Immanuel Kant on War

“Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'”
--Immanuel Kant

Among philosophers, no one is accepted as an authority. Just because Kant affirmed some ancient Greek thinker who claimed that war breeds more evil then it destroys, that doesn’t make it so. Kant, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, are counted among the most highly respected and influential philosophers in Western history. But that makes neither Kant nor an unknown ancient Greek authorities on war.

In philosophy, every claim, every theory must stand up to rigorous critical investigation. Ideas must be held up to the light of human experience and human reason. Therefore, you and I must make our own judgments about the validity of the Kantian quotation.

The implicit assumption is that war is good if it kills more evil than it begets, but it is bad if it begets more evil than it kills. Thus:

Either our present war is unjust or it is just.
If it is unjustified, it is making things worse than they were.
If it is just, it is making things better than they were.
Therefore our war is making things either better or worse.

This, of course, is obvious. It also is vague. As a general principle, we all are agreed that war, as such, is not a good thing.

In a war, each adversary kills and maims--both physically and psychically--their enemy. In an unimaginable variety of ways, we bring suffering to homes and families. We destroy or severely damage cities and societal infrastructures that later must be rebuilt with labor and resources that might have been put to better use. We drain, and sometimes deplete, our national budgets of funds that might have alleviated some of the causes of the war. The total cost of war is incomprehensible and unconscionable.

Often, nations engage in war, based on principle. Abraham Lincoln judged that men “of principle” were always dangerous. They consider nothing except to stand for principle at all costs. Lincoln stood for principles--plural, not singular.

Governments, he believed, should place all their basic principles in the balance and weigh them against each other. People and leaders must take account of the probable variety of gains and losses that will be incurred.

The singer, Johnny Cash, once said that songs were the only good thing to come out of a war. At the time I heard him say that, it seemed to ring true. Then I realized that war has always–necessity is the mother of invention–produced medical and technological advances that are, in turn, of lasting value in civilian life. What gain? What price?

Unaware of the enormous costs of the research required to develop one useful medication, we are quick to decry the exorbitant prices charged at the pharmacy. On the other hand, the medical and technological advances that come to us by way of the battlefield often are praised with little thought given to the costs, of all kinds, of war in contrast to the costs, again of all kinds, incurred in laboratory research.

We must each judge for ourselves, whether in Baghdad or in Kandahar we are creating more evil than we are killing. Al Qaeda continues to grow; terror clouds every horizon; on one hand, mothers and children continue to die, on the other, they continue losing fathers and husbands; ethnic groups, religions, and societies are becoming more polarized. As responsible citizens, our personal judgment must be translated into public policy.

What are we begetting? What are we killing? Could it be that we are merely speeding the advance of a human illness that just might be terminal?

“War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.”