I did not begin by thinking about war in general, but about particular wars, above all about the American intervention in Vietnam. Nor did I begin as a philosopher, but as a political activist and a partisan. Certainly, political and moral philosophy ought to help us at those difficult times when we choose sides and make commitments. But it does so only indirectly. We are not usually philosophical in moments of crisis; most often, there is no time. War especially imposes an urgency that is probably incompatible with philosophy as a serious enterprise. The philosopher is like Wordsworth’s poet who reflects in tranquility upon past experience (or other people’s experience), thinking about political and moral choices already made. And yet these choices are made in philosophical terms, available because of previous reflection. It was, for example a matter of great importance to all of us in the American anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that we found a moral doctrine ready at hand, a connected set of names and concepts that we all knew—and that everyone else knew. Our anger and indignation were shaped by the words available to express them, and the words were at the tips of our tongues even though we had never before explored their meanings and connections. When we talked about aggression and neutrality, the rights of prisoners of war and civilians, atrocities and war crimes, we were drawing upon the work of many generations of men and women, most of whom we had never heard of. We would be better off if we did not need a vocabulary like that, but given that we need it, we must be grateful that we have it. Without this vocabulary, we could not have thought about the Vietnam War as we did, let alone have communicated our thoughts to other people.
No doubt we used the available words freely and often carelessly. Sometimes this was due to the excitement of the moment and the pressures of partisanship, but it also had a more serious cause. We suffered from an education which taught us that these words had no proper descriptive use and no objective meaning. Moral discourse was excluded from the world of science, even of social science. It expressed feelings, not perceptions, and there was no reason for the expression of feelings to be precise. Or rather, any precision it achieved had an entirely subjective reference: it was the domain of the poet and the literary critic. I don’t need to rehearse this point of view (I shall criticize it in detail later on), though it’s less prevalent now than it once was. What is crucial is that we disputed it, knowingly or unknowingly, every time we criticized American conduct in Vietnam. For our criticisms had the form at least of reports on the real world, not merely on the state of our own tempers. They required evidence; they pressed us, however trained we were in the loose use of moral language, toward analysis and investigation. Even the most skeptical among us came to see that these criticisms could be true (or false).
In those years of angry controversy, I promised myself that one day I would try to set out the moral argument about war in a quiet and reflective way. I still want to defend (most of) the particular arguments that underlay our opposition to the American war in Vietnam, but also and more importantly I want to defend the business of arguing, as we did and as most people do, in moral terms. Hence this book, which may be taken as an apology for our occasional carelessness and a vindication of our fundamental enterprise.
Now, the language with which we argue about war and justice is similar to the language of international law. But this is not a book about the positive laws of war. There are many such books, and I have often drawn upon them. Legal treatises do not, however, provide a fully plausible or coherent account of our moral arguments, and the two most common approaches to the law reflected in the treatises are both in need of extra-legal supplement. First of all, legal positivism, which generated major scholarly works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has become in the age of the United Nations increasingly uninteresting. The UN Charter was supposed to be the constitution of a new world, but, for reasons that have often been discussed, things have turned out differently.1 To dwell at length upon the precise meaning of the Charter is today a kind of utopian quibbling. And because the UN sometimes pretends that it already is what it has barely begun to be, its decrees do not command intellectual or moral respect—except among the positivist lawyers whose business it is to interpret them. The lawyers have constructed a paper world, which fails at crucial points to correspond to the world the rest of us still live in.
The second approach to the law is oriented in terms of policy goals. Its advocates respond to the poverty of the contemporary international regime by imputing purposes to that regime—the achievement of some sort of “world order”—and then reinterpreting the law to fit those purposes.2 In effect, they substitute utilitarian argument for legal analysis. That substitution is certainly not uninteresting, but it requires a philosophical defense. For the customs and conventions, the treaties and charters that constitute the laws of international society do not invite interpretation in terms of a single purpose or set of purposes. Nor are the judgments they require always explicable from a utilitarian standpoint. Policy-oriented lawyers are in fact moral and political philosophers, and it would be best if they presented themselves that way. Or, alternatively, they are would-be legislators, not jurists or students of the law. They are committed, or most of them are committed, to restructuring international society—a worthwhile task—but they are not committed to expounding its present structure.
My own task is different. I want to account for the ways in which men and women who are not lawyers but simple citizens (and sometimes soldiers) argue about war, and to expound the terms we commonly use. I am concerned precisely with the present structure of the moral world. My starting point is the fact that we do argue, often to different purposes, to be sure, but in mutually comprehensible fashion: else there would be no point in arguing. We justify our conduct; we judge the conduct of others. Though these justifications and judgments cannot be studied like the records of a criminal court, they are nevertheless a legitimate subject of study. Upon examination they reveal, I believe, a comprehensive view of war as a human activity and a more or less systematic moral doctrine, which sometimes, but not always, overlaps with established legal doctrine.
In fact, the vocabulary overlaps more than the arguments do. Hence I must say something about my own use of language. I shall always refer to laws of international society (as these appear in legal handbooks and military manuals) as positive laws. For the rest, when I talk of law, I am referring to the moral law, to those general principles that we commonly acknowledge, even when we can’t or won’t live up to them. When I talk of the rules of war, I am referring to the more particular code that governs our judgments of combat behavior, and that is only partially articulated in the Hague and Geneva conventions. And when I talk of crimes, I am describing violations of the general principles or of the particular code: so men and women can be called criminals even when they cannot be charged before a legal tribunal. Since positive international law is radically incomplete, it is always possible to interpret it in the light of moral principles and to refer to the results as “positive law.” Perhaps that is what has to be done in order to flesh out the legal system and render it more attractive than it presently is. But it is not what I have done here. Throughout the book, I treat words like aggression, neutrality, surrender, civilian, reprisal, and so on, as if they were terms in a moral vocabulary—which they are, and always have been, though most recently their analysis and refinement have been almost entirely the work of lawyers.
I want to recapture the just war for political and moral theory. My own work, then, looks back to that religious tradition within which Western politics and morality were first given shape, to the books of writers like Maimonides, Aquinas, Vitoria, and Suarez—and then to the books of writers like Hugo Grotius, who took over the tradition and began to work it into secular form. But I have not attempted a history of just war theory, and I quote the classical texts only occasionally, for the sake of some particularly illuminating or forceful argument.3 I refer more often to contemporary philosophers and theologians (and soldiers and statesmen), for my main concern is not with the making of the moral world but with its present character.
Perhaps the most problematic feature of my exposition is the use of the plural pronouns: we, our, ourselves, us. I have already demonstrated the ambiguity of those words by using them in two ways: to describe that group of Americans who condemned the Vietnam War, and to describe that much larger group who understood the condemnation (whether or not they agreed with it). I shall limit myself henceforth to the larger group. That its members share a common morality is the critical assumption of this book. In my first chapter I try to make a case for that assumption. But it’s only a case, it’s not conclusive. Someone can always ask, “What is this morality of yours?” That is a more radical question, however, than the questioner may realize, for it excludes him not only from the comfortable world of moral agreement, but also from the wider world of agreement and disagreement, justification and criticism. The moral world of war is shared not because we arrive at the same conclusions as to whose fight is just and whose unjust, but because we acknowledge the same difficulties on the way to our conclusions, face the same problems, talk the same language. It’s not easy to opt out, and only the wicked and the simple make the attempt.
I am not going to expound morality from the ground up. Were I to begin with the foundations, I would probably never get beyond them; in any case, I am by no means sure what the foundations are. The substructure of the ethical world is a matter of deep and apparently unending controversy. Meanwhile, however, we are living in the superstructure. The building is large, its construction elaborate and confusing. But here I can offer some guidance: a tour of the rooms, so to speak, a discussion of architectural principles. This is a book of practical morality. The study of judgments and justifications in the real world moves us closer, perhaps, to the most profound questions of moral philosophy, but it does not require a direct engagement with those questions. Indeed, philosophers who seek such an engagement often miss the immediacies of political and moral controversy and provide little help to men and women faced with hard choices. For the moment, at least, practical morality is detached from its foundations, and we must act as if that separation were a possible (since it is an actual) condition of moral life.
But that’s not to suggest that we can do nothing more than describe the judgments and justifications that people commonly put forward. We can analyze these moral claims, seek out their coherence, lay bare the principles that they exemplify. We can reveal commitments that go deeper than partisan allegiance and the urgencies of battle; for it is a matter of evidence, not a pious wish, that there are such commitments. And then we can expose the hypocrisy of soldiers and statesmen who publicly acknowledge these commitments while seeking in fact only their own advantage. The exposure of hypocrisy is certainly the most ordinary, and it may also be the most important, form of moral criticism. We are rarely called upon to invent new ethical principles; if we did that, our criticism would not be comprehensible to the people whose behavior we wanted to condemn. Rather, we hold such people to their own principles, though we may draw these out and arrange them in ways they had not thought of before.
There is a particular arrangement, a particular view of the moral world, that seems to me the best one. I want to suggest that the arguments we make about war are most fully understood (though other understandings are possible) as efforts to recognize and respect the rights of individual and associated men and women. The morality I shall expound is in its philosophical form a doctrine of human rights, though I shall say nothing here of the ideas of personality, action, and intention that this doctrine probably presupposes. Considerations of utility play into the structure at many points, but they cannot account for it as a whole. Their part is subsidiary to that of rights; it is constrained by rights. That is above all true of the classical forms of military maximization: the religious crusade, the proletarian revolution, the “war to end war.” But it’s true also, as I will try to show, of the more immediate pressures of “military necessity.” At every point, the judgments we make (the lies we tell) are best accounted for if we regard life and liberty as something like absolute values and then try to understand the moral and political processes through which these values are challenged and defended.
The proper method of practical morality is casuistic in character. Since I am concerned with actual judgments and justifications, I shall turn regularly to historical cases. My argument moves through the cases, and I have often foregone a systematic presentation for the sake of the nuances and details of historical reality. At the same time, the cases are necessarily sketched in outline form. In order to make them exemplary, I have had to abridge their ambiguities. In doing that, I have tried to be accurate and fair, but the cases are often controversial and no doubt I have sometimes failed. Readers upset by my failures might usefully treat the cases as if they were hypothetical—invented rather than researched—though it is important to my own sense of my enterprise that I am reporting on experiences that men and women have really had and on arguments that they have really made. In choosing experiences and arguments for discussion, I have relied heavily on World War II in Europe, the first war of which I have memories and the paradigm, for me, of a justified struggle. For the rest, I have tried to pick out the obvious cases: those that have figured largely in the literature of war and those that play a part in contemporary controversies.
The structure of the book is explained in the second and third chapters, which introduce the main argument. Here I only want to say that my presentation of the moral theory of war is focused on the tensions within the theory that make it problematic and that make choice in wartime difficult and painful. The tensions are summed up in the dilemma of winning and fighting well. This is the military form of the means/ends problem, the central issue in political ethics. I address it directly, and resolve or fail to resolve it, in Part Four; and the resolution, if it works, must be relevant also to the choices faced in politics generally. For war is the hardest place: if comprehensive and consistent moral judgments are possible there, they are possible everywhere.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977