Can War Be Ethical? Kant, Tolstoy and Arendt on War — Transcript

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1. 0:00Not every philosopher tried to justify  war. Some believe the very idea of war
2. 0:06was failure [music] of reason and a collapse of  morality. Kant, for example, dreamed of something
3. 0:11radical for his time, a world without war. He  called it perpetual peace. Kant believed if the
4. 0:16states were governed by rational laws and treated  each other as equals, then war wouldn't just be
5. 0:21immoral, [music] it'll be illogical. In his words,  standing army shall in time be totally abolished.
6. 0:27War he said happens [music] when people treat  people and nations as means to an end not as
7. 0:33ends in themselves. Then came Leo Tolstoy novelist  mystic and moral radical. He didn't see war as
8. 0:40noble or even necessary. He saw it as organised  murder. Tolstoy argued that state doesn't fight
9. 0:46evil. It simply redistributes it. And every  time we accept war as normal, [music] we are
10. 0:51becoming morally numb. And finally, Hannah Arendt  a philosopher shaped by the violence of the
11. 0:5620th [music] century. She warned that modern war,  especially total war, does something even worse
12. 1:02than kill. It destroys our ability to think. When  everything becomes a target, when [music] violence
13. 1:07is bureaucratized, when language is replaced with  propaganda, we don't [music] just lose lives.
14. 1:13We lose judgment. And without judgment,  even democracies can justify anything.