Abstract
The article aims at the ethical problems of the restoration of peace in the context of the challenges of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It presents the analysis of the situation of crisis of Enlightenment’s ideals of peace arrangement of the world on the base of the universal values and a priori principles of human mutual understanding. The development of ideas of a just peace and ethical arguments regarding the justification of war from the Middle Ages (Augustine, Aquinas) to modern times and the present time are analyzed. The particular topic of the article is the Kantian ethics of peace in its determination to the rational conditions of coexistence of nations. Like the other thinkers of Renaissance, Reformation, and European Enlightenment, such as particularly Machiavelli and Luther, Kant understood the natural character of wars and their political purpose, but pursued the task of social improvements for their elimination in the future. Those tasks are known in the settlement of international public laws for the federation of republican states. Nowadays, the project of Enlightenment is levered off its ground by the presence of the states with oppressive rule. Therefore, the paper analyzes the problem of understanding between the sides of contemporary wars, especially in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, as the incommensurability of the archaic discourse of the states with oppressive rule, which persist on the will of the particular nations, with modern discourse of the leading world democracies. The relevant ethical strategy of how to reach mutual understanding presents the idea of the new Enlightenment. This concept has been developed by the Western and Ukrainian philosophers and the intellectuals from wide social spheres. It covers not only wars, but also other global issues, including ecological, because the war of humans against nature is an important problem of new Enlightenment too.
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