Since I last blogged, I think I have found a way of giving the 'why and how' to Kant's permissive law. This is more than the mere "authorizing something that is otherwise impermissible." I think, and have argued, that the permissive law only applies when one is faced with a supreme moral emergency - a situation where reason is threatened with undermining itself. I have ample textual evidence for those of you interested, and I am in the stages of tweaking and editing to send out for publication if you are really that interested.
The topic for today is whether such a Supreme Moral Emergency (SME) could result in the international realm with regard to human rights violations. In other words, if the domestic condition can be so bad to trigger a permissive law to allow individuals to coerce others into a civil society, is this situation analogously present in the international system.
I suspect that most Kantians out there are now pulling their hair out at such a question. "NO!", they say. "Absolutely not!" adds another. Well, think about this: Kant was a man. A brilliant man, no doubt, but a man situated in his time and place. I think that Kant was assuming 2 things in his arguments about coercing states into cosmopolitan institutions or states...
I'll only talk about one of them here: the threat of external war. Kant assumed, explicitly, that the biggest threat to the rights of citizens came from external war. We have Perpetual Peace and the 5th Definitive Article, we have countless musings in the Doctrine of Right... but here is the rub. Political scientists have consistently found that the biggest threat of war in the past 100+ years is internal -- that is civil -- war. It is 5X more likely, and many, many more lives are lost to it. (Thanks Fearon and Latin...)
At any rate, if the assumption that the threat comes from the outside is false...perhaps intervention isn't such a horrible thing anymore. Moreover, if the domestic state is so awful that it is consistently devolving back into civil strife....well... need I say more?
In any event, I think there must be something at work that proves that Kant's arguments - while insightful and logically coherent -- are not completely applicable today. We as good Kantians must rise up! We must take the mantel... we must take the spirit of Kant's writings and find solutions for today's (and possibly tomorrow's) problems.
So, the permissive law is necessary -- and human rights violations seem to present us with a case of why a permissive law may be at work for transnational justice.
TTFN-
H
