In Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that war’s violence enables humanity to envision perpetual peace as both reason’s moral end and history’s presumptive telos, thereby motivating action to renounce war. This article critiques the universalist assumption underlying this argument and argues instead for a pacifism grounded in what I call ‘situated universality’. I do so through a comparative political theoretical approach. After reconstructing Kant’s account of peace, I turn to post-World War II Japan, where a Kantian defense of its pacifist constitution initially flourished, but was later challenged by a nationalistic counter-discourse. Drawing on literary critic Katō Norihiro’s concept of the ‘dialectic of the defeated’, I argue that Japanese Kantian pacifists erred in hastily identifying with ‘humanity’ without acknowledging their positionality as a defeated people; this, in turn, has allowed calls to ‘normalize’ the constitution. I then engage novelist Oda Makoto’s reflections on ‘meaningless death’ to propose an alternative pacifism, one that moves from the affective response of the defeated to the meaninglessness of death in war, to a pacifist sensibility shared by all humanity. Because war yields victors and losers, it is in defeat – when not directed toward revenge – that we find the potential to imagine a radically universal, peace-oriented politics.
Recent debates in liberal political theory have revisited John Rawls’s claim that the methods and conclusions of science may function as public reasons when they are “not controversial.” Yet this condition remains underspecified: controversial to whom? This article defends an intra-scientific interpretation of that requirement. According to the intra-scientific consensus (ISC) view, scientific claims can serve as public justifiers insofar as they command consensus within the relevant epistemic community, regardless of their acceptance by the wider public. Against the extra-scientific consensus (ESC) view, which requires public endorsement of scientific claims, the article argues that factual beliefs on politically salient issues are often shaped by comprehensive doctrines that political liberalism itself deems unsuitable for public justification. ISC, by contrast, coheres with liberalism’s commitment to a public standard of impartial adjudication, extending this ideal from normative disagreement to factual dispute. The article further argues that ISC does not entail technocracy, since it does not grant scientists political authority but instead restricts admissible factual premises in public justification. Finally, it shows that cases of urgency under scientific uncertainty do not require abandoning ISC. Introducing the “negative consensus” view, in which scientific consensus functions as a threshold of exclusion by ruling out empirically discredited claims, I conclude that this is best understood as a fallback mode internal to ISC.
