict that there is better than a 50 percent chance that tomorrow will be a sunny day. But the common view cannot be that hoping is possible only if the “good chance” of the hoped-for event occurring is more than 50 percent. It must allow for the obvious fact that we can and often do hope for tails (or heads) when a fair coin is flipped even if we believe that the chance of tails (or heads) is exactly 50 percent. But people do not only hope for tails when a coin is flipped, they often hope to win the lottery when they have only one ticket and they know that their chance of winning is infinitesimal.

Although the common view must therefore be rejected, a qualified version of it seems defensible. We can begin by noting that there is something odd and even a little foolish about hoping to win the lottery when one has only one ticket and literally millions of tickets have been sold. There is nothing the least bit odd about describing hopes as foolish. Hope is an emotion and, like most emotions, it can be described as rational or irrational and as foolish. We speak routinely of foolish fears and foolish anger and also, accordingly, of foolish or unreasonable hopes, and even of wise hopes, and of good and evil hopes.Footnote ¹² Presumably, we say that hoping to win the lottery is foolish because the chances of winning are so small. Hoping for something involves an outlay of time, energy, and sometimes even resources. Someone who hopes to win the lottery may very well buy expensive things on credit that he cannot afford, expecting to be able to pay off his debts after he wins the jackpot. At the very least, he will spend some time and energy making plans about what he will do with the money or just imagining what he will be able to do with it. And the more he hopes, the more and more time and energy all this planning and imagining will absorb. One may therefore conjecture that hoping for very unlikely things like winning lotteries is foolish, given what it costs and given that it will almost certainly come to nothing. The hoper, as we say, is setting himself up for disappointment and frustration.

If hoping to win the lottery is a foolish or at least unreasonable hope because its chances of being realized are so small, it seems that reasonable hopes are hopes with somewhat greater chances of being realized. In the case of reasonable hopes, we may plausibly say that we have good grounds for hoping, and when the chances of getting what we hope for are especially good, we may also plausibly say that our hope is well founded. If these considerations are persuasive, then it seems that when Kant implied that our hope for peace was well founded, he must have meant that we had reasons to believe there was a good chance that peace would one day be established.

Attention to some detailed considerations confirms this conclusion. As we saw earlier, Kant believed that the duty to seek peace presupposes only that peace is barely possible. He may also have believed that this possibility was enough to sustain a hope for peace. As we saw earlier, we can hope for things even when the chances of securing these things are very small. Of course, the example I used to make this point (people hoping to win the lottery with one ticket, although they know that their chances of winning are infinitesimal) does not show that the possibility of peace necessary to support a duty to seek peace suffices to support a hope for peace. As I have allowed, Kant may have believed that a duty to seek peace implies only that peace is conceptually or logically possible, and winning the lottery is more than only logically or conceptually possible. But even if Kant believed that the possibility of peace necessary to support the duty to seek peace could also support a hope that peace will be established, it does not follow that a hope for peace is well founded just because we believe we have a duty to seek peace. The passage cited earlier from the end of Perpetual Peace suggests that having a duty to establish public right and having a well-founded hope that public right can be attained are different and separate things. In other words, the passage suggests that it may be possible to have duties to secure ends even though we do not have well-founded hopes that we will succeed in securing them. Consequently, when Kant suggested in that passage that we have a well-founded hope for peace, he must have believed that the possibility of establishing peace was greater than the possibility of establishing peace that follows from the fact that we have a duty to seek peace.

Of course, it still does not follow that he believed that he was giving us reasons to believe that there was a “good chance” of establishing peace. There need not be a “good chance” of establishing peace just because the possibility of establishing peace is greater than the possibility of peace necessary to show that we have a duty to seek peace; after all, the latter possibility may be merely that peace is conceptually or logically possible. So we need another argument to show that when Kant claimed that we had a well-founded hope for peace, he meant that he had given us reasons for believing that there was a “good chance” for peace. I noted earlier that hopes generally become more reasonable as the chances of securing what is hoped for become greater. Hopes also generally become stronger and more intense as the chances of securing what is hoped for become greater.Footnote ¹³ The fact that hopes can vary in strength should come as no surprise. Hope is an emotion, and like other emotions (fear and anger, for example), it may be more or less intense. The fact that hope is generally strengthened as the chances that it will be realized become greater does not mean that a hope can be very strong only if the chances of its being realized are great. Since we can hope for something that we believe is very unlikely, our hope for it may conceivably be enormously strengthened if we come to believe that it is a little less unlikely. Consequently, I grant that Kant could conceivably enormously strengthen our hope for peace by showing us that peace is barely more than just logically or conceptually possible. And I grant too that, generally, the stronger the hope, the greater the motivation to try to establish what is hoped for and, consequently, the more likely that the hope will be realized. It still does not follow, however, that Kant was entitled to believe that we would approach the goal of peace, just because he had enormously strengthened our hope for peace. The fact that people hope intensely for some outcome does not necessarily justify an assurance that they will come close to achieving it. Strong hopes and strenuous strivings do not assure success. Indeed, they are fully compatible with almost certain failure. Success does not depend only on hope. It depends on how things are independently of hope. We can have some confidence than our hopes will not be frustrated only if there is some good likelihood of achieving what we hope for, independently of our hopes for it. Consequently, when Kant says that he can predict that we will approach our goal of peace because we have well-founded hopes that we will secure that goal, he can only mean that we have a “good chance” that peace will be established, independently of our well-founded hopes for peace.

Kant's argument can therefore be summarized as follows: We have a duty to seek peace; this duty implies that peace is possible; and possibility of peace may be enough to support a hope for peace. But our hope for peace is well founded; that is, there is actually a good chance that peace will be established. If we reflect on the fact that our hope for peace is well founded because we have a good chance to establish peace, our hope for peace will be strengthened. This strengthened hope for peace will energize our search for peace, and given that there is already a good chance for peace, this assures us that we will approach the goal of peace.

We have already agreed that hope can be intensified by reflecting on the fact that its object is probable. Now we must consider the claim that intensified hope energizes the search for the object of the hope. This claim is not always true. If a meteorologist tells me that tomorrow will be a sunny day and I believe him, I will believe that there is a “good chance” that tomorrow will be sunny; and if I want tomorrow to be sunny, his news will start me hoping that tomorrow will be sunny, or will strengthen my hope that tomorrow will be sunny. But it will not motivate me to do anything to make tomorrow a sunny day, because I can do nothing to make tomorrow a sunny day. Similarly, hoping to win the lottery with one ticket will not motivate me to do anything to increase my chances of winning the lottery. It may motivate me to buy more tickets, but then I would not still be hoping to win the lottery with one ticket. In other words, hoping to win the lottery does not improve one's chances of winning the lottery. If John and I each have one ticket in a lottery, the fact that I hope to win and he does not, does not make me more likely to win than he is. In contrast, when it is possible to do something to increase one's chances of securing what one wants, hoping to secure it may very well increase one's chances of securing it. Suppose John and I are equally fit and are given one month to prepare to race against each other. If I hope to win and he does not, then even if we both want to win, my chances of winning are greater than his, all else equal, because my hope to win will motivate me to train harder than he is likely to train. Generally, when initiative and effort can increase the chances of establishing some desired state, hoping for it motivates us seek to establish it more effectively, and consequently increases the chances that we will establish it. Kant seemed to hold this view. In the course of repudiating Moses Mendelssohn's pessimistic conception of history, he wrote that “hope for better times, without which an earnest desire to do something that benefits the general good would never have warmed the human heart, has always influenced the work of the well-intentioned.”Footnote ¹⁴

IV. Kant's Blueprint for Peace

If we grant that Kant has strengthened our hope for peace by showing us that this hope is well founded, the next question to ask is whether he has provided room for our strengthened hope to motivate us to act effectively to secure peace. The answer seems to be that he has. His arguments in Perpetual Peace seem to tell us exactly what we must do to secure peace: we must establish the three institutions he lists in the three “Definitive Articles” of Perpetual Peace: namely, a republican constitution for every state; a pacific federation of all states; and a Cosmopolitan Right that entitles individuals to visit foreign countries and to attempt interactions with the natives, but also entitles the natives to turn them away, at least if this can be done without destroying them.Footnote ¹⁵ Kant seems to present these institutions as a blueprint for establishing peace. Consequently, he seems to imply that we can do our duty to secure peace by doing what we can to help establish them.

Unfortunately, however, Kant sometimes writes as if the best thing we can do to help ensure that these institutions are realized is to leave it to nature. “Nature,” he proclaims, guarantees peace through the “mechanism of man's inclinations,” which he appears to identify as our unsocial sociability, our prudence, our greed, and our fear.Footnote ¹⁶ These passions, along with the intelligence that they stimulate to grow ever more subtle and acute, will, without any help from morality, eventually drive human beings to set up the three institutions. In none of his arguments concerning these institutions does Kant show us people acting from duty. At best, he shows us people acting in accordance with duty (for example, defending themselves against others), but mainly he also shows us people acting against duty (for example, making war for profit). Thus, he argues that the natural nonmoral inclinations involved in competition (clearly, greed and pride) can spread republicanism through trade.Footnote ¹⁷ And he also argues that war will eventually become so devastating that we will be driven (presumably by prudence, fear, and material self-interest) to “enter into a federation of peoples.”Footnote ¹⁸ Finally, he maintains that nature drives human beings to use the intelligence and understanding they have acquired as a result of competition to design a state that directs the forces within it against each other in such a way that the one “hinders or nullifies the destructive effects of the other,” leaving everyone free. Such a state is republican, of course, and his statement that selfishness and intelligence alone (without morality) can set it up is famous: “[T]he problem of organizing a nation is solvable, even for a people comprised of devils (if only they possess understanding).”Footnote ¹⁹

V. Implementing Kant's Blueprint for Peace

We should not infer that Kant meant that to establish the institutions that will establish peace, we should always follow our selfish inclinations intelligently, even if this means acting wrongly. Such a view would contradict his whole moral philosophy. It would not even work to establish peace, since it falls easily before Rousseau's argument that if the passions drive the intelligence to become ever more subtle and powerful, they will drive it to subvert any institution it designs to contain them.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, the view is no better than the Realists' view that only a balance of power can establish peace. Since Kant dismissed that view derisively, we should conclude that he understood its fatal flaw and, consequently, would take care to keep that flaw out of his own argument.Footnote ²¹

He kept that flaw out of his own argument by supposing that at some point in the interdependent development of intelligence and passion, intelligence will design institutions that will free it from its subservience to selfishness. The point of these institutions would not be to stymie intelligence in its efforts to subvert the institutions, for intelligence will never be stymied in this way while it continues to be driven by selfishness. The point of the institutions would be to educate a faculty already present (but dormant) that will prevent selfishness from driving intelligence to subvert all barriers to selfishness. That faculty is, of course, morality. Kant's idea seemed to be that if intelligence and selfishness alone can indeed, at some point, eventually enable people to design institutions that keep them at peace, then if these institutions are also just, they will educate people to pay greater attention to the reasons why the institutions ought morally to be secured, and, consequently, will educate them to restrain their selfishness from its usual practice of driving their intelligence to subvert all obstacles that stand in the way of its satisfaction.

Thus, in Perpetual Peace, Kant claimed that “a people's good moral condition” would follow from “a good constitution,” adding (significantly) that “a good national constitution cannot be expected to arise from morality.”Footnote ²² His point, I take it, is that it should not be expected that the great mass of the people would design and establish a good constitution from moral considerations, although these same people would support it from moral considerations once they were educated by it.

But if the people cannot be expected to establish a good constitution from moral considerations, and nature won't, how will such a constitution ever be established? Although Kant did not believe that nature alone could produce a good constitution, he supposed that it could do something much less implausible and demanding, namely, produce a constitution that very roughly approximates a good constitution. Or, to weaken the argument even more drastically, he supposed that the trends he discerned suggested that nature will produce opportunities that morally motivated politicians and ordinary people—if they are vigilant, imaginative, alert, and well placed—can use to establish a good constitution, or at least to nudge extant institutions closer to such a constitution.Footnote ²³ It is not even necessary that the institutions produced should be rough approximations of good constitutions. All that is necessary is that intelligence and selfishness can possibly help produce institutions that sufficiently imaginative and moral politicians can use to establish good constitutions. Further, if such politicians are resourceful, they just may be able to keep a good constitution in existence long enough so that the people are educated to support it.Footnote ²⁴

This is the possibility of peace that I think Kant believed his arguments established, and the possibility of peace that he also believed would cultivate a hope for peace. He did not believe, and had no good reason to believe, that natural processes alone could make peace even possible. The arguments that they could are implausible and are undone by Rousseau's argument. In addition to being implausible, they encourage moral passivity, as we have already seen. Kant's argument, the argument just presented in the previous paragraph, is that natural processes may bring about opportunities for moral politicians if they are alert and well placed to establish a just constitution and keep it in existence long enough for its educative effects to take hold.

Unfortunately, Kant's defenses of the idea that these three institutions will each make a special contribution to peace—and that together they would secure peace—seem perfunctory. For example, he argued that republican states would contribute to peace because they would go to war only if their citizens authorize it, and their citizens will generally not do so, knowing that they would have to bear the costs of war. This argument seems to fail if we assume that a majority of the citizens of a republic can often shift the costs of war onto a minority. Kant's argument for the contribution that a Cosmopolitan Right makes to peace is similarly perfunctory. It suggests that once states are able to trade freely with one another, they will see that their greed is more effectively satisfied by trade than by war. But this suggestion falls easily before Rousseau's argument, as is amply confirmed by history, including contemporary history. For history tells us that trade can actually lead to war because it disposes states to become dependent on raw materials or commodities that other states control, and that, once dependent on those things, states will be willing to go to war against the states they depend on to keep those materials or commodities flowing steadily, and may even be disposed to take over such states to guarantee their supply. Finally, the case for a federation of states is also far from conclusive. Basically, it seems to rely on the assumption that wars break out only because the states concerned have not talked long enough about how to resolve their disputes peacefully. But of course this assumption is empty because it is logically invulnerable to refutation. It can always be argued that a war would have been avoided if the belligerents had talked a little more.

These considerations suggest that if Kant wanted to show that the three institutions he described in his three “Definitive Articles” are sufficient for securing peace, he did not succeed in showing this. His failure is, however, not a catastrophe for his position. Possibly more elaborate arguments may show that it is quite plausible to suppose that the three institutions are together sufficient to secure peace. For example, the so-called Democratic Peace Theorists have urged a battery of interesting and cogent arguments to show that although democracies are not in general peaceful, as Kant surmised, it is nevertheless true that democracies never fight other democracies, at least when they recognize each other as democracies.Footnote ²⁵ And these theorists support their arguments with the contention that history has no record of two democracies fighting each other when each democracy recognized the other as a democracy. Even if the considerations raised by the Democratic Peace Theorists are not altogether compelling, they do suggest that further investigation may fully support Kant's view that the three institutions he proposed may be just about sufficient to secure peace.

VI. The Problem of Globalization

More worrisome than the possibility that Kant's three institutions are not sufficient to ensure a just peace is the possibility that his arguments in Perpetual Peace do not show that the hope for peace is well founded. As we have seen, he tried to show that such a hope was well founded by arguing that historical trends are likely to create opportunities for moral politicians to realize his blueprint for peace. But according to many authorities, a new trend, globalization, is making such opportunities less and less likely, because it is steadily undermining the sovereignty of states that Kant's blueprint supposes is a condition for securing peace.

Our prospects for peace would therefore be very grim if Kant had proved that his blueprint set out the only way to secure a just peace. But he did not prove this, and he did not believe that he had. If his arguments were meant to show that a world of republics, a federation of states devoted to securing peace, and a Cosmopolitan Right are sufficient to establish peace, they were not meant to show (and they certainly do not show) that these institutions are necessary for peace. Kant's story of how peace could be established, given the historical trends he thought he discerned, was an imaginative reconstruction of one out of the many possible future worlds that intelligence and self-interest could have brought into being, starting out with the facts as he saw them. As he said himself, although nature guarantees perpetual peace, it “does not do so with a certainty sufficient to prophesy it from a theoretical point of view.”Footnote ²⁶ In other words, the particular future he chose to describe has no predictive validity whatsoever. He did not predict that history would forever create reasonable opportunities for moral politicians to set about realizing his blueprint for peace. If history did once create these opportunities, it seems now to be embarking on a course in which opportunities to realize Kant's blueprint are becoming steadily slimmer.

It is possible, however, that history's new course will provide opportunities for moral individuals to establish peace using institutions that are very different from the ones Kant described. I suspect Kant would not be surprised at such an outcome. In the fifth and sixth theses of his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, he declared that the problem of achieving a “universal civil society administered in accord with right” requires the “correct concept of the nature of a possible constitution,” and “great experience,” and consequently is the “hardest and last [problem] to be solved by the human species.” So difficult did Kant take this problem to be that he claimed that a “perfect solution is impossible” and that if even an “approximation” is ever found, “it will only be very late, and after many futile attempts.”Footnote ²⁷ Given that the problem Kant describes here is part of the problem of setting out the conditions for universal peace, it seems highly unlikely (and if not unlikely then certainly presumptuous on his part) to claim that the institutions he described in his three “Definitive Articles” were the only solution to that problem.

Consequently, there is no reason to give up hope for peace. If the anachronism of Kant's blueprint reduces our hopes for peace, it should not extinguish them. If Kant could design a blueprint for peace that the historical trends of his period seemed likely to offer moral politicians opportunities to realize, we can follow in his footsteps and design a blueprint for peace that the historical trends we now see emerging are likely to give us opportunities to realize.

VII. Another Way to Cultivate a Hope for Peace

If we designed such a blueprint, we would be following Kant's way of trying to cultivate an energizing and motivating hope for peace by demonstrating that there were good grounds for believing that there was a good chance of peace being established. But there may be another way. Recall the fact noted earlier that many people seem to hope to win the lottery; it implies that hope is possible even when the hoper believes there is only a very small possibility that his hope will be realized. If this is indeed the case, and if we can discover what makes it possible for people to hope for very unlikely things, we may be able to cultivate a hope for peace even if we cannot demonstrate that our hope for peace is well founded and have no grounds for believing there is a good chance that peace will eventually be established. In particular, we may be able to cultivate a hope for peace even if we have not yet been able to duplicate Kant's feat of producing a blueprint for peace that historical trends are likely to create opportunities for us to realize.

A critic may object that although it is possible to hope for very unlikely things, such hopes are unreasonable; and he may remind me that I myself admitted that hoping to win the lottery with only one ticket is unreasonable. He may also object that hope for very unlikely things is useless in the sense that it does not motivate the hoper to do anything to establish what he hopes for; and, again, he may remind me that I admitted that hoping to win the lottery with only one ticket does not motivate the hoper to do anything to help him win the lottery. Such a critic may conclude that, for these reasons, cultivating a hope for peace when peace is believed to be very unlikely is pointless, and that to support a duty to seek peace, we need a hope for peace that motivates reasonable people to search for morally permissible ways to secure peace.

In response, I emphasize first that the objection does not challenge the very possibility of hoping for things believed to be very unlikely. It only challenges the reasonableness and usefulness of such hopes. But consider the following two examples: (1) very sick patients who accept their doctors' prognoses that they are very likely to die, but who nevertheless keep their hopes for recovery high; and (2) the parents of a very sick child who continue to hope for the child's recovery even if they believe the experts' prognosis that the child has virtually no chance to recover. The hopes of such people are not useless. They powerfully motivate the hopers to search for cures, sometimes with notable success; and they help the hopers to live better lives even when these individuals do not find what they seek. Finally, since such hopes have such good consequences, we should hesitate to dismiss them as unreasonable, though I shall have more to say on this point. If we can explain what makes their hopes possible and also both useful and reasonable, we may be able to discover how to cultivate an energizing hope for peace despite not having yet designed a blueprint for securing peace that we believe current historical trends will create opportunities for us to realize.

For convenience, let us focus on my second example: the hopeful parents and the experts. One large and obvious difference between them is that the parents love the child a lot more than the experts do. I will argue that this difference explains why they continue to hope for the child's recovery even though the experts do not.

Reflection suggests that in every case of hope, the hoper loves, desires, or positively appraises or evaluates what he or she hopes for.Footnote ²⁸ Of course, people can seem to hope for something they acknowledge to be bad: for example, the death of a competitor. But it can be argued that in such cases they are really hoping that the competitor's death will redound to their advantage, which they conceive of as good. The view that hope involves a desire for or a positive evaluation or appraisal of what is hoped for fits with hope's being an emotion. On a widely accepted account of emotion, evaluations or desires are always parts of emotions.Footnote ²⁹ So to our earlier finding that hope always contains a judgment about the likelihood of what is hoped for, we can add that hope also always contains a desire for or a positive evaluation of what is hoped for.Footnote ³⁰

We have seen that, like other emotions, hope can vary in strength or intensity. In particular, we saw that it tends to grow stronger as the hoper comes to believe that the probability of its being realized grows higher; and that it tends to grow weaker as he comes to believe that the probability of its being realized falls. We can now add a few refinements. As a hoper comes to believe that the probability that the object of his hope will be realized falls, not only does his hope tend to fall, it also tends to change to despair, and to disappear altogether if his belief in the probability of its object being realized falls to zero. And as a hoper comes to believe that the probability that the object of his hope will be realized rises, not only does his hope tend to rise, it also tends to change to another emotion, this time to confidence, and to disappear altogether if his belief in the probability of its object being realized rises to certainty. Up to a point, hope varies in a somewhat parallel way when its other component varies. Thus, hope tends to grow weaker the less the hoper values or desires what he hopes for, and to disappear altogether if he stops wanting it or comes to believe that it has no value; if someone does not want or value something, he won't hope for it. And hope tends to grow stronger the more the hoper values or desires what he hopes for, as long as its realization is neither impossible nor certain. An airline pilot's hope that his plane is in good condition is stronger than his hope that his television at home is in good condition because he values his life and the lives of his passengers more than he values watching the big game.

But here the parallelism ends. Increasing a person's desire for what he hopes for, or persuading him to value it more highly, will not cause his hope for it to disappear, as long as its realization remains uncertain. Christian believers place incredible value on the beatific vision, and desire it as much as it is possible for people to desire anything; but as long as they live, they never stop hoping for it. If they do stop hoping, it is because they are no longer believers. Further, if the object of hope is valued enough, hope for it never changes into another emotion, however the hoper's estimation of its probability varies. As long as she lives, the saint hopes to be saved, and is never either confident of it or despairing of it. Similarly, the pilot's hope for the safety of his passengers never disappears or changes to something else, perhaps to confidence, no matter how highly he estimates the safety of his plane, as long as it is not parked on the ground and all the passengers have left it.Footnote ³¹ And his hope for the safety of his passengers will remain constant and will motivate him to save the plane even if it seems very likely to go down.

These considerations persuade me that the decisive factor determining the strength of hope is the desire for the object of hope, or the value that is placed on it. If the object is desired enough or valued highly enough, hope for it will remain strong and motivating no matter how small the probability of realizing it seems to be. Because the believer desires salvation or values it highly, he hopes for it and is motivated to seek it, no matter how small its likelihood seems to him to be. His desire for it accounts for the strength of his hope for it, and if he is right about its possibility and value, his hope is reasonable too.

If all this is more or less correct, it seems that we have our explanation for the parents' hope for the recovery of their sick child: they love him too much to give up hoping that he will recover. And their hope is reasonable, not because they love him so much (for the intensity of their love explains the strength of their hope, not its reasonableness), and not only because their hope sometimes leads them to discover how to cure him and makes their lives better, but because parents are right to love their children that much.

If we apply these considerations to the hope for peace, we do not need to follow Kant's example and speculate on historical trends and blueprints for peace in order to cultivate a hope for peace. Hope for peace may motivate us to indulge in such speculations, and if our speculations are plausible they may strengthen the hope for peace a little, but they are in the first place the results of this hope, not its cause. Once peace is established to be possible, the strength of our hope for it depends on the strength of our desire for it, or on the value we place on it. If we can strengthen that desire and establish that peace is of supreme value, we can cultivate an energizing and motivating hope for it, even if we cannot demonstrate that there is a good chance of establishing it.

VIII. Supporting the Duty to Seek Peace with Fear and Compassion

If the foregoing conclusion is sound, the following question is inescapable: If Kant wanted to help us to have an energizing and motivating hope for peace, why did he embark on his conflicted and implausible speculations about historical trends and blueprints for securing peace? Why did he not stick to something he could probably have done a whole lot better, namely, expounding on the value of peace? To answer this question, we must first answer another one.

That other question begins with a complaint about the examples I used to urge that an energizing hope is possible even if realizing its object is very improbable. The complaint is that the examples beg the question. Consider the case of the very sick patients who believe that they are very likely going to die, but who are still sometimes motivated to seek cures for their illnesses. The complaint is that I simply assume that they are motivated by a hope to live, when they may just as easily be motivated by the fear of dying.

Although I continue to insist that the patients may hope to live despite their doctors' prognoses, I concede that they may be motivated to seek a cure by a fear of death rather than by a hope to live. This is because of the way hope is related to fear. We tend to fear the absence of what we hope for. Because we hope to live, we therefore tend to fear dying. To see why these claims are justified, note that fear resembles hope in having two parts: a judgment about the likelihood of its object, and an evaluation of its object. But whereas the object of hope is valued, the object of fear is disvalued.Footnote ³² If something is valued, presumably its absence will be disvalued. In particular, if the patients value living, they must disvalue dying. Consequently, if the patients hope to live because they value living, they must fear to die if they disvalue dying in an appropriate way. Accordingly, if I affirm that the patients may hope to live, I must concede that they may also fear to die, and may be motivated by that fear to seek cures for their illnesses.

This possibility raises the following interesting question: Kant tried to support our duty to seek peace by strengthening our hope for peace. Why did he not try to support the duty to seek peace by strengthening our fear of war? The fear of war is likely to motivate us to seek peace. War increases our risk of dying violently, and most of us fear dying violently. Hobbes saw this very clearly, and indeed he listed fear first among the passions that incline us to peace, well ahead of hope, which he placed third and last after the desire for well-being: “The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things that are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”Footnote ³³ So if both hope and fear incline us to seek peace, and Kant was prepared to use a hope for peace to support the duty to seek peace, why was he not prepared to use the fear of war to support that same duty?

As I noted earlier, Kant did use the fear of war and its perils to support his argument that we had good grounds to hope for peace. He suggested that our fear of war and its perils will eventually motivate us to seek peace, and that this motivation is among the factors that give us grounds to hope for peace.Footnote ³⁴ But of course this use of the fear of war does not suggest that we use such fear directly to support the duty to seek peace.

Kant may have been wary of using the fear of war to support the duty to seek peace because he thought that there were strict limits on how much the fear of war can be cultivated. When Hobbes argued that the fear of war motivates us to seek peace, he was referring to the war of every man against every other man. In that war, as Hobbes took great care to emphasize, everyone has reason to fear violent death because everyone has a high risk of being violently killed.Footnote ³⁵ Wars between states do not similarly affect everyone. While they may raise everyone's chances of dying violently, they may not raise everyone's chances of dying violently high enough to ensure that everyone fears such wars. Kant saw this point as it applied to kings. He reasoned that they made so many wars because they themselves did not need to be imperiled by war and, consequently, did not need to fear it.Footnote ³⁶ But Kant seemed to think that in republics everyone would be sufficiently imperiled by war to ensure that everyone would fear war; he apparently failed to see that even if decisions to go to war are made democratically, a majority—or those who control the majority—may be able to shift the burdens and dangers of war onto a minority, and consequently that republics may be as liable to make war as kingdoms. Perhaps Kant could defend his position on the ground that people can fear dangers to others (people can fear for others, as the point is usually put), especially if they care for these others. Thus, if we suppose that the citizens of republics care for each other—a supposition that is entirely consistent with the claims republicans make about the virtues of their favored kind of state—then all citizens of such states will fear war, some because the war endangers them personally, and others because the war endangers those they care about.Footnote ³⁷

This argument could help to vindicate Kant's faith that republics tend to be peace loving, while allowing him to argue that fear cannot be relied on as a general motivation to seek peace—for most states are, of course, not republics. But it is not entirely satisfactory, since it may still be possible to encourage citizens of nonrepublican states to fear for their fellow citizens even when they are not themselves endangered. Be that as it may, there are other emotions besides fear that seem capable of supporting a duty to seek peace: for example, compassion. Aristotle describes compassion as a painful feeling directed at others who are suffering serious and undeserved misfortunes.Footnote ³⁸ But war always has many victims, namely, the people that it causes to suffer serious and undeserved misfortunes. Even citizens who are not among the victims of war may therefore appropriately direct their compassion at the victims of war. Further, since compassion is partially constituted by or at least normally accompanied by a desire to alleviate and prevent the misfortunes that arouse it, and since establishing peace seems an obvious way to do this, it follows that cultivating compassion for the victims of war should encourage a desire to establish peace that should help to support the duty to seek peace.

This possibility of using compassion to support the duty to seek peace is all the more intriguing because Kant himself suggests the general possibility of using compassion to support duty. As we have already seen, Kant said that compassion is “one of the impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone would not accomplish.” Consequently, it does not seem inconsistent with his teaching to suppose that nature has implanted compassion in us to do what the bare “representation” of the duty to seek peace “would not accomplish.” Further, if as Kant observed we have a duty to cultivate compassionate feelings and to use them “as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles,” it seems that we have a duty to cultivate compassionate feelings in a similar way to support the duty to seek peace. Indeed, in the eighteenth century (that is, in Kant's own lifetime), as David Brion Davis observes, many Europeans were trying to arouse sympathy for the victims of European imperialism, who were, of course, victims of war. Even before that, as Davis notes, compassion had been effectively used to support the duty to abolish slavery, another ancient scourge of the human race.Footnote ³⁹ The antislavery movement, he writes, gained strength from the popularization of the idea of the “power of sympathy” urged by philosophers like Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith; and he adds that Montesquieu not only argued that Negro slavery violated moral principles, but also tried to arouse sympathy for the slaves by “encouraging the imaginary experiment of a reversal of roles in a world turned upside down.”Footnote ⁴⁰

It may be objected that, like the fear of war, compassion for the victims of war cannot be aroused widely enough to reliably support the duty to seek peace. Thus, it may be argued that while Kant allowed that compassion could support duties in a domestic context, he might well have doubted that it could be effectively used to support duties that involved global considerations. Perhaps he had been persuaded by Rousseau's argument that the advance of reason and the artificial and powerful passions engendered by European competitive society had undermined our capacity for compassion, and that national differences so assiduously cultivated by politicians had exacerbated the problem, making it almost impossible for people of one country to feel compassion for the suffering of those of another. But Kant's enthusiasm for the “universal yet disinterested sympathy” for the French revolutionaries that was expressed by people throughout Europe, “even at the risk that this partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves,” suggests that he allowed that compassion could cross national boundaries.Footnote ⁴¹ Further, if sympathy for the French revolutionaries showed that commitment to republican ideas was spreading, compassion for the victims of European imperialism showed that the same ideas were spreading, in particular, the idea that all people have a right to govern themselves without the interference of outside powers.

We can still ask, then, why Kant urged the hope for peace—rather than compassion for the victims of war and of European imperialism, or simply the fear of war—as a way to support the duty to seek peace. To answer this question, we must seek a better understanding of fear and compassion.

I noted earlier that we can hope to live and fear to die, and we can hope for peace and fear war. This would not be possible if we feared only dangers we considered likely and if we hoped only for goods we considered not very unlikely. If that were the case, and if we feared war, we could not hope for peace. But as we saw, we can hope for goods that we consider very unlikely. Consequently, we can hope for peace though we fear war because we consider it very likely. How does this explain why Kant wanted to support the duty to seek peace with a hope for peace rather that with a fear of war?

Consider again the patients who believe that they are likely to die, and both fear death and hope to live. Though they experience both emotions, it does not follow that they are motivated by both emotions, and it makes a difference which emotion motivates them to seek a cure. It may be objected that it can make no difference, since in both cases the same thing, a cure, is sought. But the word “cure” here is ambiguous. It could refer to something that prevents a patient from dying, or it could refer to something that enables him to return to a normal life. If the patients are motivated simply by a fear of death, they may be satisfied with a cure that only prevents them from dying. That is, they may he satisfied with a cure that keeps them from dying, but leaves them in a vegetative state or severely handicapped. If they are motivated by a hope to live, however, it is natural to think that they would not be satisfied with being in a vegetative state or severely handicapped. They will want instead to live normally, perhaps even to flourish. Very similar comments apply to the parents of the very sick child. They fear his dying, of course, but they will not be satisfied with a cure that leaves him in a vegetative state or severely handicapped. They hope that he lives, and thus they will want a cure that enables him to flourish and to realize at least some of the wonderful possibilities they have been imagining for him.

The foregoing discussion helps to explain why Kant did not think of using the fear of war to support the duty to seek peace. The fear of war motivates us to find a way to prevent it; that is, it motivates us to ensure its absence. But the absence of war is perfectly compatible with a condition in which (as Kant saw it) nothing very valuable or even very interesting ever happens. It is compatible, for example, with a condition in which there is only a mediocre development of human talents. Kant not only saw nothing valuable in such a condition, he actually despised it. His rhetorical question to Johann Gottfried von Herder about such a condition drips with contempt. “Does the author really mean,” Kant wrote (referring to Herder), “that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more cultured nations, had been destined to live for thousands of centuries in their tranquil indolence, one could give a satisfying answer to the question why they exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good to have this island populated with happy sheep and cattle as with human beings who are happy merely enjoying themselves?”Footnote ⁴²

When Kant was thinking of peace, he was not thinking only of the absence of war. He was thinking also of the full development of human talents that he believed the absence of war would make possible. But he could not have believed that the mere absence of war would make the full development of human talents possible. After all, he seemed to believe that the Tahitians might well live in “tranquil indolence” for “thousands of centuries.” In his mind, the absence of war would make the full development of human talents possible only after, and as a result of, thousands of centuries of war. As he put it himself, “war is an indispensable means for bringing” culture “to a still higher stage.”Footnote ⁴³

This should make it clear why Kant did not want to rely on the fear of war, or compassion for the victims of war, to support the duty to seek peace—as he understood peace. These emotions would not support the duty to seek peace, because they would motivate us to seek the end of war, a goal that is very different from the goal of the duty to seek peace—as Kant understood peace. Think of Kant's idea of peace: the absence of war and the full development of all human talents. Compare it with the absence of war secured by a fear of war, perhaps a Hobbesian state or a Hobbesian balance of power. Whether or not these arrangements can end war, they certainly suppress the development of human talents; for example, they use up resources that could be used to develop talents, and they require the sovereigns of states to impose a rigid censorship that suppresses and confines the imagination.Footnote ⁴⁴ Or compare the Kantian idea of peace with a peace motivated by compassion. Compassion motivates us to put an end to suffering, not to make the full development of human capabilities possible. Or, finally, compare the Kantian idea of peace with a Rousseauian peace secured by the isolation of states from one another. In Kant's opinion, these small, self-sufficient, isolated, homogeneous societies would achieve nothing of value beyond the absence of war.