Preventive Defense In Kant's Grounding For The Metaphys

Preventive Defense
There was once a king who ruled a kingdom that was contained within a stone wall. The buildings inside the wall were made of wood with straw roofs and were vulnerable to fire. The barbarians who lived outside the wall knew of this weakness and the King knew that the barbarians were hostile to his kingdom. Therefore, the king decided to hold a council of war to decide how to ensure that the barbarians do not burn his kingdom. The council argued about whether they should immediately attack the barbarians in a preventive strike or if they should wait until just before the barbarians begin shooting flaming arrows over the wall to strike in a preemptive fashion. The king in the above example has two moral duties to balance. The first is his duty to his citizens to provide them the necessary protection and the second moral duty is to not unnecessarily kill barbarians. These two duties seem to conflict one another, for instance if the King wanted to ensure the protection of his civilians he could end up killing more barbarians than was really need. The inverse could be true as well, if the King was too cautious
Kant developed a system where moral duties are defined short laws called maxims. However, Kant argues that we do not need to follow all maxims. For instance, Kant in his book Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals claims that we must “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant 421). Therefore Kant is saying that in order for something to be a maxim it must be something that would be great if everyone did it. For instance, if everyone were to help those in need, that would be great so that passes the universalization test. Furthermore, if everyone were to fight back in self-defense then this would deter people from starting fights. Therefore, a maxim on self-defense would pass a universalization portion of Kant’s