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Cover of: Zum Verschwinden des Vertrauens in Theorien der Rationalität und in der Praxis des Krieges
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer

Zum Verschwinden des Vertrauens in Theorien der Rationalität und in der Praxis des Krieges

Section: Articles
Volume 69 (2022) / Issue 1, pp. 5-13 (9)
Published 03.05.2022
DOI 10.1628/phr-2022-0008
Published in German.
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Summary
Free cooperation as well as peace are impossible without trust as an unconditioned prerequisite. Therefore, both formal theories of decisions under insecure conditions, as well as any (system-theoretical) social- or minimal moral theory of purely rational pursuit of well-understood self-interest (Nash, Becker, Luhmann; Lewis, Axelrod, Gauthier) founder on the fact that they only model the thinking of an entity from the animal kingdom in terms of cognition. Such animals are not even capable of practical reason in the sense of Kant's higher order principle of morals or cooperation regarding free joint willing. In order to achieve this, we have to bear the risk of trust while acting freely, as highlighted by both Socrates and Christianity. We may fight back only in the case of an attack on peace, as can be gleaned from what we will call the 'Ukraine-dilemma'. One advancement of the modern world consists in the fact that war is (at least in principle and unlike during the times of Clausewitz) not tolerated as a means of politics and leads to the exclusion from free cooperation.

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