3
simple models analogize political communities to individual persons; the models diverge,
however, in their accounts of the normative foundations of the duties owed by individual
persons to one another. The legalist’s model has a Kantian flavor
2
in that it prioritizes
right over interest, conceiving states roughly as individuals bound by the categorical
imperative writ large. The demands of international justice as they relate to the use of
military force are specified by a moral law which arises from a conception of practical
reason (as opposed to a conception of rational advantage).
3
The demands of Kantian
morality (and of law within a Kantian state) forbid individual persons from using
violence against one another, except in sharply circumscribed cases of immediate self-
defense. The corresponding international principle would forbid states from making war
except to defend themselves (with the exception defined in a sharply circumscribed
manner). A just state preserves establishes domestic order by legislation, which is
enforced by means of an appropriately authorized internal police force; alleged violations
of law are adjudicated by authorized, impartial tribunals. To follow this analogy, a just
international order would require an international law, interpreted by some appropriately
impartial tribunal, and enforced by some authorized agent who may legitimately employ
violence to preserve international order. In the same way that individual persons within a
state who commit wrongs and crimes merit punishment (to restrain them from further
wrongdoing and, in Kant’s conception, for retribution) and owe reparations to their
2
Which is to say that the norms generated by the legalist’s model do not, as we will make
clear later on, fully correspond to Kant’s own normative positions regarding international
affairs.
3
On the distinction between these, see Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993) 48-54.
Convention