Topics War

Question Would it ever be possible to achieve world peace? The only way that seems possible is to get everyone to believe the same thing. The only way that seems possible is if there were divine interference. Since this is highly unlikely how could there ever be world peace? ~Jordan~

Accepted:
November 16, 2005

Comments

I suppose another way you could try to get everyone to believe the same thing is coercion, terror, and force, either outright or threatened. Doesn't sound appealing.

So maybe we should rethink what's needed for world peace. Instead of thinking that it requires universal agreement, perhaps we should explore the possibility that it requires only respect for reasonable differences of opinion; instead of everyone's having the same beliefs, we need to work out a way in which sharp differences needn't lead to conflict. (You might reflect on our own society, in the U.S., which is domestically at peace and yet whose citizens have sharply conflicting beliefs about matters of great importance to them.) In this connection, you might be interested in reading Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) or John Rawls' The Law of Peoples (1999).