The Euthyphro Dilemma: What Makes Something Moral?

The sixteenth-century nun and mystic, Saint Teresa. In her autobiography, she wrote that she ‘was very fond of St. Augustine … for he was a sinner too

By Keith Tidman  

‘Consider this: Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?’ — Plato, Euthyphro

Plato has Socrates asking just this of the Athenian prophet Euthyphro in one of his most famous dialogues. The characteristically riddlesome inquiry became known as the Euthyphro dilemma. Another way to frame the issue is to flip the question around: Is an action wrong because the gods forbid it, or do the gods forbid it because it is wrong? This version presents what is often referred to as the ‘two horns’ of the dilemma.

 

Put another way, if what’s morally good or bad is only what the gods arbitrarily make something, called the divine command theory (or divine fiat) — which Euthyphro subscribed to — then the gods may be presumed to have agency and omnipotence over these and other matters. However, if, instead, the gods simply point to what’s already, independently good or bad, then there must be a source of moral judgment that transcends the gods, leaving that other, higher source of moral absolutism yet to be explained millennia later. 

 

In the ancient world the gods notoriously quarreled with one another, engaging in scrappy tiffs over concerns about power, authority, ambition, influence, and jealousy, on occasion fueled by unabashed hubris. Disunity and disputation were the order of the day. Sometimes making for scandalous recounting, these quarrels comprised the stuff of modern students’ soap-opera-styled mythological entertainment. Yet, even when there is only one god, disagreements over orthodoxy and morality occur aplenty. The challenge mounted by the dilemma is as important to today’s world of a generally monotheistic god as it was to the polytheistic predispositions of ancient Athens. The medieval theologians’ explanations are not enough to persuade:

‘Since good as perceived by the intellect is the object of the will, it is impossible for God to will anything but what His wisdom approves. This is as it were, His law of justice, in accordance with which His will is right and just. Hence, what He does according to His will He does justly: as we do justly when we do according to the law. But whereas law comes to us from some higher power, God is a law unto Himself’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 21, first article reply to Obj. 2).

In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Leibniz offered a firm challenge to ‘divine command theory’, in asking the following question about whether right and wrong can be known only by divine revelation. He suggested, rather, there ought to be reasons, apart from religious tradition only, why particular behaviour is moral or immoral:

 

‘In saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but sheerly by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realising it, all the love of God and all his glory. For why praise him for he has done if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing exactly the contrary?’ (Discourse on Metaphysics, 1686). 

 

Meantime, today’s monotheistic world religions offer, among other holy texts, the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah, bearing the moral and legal decrees professed to be handed down by God. But even in the situations’ dissimilarity — the ancient world of Greek deities and modern monotheism (as well as some of today’s polytheistic practices) — both serve as examples of the ‘divine command theory’. That is, what’s deemed pious is presumed to be the case precisely because God chooses to love it, in line with the theory. That pious something or other is not independently sitting adrift, noncontingently virtuous in its own right, with nothing transcendentally making it so.

 

This presupposes that God commands only what is good. It also presupposes that, for example, things like the giving of charity, the avoidance of adultery, and the refrain from stealing, murdering, and ‘graven images’ have their truth value from being morally good if, and only if, God loves these and other commandments. The complete taxonomy (or classification scheme) of edicts being aimed at placing guardrails on human behaviour in the expectation of a nobler, more sanctified world. But God loving what’s morally good for its own sake — that is, apart from God making it so — clearly denies ‘divine command theory’.

 

For, if the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, which is one of the interpretations offered by Plato (through the mouth of Socrates) in challenging Euthyphro’s thinking, then it opens the door to an authority higher than God. Where matters of morality may exist outside of God’s reach, suggesting something other than God being all-powerful. Such a scenario pushes back against traditionally Abrahamic (monotheist) conceptualisations.

 

Yet, whether the situation calls for a single almighty God or a yet greater power of some indescribable sort, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who like St. Thomas Aquinas and Averroës believed that God commands only what is good, argued that God’s laws must conform to ‘natural reason’. Hobbes’s point makes for an essential truism, especially if the universe is to have rhyme and reason. This being true even if the governing forces of natural law and of objective morality are not entirely understood or, for that matter, not compressible into a singularly encompassing ‘theory of all’. 

 

Because of the principles of ‘divine command theory’, some people contend the necessary takeaway is that there can be no ethics in the absence of God to judge something as pious. In fact, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, presumptuously declared that ‘if God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Surely not so; you don’t have to be a theist of faith to spot the shortsighted dismissiveness of his assertion. After all, an atheist or agnostic might recognise the benevolence, even the categorical need, for adherence to manmade principles of morality, to foster the welfare of humanity at large for its own sufficient sake. Secular humanism, in other words — which greatly appeals to many people.

 

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative supports these human-centered, do-unto-others notions: ‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. An ethic of respect toward all, as we mortals delineate between right and wrong. Even with ‘divine command theory’, it seems reasonable to suppose that a god would have reasons for preferring that moral principles not be arrived at willy-nilly.

  

Life in the Slow Lane

Illustration by Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk

By Andrew Porter

Three common plagues were cited in the early New England settlements: wolves, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes. Our current-day ‘settlements’ – cities and towns – now have their own plagues: a crush of too many people, crummy attitudes, pollution, and retrogressive political actions. How do freedom and power play out amongst individuals and communities?

One lens that can help us gain perspective on our life in relation to necessities and obligations beyond us, is to think about our agency and our values. If we get it right about what freedom and power are, we might clarify what values we want to exercise and embody.

People pushed back against the wolves and did what they could against other ‘scourges’, most regularly by killing them. This seemed like freedom – power asserted. Over the centuries, peoples around the world – coursing through trials like wars and epidemics and bouts of oppression, as well as various forms of enlightenment and progress on human rights – have struggled to articulate freedom and power to make existence shine. To fulfill purposes is the human juggernaut; but what purposes? It is pretty vital that we figure out what freedom and power are in this time of converging crises, so that actual life might flourish. The trouble is, so many people are commonly thrown off by false and unjustifiable versions of freedom and power.

In our fast-paced life, we so-called civilised humans have to decide how to achieve balance. This means some kind of genuine honouring of life in its physical and spiritual aspects. The old work-life balance is only part of it. What does vitality itself suggest is optimal or possible, and how do we make sense of what's at stake as we prioritise between competing goods?

If a parent decides that it is a priority to take care of a newborn child rather than sacrifice that time and importance to time at work, they may well be making a fine decision. Freedom here is in the service of vital things. We might say that in general freedom is that which makes you whole and that power is the exercise of your wholeness. Or, freedom is the latitude to live optimally and power is potency for good.

Since freedom is eschewing the lesser and opting for and living what has more value, we had better do some good defining. All situations confirm that freedom only accrues with what is healthful and attends flourishing. If one says, “Top functioning for me is having a broad range of options, the whole moral range,” you can see how this is problematic. We as humans have the range, but our freedom is in limiting ourselves to the good portion.

Power is commonly considered that which lords the most force over others and exerts the biggest influence broadly. Isn’t this what a hurricane does, or a viral infection, or an invasion? If you look around, though, all the people with so-called power actually dominate using borrowed power: that is, power borrowed from others or obtained on the backs of others, whether human or otherwise. This kind of power – often manifesting in greed and exploitation – is mere thievery. And what about power over one’s own liabilities to succumb or other temptations?

For many people, life in the slow lane is much more satisfying than that in the fast one. However, the big deal may be about getting off the highway altogether. What I am suggesting is that satisfaction and contentment are in the proper measure of freedom and power. And the best definition for organisms is probably that long-established by the planet. Earth has in place various forms of ‘nature’ with common value-elements.

For us, to be natural probably means being both like and unlike the rest of nature. It is some kind of unique salubrity. An ever-greater bulk of the world lives in a busy, highly industrialized society, and the idea of living naturally seems like something that goes against our human mission to separate ourselves from the natural world. But the question remains: is the freedom and power that comes with ‘natural living’ an antiquated thing, or can you run the world on it; can it work for a life?

Kant spoke of our animality in his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794) part of the Critique of Pure Reason and part of his investigation of the ethical life. In this, he argues that animality is an ineliminable and irreducible component of human nature and that the human being, taken as a natural being, is an animal being. Kant says that animality is an “original predisposition [anlage] to the good in human nature”. We increasingly see that being human means selecting the wisdom of nature, often summed up in ecological equipoise, so that we can survive, thrive, and have reason to call ourselves legitimate. Freedom in this consists of developing greater consciousness about our long-term place on Earth (if such is possible) and legitimate power in in exact proportion to the degree we limit ourselves to human ecology.

Life on its own grass-centered lane has figured out what true freedom and power are. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and global spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hạnh once wrote:

“Around us, life bursts with miracles – a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops....When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”

Figuring out the most efficacious forms of freedom and power promises to make us treat ourselves and others more justly.

Humanism: Intersections of Morality and the Human Condition

Kant urged that we ‘treat people as ends in 
themselves, never as means to an end’

Posted by Keith Tidman

At its foundation, humanism’s aim is to empower people through conviction in the philosophical bedrock of self-determination and people’s capacity to flourish — to arrive at an understanding of truth and to shape their own lives through reason, empiricism, vision, reflection, observation, and human-centric values. Humanism casts a wide net philosophically — ethically, metaphysically, sociologically, politically, and otherwise — for the purpose of doing what’s upright in the context of individual and community dignity and worth.

Humanism provides social mores, guiding moral behaviour. The umbrella aspiration is unconditional: to improve the human condition in the present, while endowing future generations with progressively better conditions. The prominence of the word ‘flourishing’ is more than just rhetoric. In placing people at the heart of affairs, humanism stresses the importance of the individual living both free and accountable — to hand off a better world. In this endeavour, the ideal is to live unbound by undemocratic doctrine, instead prospering collaboratively with fellow citizens and communities. Immanuel Kant underscored this humanistic respect for fellow citizens, urging quite simply, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality, that we ‘treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’. 

The history of humanistic thinking is not attributed to any single proto-humanist. Nor has it been confined to any single place or time. Rather, humanist beliefs trace a path through the ages, being reshaped along the way. Among the instrumental contributors were Gautama Buddha in ancient India; Lao Tzu and Confucius in ancient China; Thales, Epicurus, Pericles, Democritus, and Thucydides in ancient Greece; Lucretius and Cicero in ancient Rome; Francesco Petrarch, Sir Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, and François Rabelais during the Renaissance; and Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, A.J. Ayer, A.C. Grayling, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among the modern humanist-leaning philosophers. (Dewey contributed, in the early 1930s, to drafting the original Humanist Manifest.) The point being that the story of humanism is one of ubiquity and variety; if you’re a humanist, you’re in good company. The English philosopher A.J. Ayer, in The Humanist Outlook, aptly captured the philosophy’s human-centric perspective:

‘The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect; tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs’.

For humanists, moral decisions and deeds do not require a supernatural, transcendent being. To the contrary: the almost-universal tendency to anthropomorphise God, to attribute human characteristics to God, is an expedient to help make God relatable and familiar that can, at the same time, prove disquieting to some people. Rather, humanists’ belief is generally that any god, no matter how intense one’s faith, can only ever be an unknowable abstraction. To that point, the opinion of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume — ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’ — goes to the heart of humanists’ rationalist philosophy regarding faith. Yet, theism and humanism can coexist; they do not necessarily cancel each other out. Adherents of humanism have been religious, agnostic, and atheist — though it’s true that secular humanism, as a subspecies of humanism, rejects a religious basis for human morality.

For humanists there is typically no expectation of after-life rewards and punishments, mysteries associated with metaphorical teachings, or inspirational exhortations by evangelising trailblazers. There need be no ‘ghost in the machine’, to borrow an expression from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle: no invisible hand guiding the laws of nature, or making exceptions to nature’s axioms simply to make ‘miracles’ possible, or swaying human choices, or leaning on so-called revelations and mysticism, or bending the arc of human history. Rather, rationality, naturalism, and empiricism serve as the drivers of moral behaviour, individually and societally. The pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras summed up these ideas about the challenges of knowing the supernatural:

‘About the gods, I’m unable to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form: for there are things that hinder sure knowledge — the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life’.

The critical thinking that’s fundamental to pro-social humanism thus moves the needle from an abstraction to the concreteness of natural and social science. And the handwringing over issues of theodicy no longer matters; evil simply happens naturally and unavoidably, in the course of everyday events. In that light, human nature is recognised not to be perfectible, but nonetheless can be burnished by the influences of culture, such as education, thoughtful policymaking, and exemplification of right behaviour. This model assumes a benign form of human centrism. ‘Benign’ because the model rejects doctrinaire ideology, instead acknowledging that while there may be some universal goods cutting across societies, moral decision-making takes account of the often-unique values of diverse cultures.

A quality that distinguishes humanity is its persistence in bettering the lot of people. Enabling people to live more fully — from the material to the cultural and spiritual — is the manner in which secular humanism embraces its moral obligation: obligation of the individual to family, community, nation, and globe. These interested parties must operate with a like-minded philosophical believe in the fundamental value of all life. In turn, reason and observable evidence may lead to share moral goods, as well as progress on the material and immaterial sides of life's ledger.

Humanism acknowledges the sanctification of life, instilling moral worthiness. That sanctification propels human behaviour and endeavour: from progressiveness to altruism, a global outlook, critical thinking, and inclusiveness. Humanism aspires to the greater good of humanity through the dovetailing of various goods: ranging across governance, institutions, justice, philosophical tenets, science, cultural traditions, mores, and teachings. Collectively, these make social order, from small communities to nations, possible. The naturalist Charles Darwin addressed an overarching point about this social order:

‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him’.

Within humanism, systemic challenges regarding morality present themselves: what people can know about definitions of morality; how language bears on that discussion; the value of benefits derived from decisions, policies, and deeds; and, thornily, deciding what actually benefits humanity. There is no taxonomy of all possible goods, for handy reference; we’re left to figure it out. There is no single, unconditional moral code, good for everyone, in every circumstance, for all time. There is only a limited ability to measure the benefits of alternative actions. And there are degrees of confidence and uncertainty in the ‘truth-value’ of moral propositions.

Humanism empowers people not only to help avoid bad results, but to strive for the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people — a utilitarian metric, based on the consequences of actions, famously espoused by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, among others. It empowers society to tame conflicting self-interests. It systematises the development of right and wrong in the light of intent, all the while imagining the ideal human condition, albeit absent the intrusion of dogma.

Agency in promoting the ‘flourishing’ of humankind, within this humanist backdrop, is shared. People’s search for truth through natural means, to advance everyone’s best interest, is preeminent. Self-realisation is the central tenet. Faith and myth are insufficient. As modern humanism proclaims, this is less a doctrine than a ‘life stance’. Social order, forged on the anvil of humanism and its core belief in being wholly responsible for our own choices and lives, through rational measures, is the product of that shared agency.

Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?

Posted by Keith Tidman

I’m a Platonist. Well, at least insofar as how mathematics is presumed ‘discovered’ and, in its being so, serves as the basis of reality. Mathematics, as the mother tongue of the sciences, is about how, on one important epistemological level, humankind seeks to understand the universe. To put this into context, the American physicist Eugene Wigner published a paper in 1960 whose title even referred to the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, before trying to explain why it might be so. His English contemporary, Paul Dirac, dared to go a step farther, declaring, in a phrase with a theological and celestial ring, that ‘God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world’. All of which leads us to this consequential question: Is mathematics invented or discovered, and does mathematics underpin universal reality?

‘In every department of physical science, there is only so much science … as there is mathematics’ — Immanuel Kant

If mathematics is simply a tool of humanity that happens to align with and helps to describe the natural laws and organisation of the universe, then one might say that mathematics is invented. As such, math is an abstraction that reduces to mental constructs, expressed through globally agreed-upon symbols. In this capacity, these constructs serve — in the complex realm of human cognition and imagination — as a convenient expression of our reasoning and logic, to better grasp the natural world. According to this ‘anti-realist’ school of thought, it is through our probing that we observe the universe and that we then build mathematical formulae in order to describe what we see. Isaac Newton, for example, developed calculus to explain such things as the acceleration of objects and planetary orbits. Mathematicians sometimes refine their formulae later, to increasingly conform to what scientists learn about the universe over time. Another way to put it is that anti-realist theory is saying that without humankind around, mathematics would not exist, either. Yet, the flaw in this paradigm is that it leaves the foundation of reality unstated. It doesn’t meet Galileo’s incisive and ponderable observation that:

‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’

If, however, mathematics is regarded as the unshakably fundamental basis of the universe — whereby it acts as the native language of everything (embodying universal truths) — then humanity’s role becomes to discover the underlying numbers, equations, and axioms. According to this view, mathematics is intrinsic to nature and provides the building blocks — both proximate and ultimate — of the entire universe. An example consists of that part of the mathematics of Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicting the existence of ‘gravitational waves’; the presence of these waves would not be proven empirically until this century, through advanced technology and techniques. Per this ‘Platonic’ school of thought, the numbers and relationships associated with mathematics would nonetheless still exist, describing phenomena and governing how they interrelate, bringing a semblance of order to the universe — a math-based universe that would exist even absent humankind. After all, this underlying mathematics existed before humans arrived upon the scene — awaiting our discovery — and this mathematics will persist long after us.

If this Platonic theory is the correct way to look at reality, as I believe it is, then it’s worth taking the issue to the next level: the unique role of mathematics in formulating truth and serving as the underlying reality of the universe — both quantitative and qualitative. As Aristotle summed it up, the ‘principles of mathematics are the principles of all things’. Aristotle’s broad stroke foreshadowed the possibility of what millennia later became known in the mathematical and science world as a ‘theory of everything’, unifying all forces, including the still-defiant unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. 

As the Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark provocatively put it, ‘There is only mathematics; that is all that exists’ — an unmistakably monist perspective. He colorfully goes on:

‘We all live in a gigantic mathematical object — one that’s more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical— including you.’

The point is that mathematics doesn’t just provide ‘models’ of physical, qualitative, and relational reality; as Descartes suspected centuries ago, mathematics is reality.

Mathematics thus doesn’t care, if you will, what one might ‘believe’; it dispassionately performs its substratum role, regardless. The more we discover the universe’s mathematical basis, the more we build on an increasingly robust, accurate understanding of universal truths, and get ever nearer to an uncannily precise, clear window onto all reality — foundational to the universe. 

In this role, mathematics has enormous predictive capabilities that pave the way to its inexhaustibly revealing reality. An example is the mathematical hypothesis stating that a particular fundamental particle exists whose field is responsible for the existence of mass. The particle was theoretically predicted, in mathematical form, in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs. Existence of the particle — named the Higgs boson — was confirmed by tests some fifty-plus years later. Likewise, Fermat’s famous last theorem, conjectured in 1637, was not proven mathematically until some 360 years later, in 1994 — yet the ‘truth value’ of the theorem nonetheless existed all along.

Underlying this discussion is the unsurprising observation by the early-20th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, who noted, in understated fashion, that ‘Experience by itself is not science’ — while elsewhere his referring to ‘the profusion of insights’ that could be obtained from mathematical research. That process is one of discovery. Discovery, that is, of things that are true, even if we had not hitherto known them to be so. The ‘profusion of insights’ obtained in that mathematical manner renders a method that is complete and consistent enough to direct us to a category of understanding whereby all reality is mathematical reality.

Do We Need Perpetual Peace?

By Bohdana Kurylo

Immanuel Kant viewed war as an attribute of the state of nature, in which ‘the freedom of folly’ has not yet been replaced by ‘the freedom of reason’. His philosophy has influenced the ways in which contemporary philosophers conceive of political violence, and seek to eliminate it from global politics: through international law, collective security, and human rights. Yet is perpetual peace an intrinsically desirable destination for us today?

For Kant, peace was a question of knowledge – insofar as knowledge teaches us human nature and the experience of all centuries. It was a matter of scrutinising all claims to knowledge about human potential, that stem from feelings, instincts, memories, and other results of lived experience. On the basis of such knowledge, he thought, war could be eliminated.

Kant realised, however, that not all human knowledge is true. In particular, our ever-present possibility of war serves as evidence of the inadequacy of existing knowledge to conceive the means and principles by which perpetual peace may be established. Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism explained this inadequacy by claiming that humans experience only appearances (phenomena) and not things-in-themselves (noumena). What we think we know, is only appearance – our interpretation of the world. Beyond this lies a real world of things-in-themselves, the comprehension of which is simply unattainable for the human mind.

While realists, on this basis, insist on the inevitability of anarchy and war, Kant conceived that the noumenal realm could emancipate our reason from the limitations of empiricism, so enabling us to achieve perpetual peace. He sought to show that we have a categorical moral duty to act morally, even though the empirical world seems to be resistant to it. And since there is no scientific evidence that perpetual peace is impossible, he held that it ought to remain a possibility. Moreover, since moral practical reason claims that war is absolutely evil, humans have a moral duty to discipline their worst instincts to bring about perpetual peace.

Claiming to be guided by the universal reason, Kant proposed three institutional principles which could become the platform for a transnational civil society, superseding potential sources of conflict:

• The road to peace starts with the transition from the natural condition to an ‘original contract, upon which all rightful legislation of a people must be founded’, which needs to be republican.
• In order to overcome the natural condition internationally, external lawlessness between states should be solved by creating a ‘Federation of Free States’.
• Finally, a peaceful membership in a global republic would not be possible without ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility […] on someone else’s territory’ – the cosmopolitan right to universal hospitality.

Yet Kant, in spite of wanting to emancipate humans from natural determination and past experience, seems to have fallen under the same phenomenal influence as the realists. His pessimistic view of human instincts, which needed to be suppressed to avoid war, strongly reflected an internalisation of the social perceptions of human nature in his time. Humans, he thought, by choosing to overcome their instincts, ought to move from the tutelage of human nature to a state of freedom. The problem is that this ‘freedom’ was already socially defined. Therefore, viewing war as a purely negative phenomenon that hinders human progress, Kant never subjected his reasoning to the total scrutiny which he himself advocated.

Consequently Kant offered a rather deterministic solution, which merely aimed at social ‘tranquillisation’ through feeding people the ready-made values of global peace. Hence one observes his rather excessive emphasis on obedience to authority: ‘all resistance against the supreme legislative power […] is the greatest and most punishable crime’. Kant’s individual requires a master who will ‘break his self-will and force him to obey’. In turn, the master needs to be kept under the control of his own master. Crucially, this would destroy the liberty to conceive for oneself whether war is necessarily such a negative phenomenon.

Even such pacification, through obedience to authority, is unlikely to bring perpetual peace, for it refuses to understand the underlying factors that lead humans into war with each other. Perhaps more effective would be to try to find the cause of war, prior to searching for its cure.

Kant missed the idea that war may be the consequence of the current value system, which suppresses the true human will. Thus Friedrich Nietzsche argued for the need to revaluate values. Being unafraid of war, he recognised its creative potential to bring about a new culture of politics. Where Kant’s peace would merely be a temporary pacification, a complete revaluation of values could potentially create a society that would be beyond the issues of war and peace.