Can patriotism justify killing in defense of one’s country?

Cosmopolitan liberals would be ready to fight - and to kill and be killed for the sake of restoring international justice or for the abolition of profoundly unjust political institutions. Patriots are ready to do the same for their own country. Sometimes the cosmopolitan liberals and patriots would fight on the same side and sometimes on the opposite sides of the conflict. Thus the former would join the latter in the defense of Serbia against Austria-Hungary (in 1914) but would oppose the white Southerner patriots in the American Civil War (in 1861). In this paper I argue that fighting and killing for one?s country is, in both of those cases, different from the defense of one?s own life and the lives of those who cannot defend themselves. Killing for one?s country is killing in order to fulfill a particular political preference. The same is the case with fighting for the abolition of a profoundly unjust political institution. It is not amoral or immoral to refuse to kill for any one of these two political preferences because there is no reason to believe that either political preference trumps our moral constraints against killing.

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Austro-American Relations during the Era of the American Civil War

Austrian History Yearbook ◽

10.1017/s0067237800013217 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 203-226

Author(s):

Burton Ira Kaufman

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil War ◽

Political Institutions ◽

The United States ◽

American Civil War ◽

Diplomatic Relations ◽

American Review ◽

Habsburg Empire ◽

The Family ◽

The Government

For most of the nineteenth century prior to the American Civil War relations between the United States and Austria were characterized by rancor and ill feeling. As Protestants with strong nativist sentiments and republicans anxious to spread their political institutions to other nations, Americans generally regarded Catholic Austria and its conservative monarchy with great suspicion and distrust. An attempt by an Austrian Catholic missionary society in the 1820's to foster Catholicism in America led to sharp recriminations against the government in Vienna, which some even accused of supporting conspiracies against the United States. In 1848, when revolution swept the Habsburg empire, Americans almost unanimously supported the revolutionaries, condemning an Austria which the North American Review called a “conglomeration of dissimilar races having no principle of unity but despotism.” Secretary of State John M. Clayton ordered A. Dudley Mann to Hungary to welcome the country into the family of nations as soon as her independence was assured. When the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth toured the United States, he met a hero's welcome wherever he went. In response, Austria pursued an unfriendly policy of her own towards the United States, even briefly breaking off diplomatic relations.

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