Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case. Might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. If one country felt it had been wronged by another, it could declare war, conquer some territory as compensation, and expect the annexation to be recognized by the rest of the world. The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. That cannot happen today: the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council. States are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, and any country that indulges in a war of conquest can expect opprobrium, not acquiescence, from the rest.
The legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that it’s the outlawry of war that deserves much of the credit for the Long Peace. The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, the conquest taboo has occasionally been enforced with a military response, such as when an international coalition reversed Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990–91. More often the prohibition has functioned as a norm—“War is something that civilized nations just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.
“Natural food.” Whenever I hear those words crooned, my inner crank cranks up. “Natural!” I would rail if I gave it voice. “No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!”
Haidt 这位道德心理学家,在当年听耶鲁大学心理学导论公开课时就已经知道了,对他的研究也很感兴趣,但他这本 The Righteous Mind(《正义之心》)我一直拖到最近才看完。应该说最打动我的还是那些原来就已经知道的东西,比如 moral dumbfounding 相关的实验和解释,但 Haidt 对 WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries) 世界之外的道德观的同情与认可还是没有说服我。本来按他自己所说,他只是在做描述性的工作,但有意无意之中,其实讲了很多「应该」。并且他似乎还认为「应该」是不能被理性、数学和逻辑讨论的。
[I]n psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic.
Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind
We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.
Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now
[T]he economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations” (inadvertently proving his point with the expression men’s minds). “What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction.” This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.
刚看到 Parfit 在 On What Matters Vol. 1 里讨论康德伦理学中的 merely as a means 问题时,写到他母亲在 1930 年代的中国的遭遇:
In a case that is less clear, when my mother travelled on a Chinese river in the 1930s, her boat was held up by bandits, whose moral principles permitted them to take, from ordinary people, only half their property. These bandits let my mother choose whether they would take her engagement ring or her wedding ring. If these people treated my mother as a means, they did not treat her merely as a means. Were they close to doing that? I am inclined to answer No. But this may be a borderline case, in which this question has no definite answer.
Unlike our first reading of Sidgwick’s Methods, our first reading of Kant’s Groundwork is, in some ways, the best. There are some striking and inspiring claims, and we are not worried by what we can’t understand. But when we re-read the Groundwork, many of us become discouraged, and give up. We decide that Kant, though he may be a great philosopher, is not for us.
The first problem is Kant’s style. It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?’
Kant did not have a single, coherent theory.
Kant makes many conflicting claims, and such claims cannot all be true.
As Kemp Smith points out, Kant often ‘flatly contradicts himself’ and ‘there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting senses. He is the least exact of the great thinkers.’ (To avoid provoking Hegelians, we should perhaps say ‘one of the least exact’.)
When I first re-read Kant, what I found most irritating was not Kant’s obscurities and inconsistencies, but a particular kind of overblown, false rhetoric.
…since I knew that Kant believed in a Categorical Imperative, I was surprised by Kant’s second sentence. I asked a Kantian, ‘Does this mean that, if I don’t give myself Kant’s Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?’ ‘No,’ I was told, ‘you have to give yourself a law, and there’s only one law.’ This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said ‘But I haven’t given myself Kant’s Imperative as a law’, I was told ‘Yes you have’. This reply was even worse. My irritation at such claims may have left some traces in this book.