John Rawls’ account in Law of Peoples of a realist utopia composed of a society of liberal and decent peoples is a stark contrast to his description of “outlaw states,” which seek to undermine the legal and moral frameworks that constitute a pacific global order. Rawls argues that outlaw states cannot conceive of political accommodation with their external enemies; instead, they opt for the rule of force, terror, and brutality. Rawls even urges that liberal peoples are justified in maintaining a nuclear deterrent to prevent outlaw states from obtaining and then using nuclear weapons on liberal societies if the opportunity arose. This article examines the paradoxical question of liberal societies that, in the name of opposing outlaw states, undertake security policies which correspond to “outlaw” statist behavior. It then explores the implications of liberal roguishness for the legitimacy of liberal international security arrangements, such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Regime.
In 1976 the noted Catholic ethicist J. Bryan Hehir expressed concern about the waning sense of moral urgency over the existence of nuclear weapons with each passing year that superpower nuclear war was avoided. Acknowledging that international ethicists had justifiably turned to other global problems, such as world hunger and poverty, Hehir still worried that the relative exile [of the ethical analysis of the nuclear] issue [that] has endured in the academy . . . , if not in government during the last decade, is not healthy. The price of error on this issue is still catastrophic; the chance of redress is minimal. Yet each year the genie kept in the political bottle contributes to our confidence of control and can contribute to our lack of attention. But the complexity of the issue and the costs of ignorance require attention, ethically and politically. 1 This hiatus in nuclear ethics lasted until the Reagan administration reasserted a confrontational posture with the former Soviet Union, including a proposed comprehensive missile defense system (colloquially referred to as Star Wars), at which time popular fears of nuclear war resurfaced. In response, the journal Ethics devoted an entire volume in 1985 to superpower nuclear ethics. 2 Nonetheless, another hiatus followed the end of the cold war in anticipation of a broad peace dividend. International ethicists again turned their attention from issues of great power security to such demanding and seemingly more immediate issues as human rights, humanitarian intervention, refugees, democratization, and economic globalization.
Recent revelations of Iran's hitherto undisclosed uranium enrichment programs have once again incited western fears that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons' capability. Their fears seem motivated by more than the concern for compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Rather, they seem strongly connected to the western moral assumptions about what kind of government or people can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal. In this paper, I critically examine the western assumptions of the immorality of contemporary nuclear proliferation from an international ethical stance that otherwise might be expected to give it unequivocal support -the stance of Kantian nonideal theory. In contrast to the uses of Kant that were prominent during the Cold War, I advance and apply a sketch of a Kantian nonideal theory that specifies the conditions (although strict conditions) under which nuclear proliferation for states like Iran is morally permissible even though the NPT forbids it.
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