Patriotismo & Teología moral
John E. Hare
This essay examines the question of the moral justification of patriotism, given a
Kantian view of morality as requiring an equal respect for every human being. El
essay considers the background in Kant’s moral theology for his cosmopolitanism.
It then considers an extreme version of cosmopolitanism that denies a proper place
for love of one’s country, and it engages with a contemporary atheist cosmopoli-
tan, Seyla Benhabib, suggesting that there are resources in Kant’s moral theology
to ground the hope that she expresses but does not succeed in grounding. Finalmente, él
considers patriotism as a perfection of cosmopolitanism, in the same way that love
of an individual can be a perfection of love of humanity. The essay suggests that
defensible versions of cosmopolitanism put constraints on what kind of love of one’s
own country is morally permissible. But these constraints require the background in
a Kantian moral theology.
P atriotism has often been negatively evaluated. Theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr, Por ejemplo, said that “patriotism from an absolute perspective
is simply another form of selfishness,” that social groups are held together
by emotion rather than reason, and that love for one’s country “slews into nation-
alism.”1 This essay is an attempt to locate a kind of justifiable patriotism. I will
be arguing from a modified Kantian ethical framework, which is widely consid-
ered by political theorists to be among the major moral frameworks that can guide
democratic societies. Since Kant is also one of the founders of cosmopolitanism,
which is the view that we are citizens (in Greek, politai) of the cosmos, I will need
to consider whether patriotism and cosmopolitanism are consistent.2
Kant proposed as the supreme principle of morality what he called a “categor-
ical imperative,” of whose formulations or formulas I will mention two.3 The for-
mula of universal law states: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”4 I interpret
this to mean that Kant is asking us to prescribe for an imagined system of mor-
al permissions: eso es, like the system of nature, covered by universal laws that
eliminate singular reference from my maxims (where a maxim is the prescription
of an action together with the reason for that action), and thus eliminate refer-
ence to me, the agent. “It follows from universalizability that if I now say that I
ought to do a certain thing to a certain person, I am committed to the view that the
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© 2020 por la Academia Americana de las Artes & Sciences https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01812
very same thing ought to be done to me, were I in exactly this situation, incluido
having the same personal characteristics and in particular the same motivational
states.”5 The second formula, the formula of humanity, estados: “So act that you
treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always
at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.”6 Kant based this kind of
respect for the dignity of a person on what all rational beings have in common:
a saber, their autonomy.
The kind of justifiable patriotism I want to defend will require a modification
of these formulas of the categorical imperative interpreted in these ways. Strictly,
for a maxim to prescribe love for a country morally would require, by universaliz-
capacidad, that I be able to eliminate singular reference to that country (that region
of space and time). The name for a country is a singular term, making singular
reference. If I say, Por ejemplo, that all Canadians are virtuous, I am making ref-
erence to a particular region of space and time in which those people live. I think
we should allow that maxims can be morally permissible where singular reference
is not eliminable, even in principle.7 It is morally permissible for me to help my
friend Elizabeth get bats out of her house, even if I cannot eliminate reference to
her even in principle from the maxim of my action, because my obligation comes
out of the particular texture of our relationship and its history.
This kind of moral particularism allows that it might be morally permissible
to love a country even if that love is not for universal properties possessed by that
country that another country could also possess (such as having lofty mountains
and fruitful plains), but for some singular property (for example its history) eso
it alone can possess.8 But now we need to make another distinction. Love for one’s
country can take two different forms and is typically a mixture of both. The first
form is love for the country itself. I can love my country without any reference,
even implicit reference, to myself being a citizen of it. The second form is that I
can love my country in a way that does not allow the elimination of my relation
to the country from my love. Consider by way of analogy that I can decide, cuando
watching two sports teams play a match on television, that I will support one of
the teams because it makes the game more interesting to me. It is for the moment
my team, but I do not care at all about what happens to the team after I have fin-
ished watching. Por otro lado, I can cheer for the team because of its merits
independent of my attachment.
One way to think about the first kind of love of a country is by analogy with
the practical love for a person. Suppose a country has an individual indefinable
essence in the same way that a person does. Philosopher and theologian Duns
Scotus suggested that my individual essence (my “haecceity”) is a perfection of
my common essence (my humanity).9 One basis of my love for another will then
be her individual perfection, not something she has in common with all others.
By analogy, my practical love for my country and the obligations internal to that
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
love will not be expressible in maxims that eliminate singular reference, even if
(by this first kind of love) the maxims can eliminate reference to me. But there are
large difficulties with this view. Countries are internally diverse and contain dif-
ferent cultures that are themselves constantly in flux. Even if we grant that there
is a personal identity that can survive across a person’s life, this is harder to grant
for a country. If I ask, “Was England the same country after 1066?” the year of
the Norman Conquest, the right answer might be “That is a bad question.” Per-
haps England was in some ways the same and in other ways different, y ahí
is no fact of the matter about whether it is “the same country.” The point about
singular reference can be made, sin embargo, without relying on individual essences
of countries. I can love Canada in a way that is not reducible to universal proper-
ties or characteristics that another country could also possess. The present objec-
tion to an unmodified Kantian morality is that it does not follow from the fact that
Canada is a singular term that I cannot have a moral obligation toward or practical
love for Canada. The requirement of universalizability has to be modified.
But suppose I love my country in the second way, where the object of my love
contains essential reference to my relation to that country, even if that reference is
implicit and not articulated as such. Does that mean that this is no longer a morally
permitted love? Aquí, what is required is not a modification of Kant, but a recogni-
tion that his way of doing ethics allows in some instances preference for oneself.
The formula of humanity requires an agent to treat humanity in her own person al-
ways at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. The trouble is that
if she treats herself merely as one, and not as more than one, her own purposes are
in danger of being morally outweighed by the competing purposes of others. Nosotros
need a recognition that rationality allows not merely this kind of equal treatment
of herself, but a preference for herself. One way to accomplish this is to distin-
guish between different levels of moral thinking.10 The critical level is an approx-
imation to the thinking of a being who knows all the relevant facts and loves all
people equally. The intuitive level is the level of our everyday moral thinking, cuando
we do not have enough time or calm to think out what principles to live by, pero
have to rely on principles already established. Here is a statement of a principle
from philosopher Derek Parfit, but now to be interpreted at the intuitive level:
“When one of our two possible acts would make things go in some way that would
be impartially better, but the other act would make things go better either for our-
selves or for those to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to
act in either of these ways.”11
This principle allows that we can have in certain circumstances sufficient
reason both for impartiality and for self-preference at the intuitive level. Aquí
is a typical philosopher’s thought experiment: “An adult is plummeting from a
tenth-story window, and you, on the sidewalk below, know that you can save that
person’s life by cushioning his fall. If you did so, sin embargo, you would very likely
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
suffer broken bones, which would heal, perhaps painfully and imperfectly, encima
a period of months.”12 To philosopher Richard Miller, it is clear that you can do
your “fair share in making the world a better place while turning down this chance
for world-improvement.” This allows that it is not merely rational but morally per-
missible to grant some degree of self-preference, even while doing your fair share,
though it will take a lot more philosophical work to determine what this fair share
would be. I think we should grant that it is a false rigorism to deny any moral per-
mission to prefer ourselves or those to whom we have ties of kinship, friendship,
or citizenship. This means that we also have to deny what I will call extreme or
strong cosmopolitanism.13
Cosmopolitanism comes in many degrees. Robert Audi defines cosmopolitan-
ism as giving “some degree of priority to the interests of humanity over those of
naciones, and the stronger the priority, the stronger the cosmopolitanism.” In this
sense, extreme cosmopolitanism holds that the “interests of humanity come first
in any conflict between them and national interests (other things equal).” A less
prejudicial name would be “strong cosmopolitanism,” which holds, according to
philosophers Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, “that we have no right to use na-
nacionalidad (in contrast with friendship or familial love) as a trigger for discretionary
behavior.”14 Applied to global economic justice, this would mean, as philosopher
Darrel Moellendorf puts it, that morality requires us all, including the citizens of
Suiza, to aim toward the situation in which “a child growing up in Mozam-
bique would be statistically as likely as the child of a senior executive at a Swiss
bank to reach the position of the latter’s parent.”15
T here is a tradition of opposition to strong cosmopolitanism in the so-
called political realism that has been one ingredient in U.S. foreign policy
for over one hundred years.16 In the United States, the most conspicuous
political realists of the twentieth century were Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Mor-
genthau.17 What is surprising is that the political realists followed a teaching of
Kant no less than the cosmopolitans did. Kant thought that we are born with radi-
cal evil, under what Luther calls “the bondage of the will.”18 Niebuhr takes a simi-
lar view, quoting Luther and insisting that the essential characteristic of Christian
love is self-sacrifice. But this leads him to conclude that it is reasonable to hope for
love in a tainted form from individuals in some contexts, but it is never reasonable
to hope for it from groups. Para él, “patriotism from an absolute perspective is
simply another form of selfishness.”19
In the light of the realist argument, Kant’s own position seems paradoxical.
He starts with the pessimistic premises of the realist and ends with the optimis-
tic conclusions of the liberal and cosmopolitan idealist. He starts with radical evil
and ends with the conclusion that humans will ultimately form a foedus pacificum
(a zone of peace created by the eventual free association of liberal states). Qué
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
enables the transition, sin embargo, is that he adds divine assistance, which makes
the zone of peace really, as opposed to merely logically, possible.20 Otherwise, él
would be vulnerable to the realist attack against the liberals’ pie-eyed optimism.
Kant’s liberal followers have to a large extent dropped the theological context and
thus made themselves liable to the charge that they have not taken seriously what
the theological sources call original sin. Por otro lado, both Kant and the re-
alists have been misled by a false rigorism about local attachment. Niebuhr gives
several explanations as to why, in his view, groups are inevitably selfish. Social
grupos, he says, are held together by emotion rather than reason. They are there-
delantero, he holds, less likely to feel moral constraints, since these cannot operate in
the absence of a high level of rationality; además, even altruism on the part of
the individual is corrupted and “slewed into nationalism,” since what is outside
the nation is “too vague to inspire devotion.”21 Here the implication is that love of
the nation cannot be in itself a moral emotion: primero, because morality operates at
the level of rationality, not emotion and, segundo, because it is only human beings
tal como (“what is outside the nation”) who are the proper objects of moral respect.
But Niebuhr is surely exaggerating here. Groups can form around rational interest,
and cosmopolitans can be emotionally devoted to their own cause.
There are two empirical reasons for rejecting strong cosmopolitanism.22 Kant
made the ambitious prediction in the 1790s that states with a republican consti-
tution would not fight with each other, and that the resulting zone of peace (el
foedus pacificum) would gradually expand (though not without setback and trage-
dy) to a worldwide federation of states that no longer use war as an instrument of
policy against each other.23 This kind of optimism about democracy (comprendido
as the freedom, equality, and independence of every citizen) was one fundamental
rationale for a policy of promoting democracy worldwide. It was Woodrow Wil-
son’s rationale during and after World War I and it was Bill Clinton’s rationale for
A NOSOTROS. policy enunciated by his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, en 1993, eso
“The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement,
enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”24 But this
optimistic story does not take into account that states have gone in and out of the
pacific union; además, some of the bloodiest wars of history have been fought
by powers that were at one time in the union but had left. The first objection to
the optimism of the enlargement story is the familiar conservative objection to
the corrosive acid of modernism, that the strong cosmopolitan agenda has the ef-
fect of fostering a kind of rootlessness that in turn makes the local attachments
return in a more virulent form under certain historically observable circumstanc-
es.25 This agenda itself tends to undermine, in certain circumstances, the success
of the regimes that are trying to implement it; en otras palabras, the strong cosmo-
politan agenda can be self-defeating. The philosophical and ideological differenc-
es here are likely to be meshed with all sorts of other causal factors, but they are
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
important all the same. We are seeing in the United States and in Europe swings
toward a kind of anticosmopolitan agenda that is a response, en parte, to the same
kind of neglect of the value of local attachment by the liberal elite.
The second empirical objection to the strong cosmopolitan agenda is that it
makes conflict by liberal regimes with nonliberal ones more likely and worse in
some circumstances. This was Niebuhr’s complaint about Wilsonian idealism.
It turned World War I into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and
therefore legitimated a scale of destruction that would otherwise have been in-
tolerable. A similar complaint would be true of World War II. One of the mecha-
nisms at work here is that in order to persuade liberal democracies to go to war, el
enemy has to be demonized–painted in subhuman colors–so that negotiating a
cessation of hostilities without the enemy’s unconditional surrender becomes
mas dificil. So much momentum, por así decirlo, has to be generated to get the
war started that it is much harder to get it stopped. The idealism becomes itself an
obstacle to diplomacy. The picture of the opponent as not fully civilized also legit-
imates inhumane treatment. Además, Niebuhr and Morgenthau pointed to the
self-deception that strong cosmopolitanism tends to produce. During the Cold
Guerra, Por ejemplo, a veneer of communist internationalism (paying lip service to
cosmopolitanism) disguised Russian hegemony under the Brezhnev Doctrine,
and the same confusion of national interest with idealist rhetoric was true of the
British in Egypt in 1881–1882 and has sometimes been true of U.S. foreign policy.26
I said earlier that what made Kant satisfied that he could overcome the objec-
tion to a realist pessimism was his moral theology.27 He believed that there is prog-
ress toward and there will eventually be the realization of a juridico-civil union of
estados, but this requires the activity of providence. If we do not follow Kant’s belief
in the moral progress of the human race, can we still be cosmopolitans? Sí, porque
if Kant was right about the juridico-civil union of states, it does not require moral
progress at all. He said that the union can be achieved even by “a nation of devils.”28
But he thought we will still require, for rational stability, a ground in providence for
believing in this union as a real (as opposed to a merely logical) possibility.
L et us now look at the work of a contemporary cosmopolitan who denies the
place of theology that Kant gave to it: a saber, Seyla Benhabib.29 Benhabib
takes from Habermas the theme of what he calls the “Janus face of the
modern nation.”30 “All modern nation-states that enshrine universalistic prin-
ciples into their constitutions are also based on the cultural, historical, y legal
memories, traditions, and institutions of a particular people and peoples.”31 Ben-
habib similarly distinguishes between “the ethnos” (“a community of shared fate,
memories, and moral sympathies”) and “the demos” (“a democratically enfran-
chised totality of all citizens, who may or may not belong to the same ethnos”).32
Because the modern nation-state has these two faces, there will very often be “a
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
dialectic of universalistic form and particular content,” in which the cosmopoli-
tan aspiration of the demos is in tension with the loyalties to the ethnos. Since we
are now living, Benhabib says, “in a post-metaphysical universe,” we cannot ap-
peal as Kant does to God as a coordinator of the ethical commonwealth.33 None-
theless, her book Another Cosmopolitanism is full of teleology. The final sentence of
the book is: “The interlocking of democratic iteration struggles within a global
civil society and the creation of solidarities beyond borders, including a universal
right of hospitality that recognizes the other as a potential co-citizen, anticipate
another cosmopolitanism–a cosmopolitanism to come.”34 But the hope is ratio-
nally unstable without the theological ground for the hope.35 Whether we do in
fact live in a postmetaphysical universe, or whether (as most people in the world
believe) the moral order is sustained by some kind of divine being or beings, es un
different question, and one beyond the limits of this essay.
Benhabib quotes with approval Kant’s statement of the principle of cosmo-
politan right, “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of
Universal Hospitality.”36 The term “hospitality” here is, as Kant realized, mislead-
En g. It refers not to the kindness or generosity one might display to guests, pero
to the right of an individual to engage in commerce on a foreign territory (en un
broad sense of commerce) without being attacked by the nationals of that terri-
conservador. Benhabib takes hospitality, even though limited in this way, to have impli-
cations for “all human rights claims which are cross-border in scope.”37 And she
has confidence that even though there did not exist in Kant’s time, and still does
not in ours, the enforcement mechanisms that lie behind domestic law, these will
come and are “signaled” by this principle. “I follow the Kantian tradition in think-
ing of cosmopolitanism as the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations
among individuals in a global civil society. These norms . . . signal the eventual le-
galization and juridification of the rights claims of human beings everywhere, re-
gardless of their membership in bounded communities.”38
What are the grounds of her confidence in this eventual juridification? I will
mention two.39 The first is the observation of the progress that has already been
hecho. Benhabib is here in the same position as Kant, looking at the international
response in Europe to the ideals of the French Revolution. Kant was tremendous-
ly encouraged by this response, even though he was horrified by some of what the
Revolution produced.40 If we restrict our attention, sin embargo, to the treatment
over the last few years of immigrants in Europe and the United States, observación
gives us at best equivocal results (this essay was written in 2019 and Benhabib’s
volume came out of a set of lectures in 2004). Kant himself was aware that he
could not ground his hope in observation because the evidence was at best am-
biguous, and his argument was therefore transcendental and finally theological.
Segundo, Benhabib appeals to the notion of “democratic iterations”: eso es,
“linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-in-transformation, invoca-
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
tions that also are revocations. They not only change established understandings
but also transform what passes as the valid or established view of an authoritative
precedent.”41 She suggests that politics can be a “jurisgenerative process,” which
creatively intervenes to “mediate between universal norms and the will of dem-
ocratic majorities.” I think she is right to point to this possibility. But as a ground
for hope, we need more than this possibility, because there is equally the possibility
of regress. Democratic iterations can go both toward and away from cosmopoli-
tan norms, and she recognizes that these norms do not depend for their validity
upon what actually transpires. If democratic practice gets closer to the norms, el
norms are the measuring stick for our rejoicing; if the practice gets further away,
these same norms are the measuring stick for our lament. But then we have the
same objection as the first one; our observation over the last few years gives us at
best equivocal evidence.
Should Benhabib keep the elucidation and prescription of the cosmopolitan
norms and drop the teleology? The trouble is that this will put her in the difficul-
ty that Kant raises for Mendelssohn: “he could not reasonably hope to bring this
about all by himself, without others after him continuing along the same path.”42
In “Religion,” Kant puts the point in terms of “the idea of working toward a whole
of which we cannot know whether as a whole it is also in our power.”43 Benhabib
needs the teleology because she needs the sense that despite the equivocal evi-
dencia, she is, por así decirlo, on the winning side; the cosmopolitan norms will in the
end prevail. But then she needs to give us the grounds for the teleology. In Kant’s
trabajar, the grounds are theological. The question is whether we can have such
grounds when we “live in a post-metaphysical universe.”
T here is a way to look at the relation between love of country and love of hu-
manity that derives from the distinction mentioned earlier between our
individual and our common essence. Scotus suggested that our individu-
al essence, our haecceity, is a perfection of the common essence of our species–
a saber, humanity–in the same way that humanity is a perfection of the common
essence of the genus, animality. I have already conceded that countries probably
do not have individual essences in the way that individual humans do, de manera que la
analogy here is incomplete. But my point is that we do not have, when the case of
patriotism and cosmopolitanism is properly understood, two competing loves. En
the same way, my love for another human being in her particularity does not com-
pete with my love for humanity.
There are other sources than Scotus of this sort of view of particularity. Philos-
opher Søren Kierkegaard says,
Humanity’s superiority over animals is not only the one most often mentioned, el
universally human, but is also what is most often forgotten, that within the species
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each individual is the essentially different or distinctive. This superiority is in a very
real sense the human superiority; the former is the superiority of the race over the
animal species. En efecto, if it were not so that one human being, honest, upright, re-
spectable, God-fearing, can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of
what another human being does who is also honest, upright, respectable, God-fear-
En g, then the God-relationship would not essentially exist, would not exist in its deep-
est meaning.44
I want to emphasize two things about this passage. Primero, Kierkegaard is not
saying that our distinctiveness is something different from our humanity; él es
saying, bastante, that our human greatness resides in our ability to be distinctive.
Segundo, he locates this distinctiveness in the unique relation each of us has to God.
George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda is about a man who discovers as an adult
that he has Jewish ancestry.45
It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry–his judgement no lon-
ger wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with the noble par-
tiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy prac-
tical–exchanging that bird’s eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference
and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to
shoulder with men of like inheritance.
De nuevo, I want to emphasize two points. The first is that Eliot is calling the par-
tiality that presupposes our difference from each other “our [eso es, our human]
best strength.” The second is that both the bird’s-eye view and the shoulder-
to-shoulder view are described as forms of reasonableness. We do not need to
leave reason behind in order to identify with our particular ancestry.
I will proceed by giving three brief personal vignettes to illustrate what loving
one’s country might be like if it was construed as a perfection of loving what hu-
man collectives do well. I write with a sense of loss, as an emigrant from Britain
to the United States, which is now my country. I will also immediately concede
the dangers of this way of seeing the love of one’s country, and the corruptions to
which it is liable. Llevar, primero, the aesthetic style that is characteristic of a particular
country’s music at its best periods, Por ejemplo, the Tudor and Jacobean writing
of vocal and consort music (decir, Byrd and Gibbons and Tomkins). I can love this
music in preference to any other, and this is undoubtedly due in part to my hav-
ing grown up with it in a boys’ choir from an early age. There is nothing irrational
about such a preference. This is truly great music, and I do not have to be shak-
en in my love by the recognition that the attachment derives from my upbring-
En g. Tal vez, if I had grown up in New Orleans, I would have loved the jazz of the
1920s and 1930s in just this way. There is a kind of attachment here that requires
a person’s early contact, so that the music is, por así decirlo, in the bones. But I can
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
recognize the good fortune that there is an excellent manifestation of the human
spirit to which I have been given access by the accident of my circumstances. Sec-
ond, I can love a particular piece of land, perhaps the downs above the Chiltern
village where I grew up, and where I know by name all the species of flowers that
grow there. Wendell Berry writes in his novels and essays about this kind of love,
that is of the land and, indissolubly mixed with this, of the people who have made
that land what it is over the generations.46 I think this is possible also in a city; uno
could love Greenwich Village in this sort of way. But if Berry is right, it is harder
because this sort of value requires stability across the generations, and the city is
constantly in flux. Love of a national musical style (as in the first example) or of
a piece of land (as in the second example) are not the same as love of one’s coun-
intentar. But they are, por así decirlo, streams that run into that sea. A third example is the
solidarity one feels when one’s country is attacked. I remember being surprised
by the intensity of my feeling when the United States was attacked on 9/11. O
one can watch in a pub a football match in the World Cup, where one’s national
team has won a surprising victory, and the communal elation can be overwhelm-
En g, hugs and cheers all round, with nothing mean-spirited to spoil it. We seem
to need something larger than ourselves to be proud of in order to be at our best.
These are three vignettes, and in each of them we can see how things could eas-
ily go wrong. I distinguished earlier different ways we might love our country. Nosotros
might love it because of universal properties that some other country might have,
such as tall mountains and fertile plains, or for some unique property, such as its
historia. Or we might love it because it is our country. I urged that it was a false di-
chotomy to allow moral value only to judgments that exclude singular reference
and a false rigorism to deny moral permission to any self-preference. Now we can
return to the case of the Jacobean motet, which I love because it is great music
(perhaps Thomas Tomkins’s “When David Heard”), and we can make another
distinction. It may be that the object of my love is valuable for its universal prop-
erties, but the quality of my love may depend upon my history with this object. I
may love the motet because I sang it as a boy, and it has a certain resonance for me
because of my memory of the people I sang it with. This fact about the quality of
my love does not make my love irrational and does not in any way pollute it. El
value of the motet is a human value. By that I mean that it is a manifestation of a
particular excellence that humans have, of making music together. The scholas-
tic language of a “perfection” fits well here. Music is a human excellence, pero esto
motet exemplifies spectacularly well what that excellence enables us to do. El
fact that I get access to that perfection because of my personal history does not
make my preference suspect.
But now suppose the choir master who loves Tudor and Jacobean vocal and
consort music refuses to allow the choir to sing anything else. There is other
equally great music with the same properties of complexity and expressiveness
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(perhaps even from roughly the same period, but from Tomás Luis de Victoria, para
ejemplo, from the Spanish Counter-Reformation), which he cannot enjoy or al-
low us to enjoy. Now something has gone wrong with his love. It has become blind
and bigoted. There is what I will call a “practical contradiction” between his love
for the Tomkins motet and his refusal to allow value to the Victoria. A practical
contradiction is generated between two maxims when the first maxim prescribes
an action or attitude that acknowledges some value and the second prescribes an
action or attitude that denies that same value.
We can see the same kind of shift in the other two vignettes. Perhaps I love
some particular piece of land. De nuevo, it may be beautiful, if it is farmed land, ser-
cause it manifests a human excellence, but here there will be a large admixture (en
the folds of the hills, Por ejemplo) of a natural beauty beyond the merely human.
If this is in a city, the human excellence will predominate. My love for this land
is not made somehow morally suspect by the fact that I grew up there. But there
are people who cannot see this beauty anywhere else (in Burgundy, Por ejemplo),
and again, there is a practical contradiction in their refusal. In terms of the third
ejemplo, if I find myself moved by love for my country when it is attacked, y yo
endorse that morally as an initial response before going on to evaluate whether
the attack was unprovoked, I should (for the sake of consistency) recognize that
when my country attacks another, I should endorse the similar initial response of
that country’s citizens. There is a human value here, a solidarity that manifests
the human excellence of our associating with each other into poleis, “cities” in the
ancient Greek sense, and this solidarity is a value wherever on the globe it occurs.
We can now propose one criterion for when a local love does become illegiti-
mate by reasonable cosmopolitan standards. It becomes illegitimate when it in-
volves a practical contradiction with a human value. Suppose, Por ejemplo, eso
I say “America first,” and I propose that this means closing the national borders,
making it almost impossible for refugees to pass the initial standards for credi-
ble fear, and separating children from their parents who cross the border whether
they are applying for asylum or not, so as to discourage such application.47 Why
should I think that America is at least potentially great and deserves this kind of
love? Perhaps I love internal freedom of the will (a human excellence), y ahí-
fore the external freedom that allows the expression in outward behavior of this
internal freedom.48 Perhaps I love in America a relatively high degree of external
freedom. But now we can see the practical contradiction. There are two maxims
here and the first maxim (the love of freedom) prescribes an action or attitude
that acknowledges some value and the second (closing the border and separating
familias) prescribes an action or attitude that denies that same value. Kant him-
self, as discussed earlier, phrased this failure as a failure of hospitality. Hay
indeed international laws that guarantee the right of the persecuted to seek sanc-
tuary in other countries, and these make concrete the right to hospitality in Kant’s
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
sense.49 The right to seek sanctuary very plausibly includes the right to have one’s
story of persecution listened to carefully, and the right not to be forcibly separated
from one’s family.
H ow can we avoid this kind of practical contradiction? This returns us fi-
nally to the moral theology. Kant did not think, and he was right not to
think, that merely pointing out a contradiction is sufficient to change be-
havior or policy. We are born, he says, under the evil maxim that prefers our hap-
piness to our duty. This is the basis for the American political realists’ pessimism
about politics in general and international politics in particular, as discussed earli-
es. If we are under the evil maxim, and we find that some practice that gives prece-
dence to our own group is inconsistent with the moral demand, then we will reject
the moral demand for that case. Kant himself, sin embargo, was not pessimistic about
the prospects of a pacific union. The basis for his optimism was his belief in prov-
idence. I will conclude by claiming that a moral theology helps us understand that
patriotism, so far from “sluicing into nationalism” as Niebuhr says, can in fact fit
a moderate cosmopolitanism. These points start from Kant’s moral theology but
go beyond it.
The essential point is about the commands of the God of the great monothe-
isms, though there may be a way to make it in nontheist terms; that is not the
project of this essay. This God both includes us within community and then sends
us out beyond it. I will try to show the implications of this for love of one’s coun-
try by distinguishing, as Kant did, God’s legislative, executive, and judicial func-
tions.50 God’s including and sending out is part of God’s legislative function. Nosotros
should recognize, Kant says, our duties as God’s commands.51 Much contempo-
rary evolutionary psychology has emphasized the role of religion as what social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a “hive switch,” the crucial social practice that
enables group formation: “If religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should
produce parochial altruism.”52 It is true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam em-
phasize duties within the group, but they also emphasize that God commands us
to love or show mercy to the enemy and stranger and they promise resources, ser-
cause of the nature of the commander, for doing so. I am not learned enough to
go beyond the limits of these three faiths, but I believe the same is true beyond
those limits in Hinduism and Buddhism. Within Judaism, we should look at the
Noahide Laws, Por ejemplo; within Christianity, at the parable of the Good Sa-
maritan; and within Islam, at the Mu‘tazilite position on duties to the stranger.53
My point is that it is the very same God who does both the including and the send-
ing out, so that the devotion that is encouraged by the group identity of believers
itself sends them beyond the group to strangers in need.
In terms of God’s executive function, the tension between happiness and duty
that lies behind the political realists’ pessimism is surmounted if Kant was right
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
about the real possibility of the highest good, which is the union of the two. Este
is why Kant says, in the preface to “Religion,” “morality inevitably leads to reli-
gion.”54 Real possibility is different, for Kant, from merely logical possibility, y
en este caso, he thinks the real possibility of the highest good is grounded in the
existence of the “supersensible author of nature” who brings our attempts to fol-
low the moral demand and our happiness together. This means that we can ratio-
nally believe that we do not have to do what immorally privileges ourselves or our
national or political group in order to be happy. Kant held that God coordinates
our individual attempts to do good so that “the forces of single individuals, insuf-
ficient on their own, are united for a common effect.”55 How does this coordina-
tion work? We need to be modest here in our claims to understand divine work-
En g. Kant says in “Toward Perpetual Peace” that “from a morally practical point of
vista . . . as e.g. in the belief that God, by means incomprehensible to us, will make
up for the lack of our own righteousness if only our disposition is genuine, de modo que
we should never slacken in our striving towards the good, the concept of a divine
concursus is quite appropriate and even necessary.”56 Concursus (concurrence) es
where God and mankind work together, though this kind of cooperation goes be-
yond the limits of our understanding.
In terms of God’s judicial function, God is merciful as well as just. Kant here
translates a Lutheran version of the Christian doctrine of justification. In strict
justice, God would not be able to reward with eternal happiness a life that was not
purely good. But God “to whom the temporal condition is nothing” regards, by in-
tellectual intuition, a human life that is moved by the predisposition to goodness
as already completely what it is not yet: a saber, holy.57 Intellectual intuition is
productive, unlike human intuition which is merely receptive. The divine regard
here is, I take it, a translation of the Lutheran doctrine of the divine imputation to
us of Christ’s righteousness.58 The present point is that our political attachments
are to relative goods not absolute goods. To think of my polis as an absolute good
would be idolatry, even though love of country can be a perfection of love of hu-
manity in the way I have been discussing. God’s mercy allows our love of human
beings to be mediated through our love of a particular political grouping, so long
as there is no practical contradiction of the type I have mentioned.
My point in this final section has been that patriotism and moderate cosmopol-
itanism do not need to be seen as competing loves. I have tried to use some theo-
logical resources in order to see how obstacles to this reconciling project might be
removed. But it remains to determine what is the best balance of these commit-
ments in any given polity. Por ejemplo, Germany accepted over one million asy-
lum seekers fleeing war and instability in the Middle East in 2015.59 Was Germany
up to that challenge, or did the sudden influx of immigrants create a backlash that
dangerously propelled the rise of nationalist anti-immigrant parties? The moder-
ate cosmopolitanism in my essay does not answer this question. But it points to a
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
possible practical contradiction between large-scale exclusion and a love of Ger-
many that lived through the pulling down of the Berlin Wall and repents of the
nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century.60 It is democracies that are
best able to find the balance here because they best give voice to the stakeholders
within the country. But a Kantian moral theology adds that the refugees also are
ends in themselves, and God’s help is offered to meet the moral demand that God
makes of us.
nota del autor
I am grateful to Charles Lockwood for an excellent set of questions about an earlier
draft of this essay, and to Robert Audi for extensive comments on an earlier draft.
Sobre el Autor
John E. Hare is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Di-
vinity School. He is the author of God’s Command (2015), God and Morality: A Philo-
sophical History (2007), Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life (2002),
God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (2001), and The Moral
Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (1996).
notas finales
1 See Harry R. David and Robert C. Bien, editores., Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: His Political Philos-
ophy and Its Application to Our Age as Expressed in His Writings (Nueva York: Scribner’s, 1960),
85; and Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics
(Nueva York: Scribner’s, 1932), 91.
2 There is a large literature on the relation between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Uno
recent collection of sources is Claudia Schumann, “Which Love of Country? Tensions,
Questions and Contexts for Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Education,” Journal
of the Philosophy of Education 50 (2) (2016). She is responding to a shift in Martha Nuss-
baum’s position. Nussbaum had argued for a replacement of patriotism by cosmopol-
itanism in Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Coun-
intentar? Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Bostón: Prensa de baliza, 1996), 3–17.
More recently, she has argued for a reconciliation in Martha Nussbaum, “Towards a
Globally Sensitive Patriotism,” Dædalus 137 (3) (Verano 2008): 78–93. An excellent
earlier collection of sources is Pauline Kleingeld, “Kantian Patriotism,” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 29 (4) (2000): 313–341. I will be making use of some of her distinctions, pero
she does not acknowledge the centrality of Kant’s moral theology.
3 I have done more exegesis of Kant in John Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 145–156. I am relying on an interpretation that derives ul-
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
timately from H. j. Paton, from whom my father R. METRO. Hare learnt it as an undergrad-
uate. See H. j. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Tiptree,
Reino Unido: Anchor Press, 1946), 133–164; y r. METRO. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Lev-
los, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 107–116.
4 I will reference Kant’s texts by the volume and page number of the Berlin Academy Edi-
ción (Berlina: George Reiner, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900–). The English translations
I will use are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant,
“Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)" [Berlin Academy Edition, volumen. 4,
421], in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 73.
5 Hare, Moral Thinking, 108.
6 Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)" [429], 80.
7 I have defended this kind of moral particularism in John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford:
prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2015), 147–151. It is a good way, but not Kant’s way, to un-
derstand the formula of humanity, that it requires me to love what is unique about my
neighbor as well as her humanity, porque (as I argue in this essay) what is unique (el
haecceity) is a perfection of what is held in common.
8 Kleingeld, in “Kantian Patriotism,” distinguishes between three kinds of patriotism: civ-
ic patriotism, nationalist patriotism, and trait-based patriotism. In the first, una persona
is committed to support her own country because it is just and democratic and can-
not sustain that character without the support of its citizens. Nationalist patriotism is
based on love for one’s own nation as necessary for a good psychological identity-for-
formación, and Kleingeld cites Alasdair MacIntyre as a proponent, based on Alasdair Mac-
Intyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1995), 209–228. MacIntyre laments the condition of being “doomed to
rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere.” Trait-based patriotism is loyalty to one’s own
country because of features it possesses that could in principle be possessed by other
countries.
9 Duns Scotus, Lectura II, dist. 3.
10 I am taking this distinction from Hare, Moral Thinking, 44–64.
11 Derek Parfit, On What Matters, volumen. 1 (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2013), 137. He calls
this a “wide value-based objective view,” but he is not distinguishing, as I have just
hecho, between two levels of moral thinking.
12 This is from Richard W. Molinero, “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Philoso-
phy and Public Affairs 27 (3) (1998): 209. It is discussed in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cos-
mopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Nueva York: W.. W.. norton & Compañía, 2006),
164 ff.
13 The term “extreme cosmopolitanism” is from Robert Audi; see Robert Audi, “Religion,
Política, and Citizenship,” in Reasons, Rights, and Values (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2015), 286.
14 Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge:
Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2005), 3.
15 Darrel Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Nueva York: Westview, 2002), 49.
215
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
16 Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations (chicago: Universidad de
Chicago Press, 1953).
17 I have written about these two thinkers as well as George Kennan at greater length in
John Hare and Carey Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs (Nueva York: Calle. Martin’s Press,
1982), esp. cap. 2. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Nuevo
york: Scribner’s, 1932); and Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1946).
18 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” [Berlin Academy
Edition, volumen. 6, 29–39], in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and
George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1996).
19 David and Good, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, 85. Morgenthau attended Niebuhr’s lectures
at Harvard and called him the greatest political thinker of his generation. For Morgen-
thau, as for Niebuhr, morality characteristically demands complete self-sacrifice, y
we cannot achieve this politically because we are infected by the animus dominandi. Él
quoted Luther here, just as Niebuhr did, in Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics,
192–196.
20 For Kant, real possibility, unlike merely logical possibility, must be grounded in what is
actual.
21 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 91.
22 I have addressed this in more detail in John Hare, “Kantian Ethics, International Poli-
tics, and the Enlargement of the Foedus Pacificum,” in Sovereignty at the Crossroads: Morality
and International Politics in the Post–Cold War Era, ed. luis e.. Lugo (Lanham, Maryland.: Fila-
man and Littlefield, 1996), 71–92. There is an excellent response by David Lumsdaine,
“Moral Rationality and Particularity: A Response to John Hare,” in the same volume.
23 Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)" [Berlin Academy Edition, volumen. 8, 356],
in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, 311–351. A state is only a republic in the required sense
if it operates three principles of government: the freedom of every member of the soci-
ety as a human being, the equality with every other member as a subject, and the inde-
pendence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen. Michael Doyle, in a series
of articles in the 1980s, argued that with a couple of exceptions, Kant’s prediction has
turned out to be correct. Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,"
Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (3) (1983): 205–235, 325–253. Kant himself distinguish-
es between republicanism and democracy. See Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)"
[352–353], but he is talking about democracies that do not respect individual rights.
24 Anthony Lake quoted in Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed,"
The New York Times, Septiembre 22, 1993. This was not a merely partisan commitment.
Ronald Reagan already had proclaimed to the British Parliament in June 1982, “a global
campaign for democratic development” or “campaign for freedom,” which he claimed
would strengthen the prospects for a world at peace; The New York Times, Junio 9, 1982.
25 An excellent example is the case of Argentina. See Peter H. Herrero, “The Breakdown of
Democracy in Argentina, 1916–30,” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: América Latina,
ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 19.
Consider also the cases of Germany, Italia, Peru, Brasil, Colombia, and Venezuela; ver
Guillermo O’Donnell, “Permanent Crisis and the Failure to Create a Democratic Re-
gime,” in ibid., 142.
216
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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPatriotism & Teología moral
26 There is a vivid indictment in Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations.
27 A fuller essay would look at texts from Kant’s “Religion,” “The End of All Things,” “Con-
flict of the Faculties,” and “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)."
28 Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)" [366].
29 Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2006). en un
longer version of this essay, I would consider also the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah,
and especially his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.
30 Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty
and Citizenship,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin
and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, Masa.: La prensa del MIT, 1998), 115.
31 Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 169–170.
32 Ibídem., 68.
33 Ibídem., 72.
34 Ibídem., 177.
35 The term “unstable” is Kant’s, from Volckmann’s notes on Kant’s “Natürliche Theolo-
gie,” Berlin Academy Edition, volumen. 28, 1151. Kant thought that perseverance in the mor-
al life without belief in God was rationally unstable, though he knew people who lived
with this instability and he thought of Spinoza as one such person.
36 Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)" [357] quoted in Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism,
21. See also Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)" [Berlin Academy Edi-
ción, volumen. 6, 352], in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor.
37 Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 149.
38 Ibídem., 20.
39 In a longer essay, I would add a third: her appeal to Hegel’s notion of concrete universals.
This is not the right place to discuss whether this notion is coherent, and a more mod-
est point is that the Hegelian dialectic of particular and universal is a history of Geist or
Spirit, ending in the Absolute Spirit as the all-in-all. We cannot appeal to this notion in
a “post-metaphysical universe.”
40 Jeremy Waldron in the same volume bases his confidence about the emergence and in-
ternalization of cosmopolitan norms on the increasing interdependence of nations and
the rising levels of international trade and commerce; Jeremy Waldron, “Cosmopol-
itan Norms,” commentary in Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 94. But Benhabib is
skeptical of this line of analysis. She thinks it sounds like nineteenth-century mercan-
tilism; Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 153–154.
41 Ibídem., 48–49.
42 Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of
No Use in Practice (1793)" [Berlin Academy Edition, volumen. 8, 307–313], in Practical Philoso-
phy, ed. Gregor, 273–309.
43 Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” [98].
44 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. hong
(Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 1988), 230.
217
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149 (3) Summer 2020John E. Hare
45 The case is discussed in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvii–xviii. The quotation is from George
eliot, Daniel Deronda (Londres: Pingüino, 1995), 745.
46 Por ejemplo, Wendell Berry, Recordando (Nueva York: North Point Press, 1988). In my
home village, the descendants of the families who came to build the church and alms-
houses and school in 1480 are still living in the village.
47 See Miriam Jordan, “Big Jump in Rejections at the Border as Asylum Seekers Face New
Hurdles,"El New York Times, Agosto 8, 2018.
48 See Kant, “On the Common Saying” [290].
49 See Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 46 ff.
50 See Immanuel Kant, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” [Berlina
Academy Edition, volumen. 8, 257].
51 See Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” [129]; Immanuel Kant, Lectures on
Ethics (collins) [Berlin Academy Edition, volumen. 27, 274]; and Kant, “Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason” [154].
52 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (Nueva York: Vintage Books, 2012), 308. I have dis-
cussed this work in Hare, God’s Command, 267–272.
53 I have discussed all of these in ibid., 305 ff.
54 Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason," 6.
55 Ibídem., 98. See Hare, God’s Command, 50–53.
56 Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)," 362.
57 Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason (1788)," 123.
58 I have done some exploration of this theology in John Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics,
Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), cap. 8 y 9.
59 The question about Germany is Charles Lockwood’s, as is the following quotation from
Merkel.
60 Angela Merkel said, “I lived behind a fence for too long for me to now wish for those
times to return”; Angela Merkel quoted in Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Refugee Crises
Once Threatened to Sink Angela Merkel’s Career. How Did the German Chancellor
Weather the Storm?” The Washington Post, Septiembre 21, 2017.
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