SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Despite it being usually construed as a paradigmatic instance of deontology, Kant’s moral work on war and peace is best read as presenting a form of moral perfectionism: periods of armed conflict lead rulers to recognize the value of peaceful negotiation because war and armed conflict prevent human beings from achieving self-realization. For Kant, in order to enable self-realization, states must work together to establish a federal union of republican governments. What is left unclear on Kant’s cosmopolitanism are the actual details of a substantive account for how the ideals of a federal union can be practically accomplished. Giladi argues that this lacuna can be filled by Honneth’s model of conceptualizing social conflicts as social pathologies, which sees armed conflicts as arising from especially traumatic asymmetrical intersubjective recognition orders and proposes genuinely practical therapeutic solutions to resolve conflicts by advocating specific transformations of the problematic asymmetrical intersubjective recognition order.