United States Military Academy, West Point
“Can there be such a thing as a just war?” The answer partly depends on the answer to another question: “Can there not be such a thing as war?” War is something that most people, especially those who have lived through one or experienced it directly, deeply want not to exist. Death is inevitable, but war seems escapable. Indeed, people have managed to escape wars in the past. Nature has sometimes played a part (a monarch dies; storms prevent the Spanish Armada from reaching British shores). Sometimes diplomacy has worked, sometimes the threat of certain mutual destruction has kept the peace (World War III has yet to occur). So, if it is possible sometimes to avert war, then why not most of the time, why not always?
Images of current and past wars create a powerful psychic push to avoid any future war: cities converted to rubble; children left wandering; the elderly starving; women and girls ravaged, as though by right of conquest; soldiers maimed and permanently diverted physically or mentally from resuming a normal life. The viral spread on the Internet of images of torture and massacre subvert the mythmaking that seeks to mellow the remembrance of war and smooth the path to a new conflict. Such images induce a sense of horror and of the futility of pursuing by military means whatever goal seemed worth achieving. Might a bloodless path have achieved peace instead? Who would not want to think war away? Since the war to end all wars (World War I), society draws comfort from dreaming war’s very disappearance.
To St. Augustine, writing more than fifteen hundred years ago, even a just war should disappear. We can understand his sentiment. Some people claim, he says, that the wise man will engage only in a just war. Augustine does not contest the truth of this claim; he merely scorns it:
As if [the wise man] would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong-doing, even though it gives rise to [a just] war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong doing. Let everyone, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if anyone either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.1
But Augustine did not really expect the cessation of war itself. This is because he had an unorthodox and very complicated view about the nature of peace. According to his view, everything in nature seeks order and to be in a state of peace. Augustine saw this universal peace-seeking as an expression of God’s laws “which pervade all things for the conservation of every mortal [kind], and which bring things that fit one another into harmony.”2 The difficulty with such a cosmic view is that some parts of nature seek peace at the expense of other parts. People who make war on others are trying to “impose on them the laws of their own peace,”3 even though theirs would be an unjust peace. Resistance to it might well count therefore as seeking a just peace. Either way, peace means war.
Augustine considered peace-seeking and disorder-making to be inherent in human nature. Today we prefer to think of these tendencies as built into our genes, and perhaps we nurture the hope that by changing them we might redeem ourselves. To convert war into a fossil of human society from past eons will indeed require genetic changes, for people seem born to assert themselves at others’ expense. To be an individual is to that extent to be self-centered. If war is politics by other means, the converse holds for politics too, as well as for many other human enterprises such as chess, sports, big business, medicine, and of course love, in all of which the vocabulary of opposition and war is less metaphorical than literal. Thanks to our present genes, it is difficult to imagine what games would be like when such language becomes archaic and loses its meaning. Meanwhile, since dreaming war away will alter no basic facts, we are left with the vocabulary of war in its often too literal meaning, and the need to answer the original question: whether any war can be just.
The words “just” and “war” fit together uncomfortably but their fit is not impossible. Asking whether war can be just is not like asking whether a circle can be square. Making these two words fit each other depends on reconciling the tension between two prominent and fundamental human characteristics. The first is self-assertion, the other is the more or less reluctant recognition that there are people besides oneself. The former shows itself first, the latter develops only gradually, often incompletely, and never becomes permanent. War is a severe challenge to our ethical ability to prevent these two characteristics from flying apart.
Many philosophers besides Augustine have tried to harmonize the concepts of justice and war. I will sketch three different modern approaches which I will align with the work of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. Their systematic doctrines will not be presumed; systems of philosophy are secondary here. What is important is that each philosopher has recognized these two basic characteristics of human nature, though assigning them different weights, and each has developed a rational means of managing our war-prone selves. If their systematic doctrines to promote justice could be applied with the rigor of reason to human society, perhaps war would disappear even before our genes change. But this, like trying to think war away, is just a dream of philosophy.
In learning about the nature of a just war and about why people think they are justified in fighting, we can discover something about ourselves, perhaps not with great delight. Thomas Hobbes (with John Locke a great British philosopher of the 17th Century), claimed that there is a deep and unstable bedrock in humans where the dominant force is that of self-interest. When people act on the strength of this force alone, they are then in what Hobbes called the state of nature, which he otherwise labels the state of war. Individuals placed together will at some point likely clash. Hobbes believed that the main causes of “quarrel” in the state of nature are not hard to find. They are competitiveness, distrust (“diffidence”), and glory. Quarrels lead to fighting, and fighting can mark the start of a feud or a war. We can imagine the fight to be over food, land, water, animals, or fired by grievances from some previous conflict. In the state of war, Hobbes writes: “The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Consequently, he says, in a state of war there is “no propriety [property], no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it.”4
Hobbes was not envisioning a remote, primitive, pre-civilized condition of life, an anti-Garden of Eden. He reminded his contemporary readers that they arm themselves when they go out and avoid traveling alone; that they lock their doors to outsiders, and their chests of valuables even to their own servants. Don’t such actions “as much accuse mankind … as I do by my words?” he asks. Then at once he adds: “But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it.”5 Hobbes was expressing realism, not moralism. He was willing to say only that people are essentially self- interested, not that they are essentially corrupt. He thought that people are able to allow for and control this inherent trait but must first recognize its existence and understand its role. Hobbes lived through a time of civil war when the British saw their king deposed and eventually beheaded, and monarchy itself in England for awhile abolished. If it was possible to descend toward the state of nature, it is also possible to reverse the direction. Realism need not exclude optimism.
In the spirit of Hobbes, though with a qualification, I would say that people who fight in what he called the state of nature are justified in fighting and have no doubt they are justified. After all, they are fighting over what they claim and are willing to defend as mine, or intended to become mine, despite there being no laws of property. And what is mine begins with one’s own life. Even in the state of nature there is one elementary right – self-preservation – which Hobbes in conformance with an accepted view calls “the right of nature”. As for property, one could imagine primitive rules, such as possession being nine-tenths of the law, which justify resistance to dispossession. So, in this primitive context, in language or gestures, inhabitants of the state of nature could make it plain enough why they are fighting, but in the absence of the “notions” that Hobbes mentions – right vs. wrong, justice vs. injustice – these individuals would be unable to explain and defend in any fuller sense the cause for which they fight. The use of such words would be merely rhetorical, little more than self-assertion in another form. They could not prove that they are right. Their proofs would be their actions, which is the way of things in Hobbes’s state of nature. In order to improve that state, something must be added which Hobbes believed people are capable of finding in themselves. It is reason, by no means an abstract concept for him but natural human intelligence in support of self-interest.
Hobbes makes emotions the simple, direct, mechanical cause of improvement: “fear of death”, “desire” for a more comfortable way of life, and “hope” that by effort such a life might be obtained. These emotions prompt a quest which is carried out by human reason. Hobbes saw reason as an instrument by which people respond to these emotions and find ways of fulfilling them for their own improvement. Reason for Hobbes is not a Platonic or Cartesian entity (the mind or soul) trapped within the body. It is not personified as an hereditary monarch whose reign is to be accepted as fact of life. Reason for Hobbes is not idealized as supreme Law sanctioned by tradition or blessed from on high. Hobbes looked within, rather than outward, back or above, for the source of law. If reason belongs to us by nature, then so does the possibility of our finding the ways of furthering our welfare. Hobbes portrays a process in which reason discovers not merely useful but indispensable “precepts” or “laws” of nature that help individuals construct a society which benefits everyone’s self-interest.6 He characterizes the beneficial results as civic virtues (justice, equity and gratitude, for instance) because, when practiced in some uniform and expected way, they promote peace within any society that follows the course of reason. Hobbes is reluctant to call them laws in a strict sense, however, since that suggests control established and enforced from without. He prefers instead to call them “dictates of reason”7, much like theorems in a formal system such as geometry, which individuals in a society that has adopted them recognize as based on reason itself and as promoting their own well being. What he was really presenting is a set of first principles for a society which develops and consents to the enforcement of rules of conduct intended to allow a life relatively free of mindless self-assertion. The laws of such a society would control competitiveness, reduce the hostility of distrust, provide recourse to arbitration for disputes, and find ways of rewarding effort. And ultimate control over them would be vested in an appointed authority (“one man, or an assembly of men”) for the good of society and for ensuring justice among the citizens and their proper defense. Laws of this kind give substance to words liked “right” and “wrong”, “mine” and “thine”, whose meaning (if any) is primitive whenever no laws concerning rights exist. However, a society which recognizes the necessity for such laws incorporates but does not eliminate the radical self-interest associated with the state of nature. Self-defense takes a different form. Hobbes conceives it is a rational alternative to the state of nature, a society of enlightened self-interest. And if self-preservation is a right of nature where the self is an individual, it would also seem to be a right where the self is a commonwealth.
Hobbes assigned to reason the central role of ascertaining benefits which promote one’s own well being in ways consistent with others’, and of showing why they are beneficial to both alike. What further roles reason might play is difficult to see in the large shadow caused by the individual self. Even Kant, who made impersonal duty and reverence for law part of reason itself, thus deliberately opposing it to self-interest, acknowledged the gravitational pull of this rival: “… if we look more closely at our thoughts and aspirations,” Kant remarked, “we keep encountering the beloved self as what our plans rely on, rather than the stern command of duty with its frequent calls for self-denial.”8
But possibly Hobbes focused on too narrow a portion of the self. He seems to have omitted other slices. What of generosity without expectation of payback? What about hardship or pain endured for others? What about sacrificing one’s own life for others? Such acts as these, often classified as expressions of love, necessarily involve the self but not obviously one’s self-interest. Yet the motivation to act in such ways is common and undeniable among individuals, perhaps even in the state of nature. An altruist might enjoy being altruistic, although (as Kant recognized in his comments on charity9) personal satisfaction is not a defining feature of altruism. People who act from a sense of obligation might nevertheless be influenced primarily by self-interest, such as a desire for praise or fear of the consequences of not acting. But if people regularly do bad things without worrying about the negative effects on themselves, they can also do good things without an eye on how it might benefit them. Kant might well be correct to suppose that the beloved self is always a player in one’s planning, yet there are times when it seems to be a bit player. People sometimes do good things because they judge them to be the right thing to do, or simply because with little or no thought at all they recognize such actions to be worthwhile in themselves. They may not be able to justify what they do, perhaps only because basic facts like these have no need of justification. Even in the state of nature there is something which might be called unself-interest, such as sacrificing one’s own life for another, for which Hobbes appears not to have allowed. Reason might not be able to discover the reasonableness of such behavior. However, since the existence of altruism cannot be denied, even if it can be ignored, it might have to be reckoned as a more complicated version of the right of self-preservation, where more selves than a single self are defended.10 A natural example of this is the family unit. Another is a military unit, a band of brothers. When Hobbes describes the state of nature from a military perspective, he has European states in mind, which he compares to gladiators “having their weapons pointing, and their eves fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms …”.11 He is not thinking of the loyalty of soldiers to each other, nor does he recognize the ways in which a sense of self-sacrifice might be extended to a commonwealth, the type of society whose laws are based on reason.
If Kant could not eliminate the beloved self, his solution was to depersonalize it. He insisted that the claims of duty are primary, unchanging, universal and impersonal. Actions are right because they fulfill a duty, wrong when they violate one. Actions done by people have moral worth not because of their anticipated consequences, still less owing to the strength of emotions impelling a person to do them. Emotions like desire and heart-felt benevolence were to him mere signals of self-interest. Perhaps characteristically, Kant doesn’t seem to have regarded deep reverence for duty, which he praises, or resoluteness, or strong determination in the face of hardship and pain, to be emotions.
The recipe for acting morally is to see oneself from a universal perspective, not as a single person but as any moral agent. Kant’s method has an ironic side, for he wants to prod the individual self into regarding itself as less than the individual it prefers to be. He wants the person faced with the need to make a decision to consider it as having the strength of a law of nature, like a law of Physics (not one of society’s laws which could be changed), and thus as a fixed and universal moral law. However high I can throw a rock, and however much I might want to keep it aloft, the law of gravity takes precedence. However much I stand to benefit by lying or by breaking a promise, which might help explain why I’ve done so to another person, the idea of a universal practice by which everyone deceives everyone would in Kant’s eyes be irrational and self-defeating, since no one would end up being deceived. Deception is possible because there are rules against it, and we can gauge the morality of an action by seeing it as the instance of a rule which holds for everyone. The difference between a law of Physics and a moral law against promise breaking lies in human freedom. I can cooperate with the law of gravity but I cannot revise it. I cannot alter the rule which prescribes telling the truth, but I can choose to violate it.
From Kant’s perspective, the self of Hobbes has not so much been supplemented by reason as supplanted by it, the subjective made as objective as possible. Moral worth is not created by society; it resides in each person and is expressed in any action which is decided on the basis of what the moral law requires. What Kant calls a good will might well exist therefore in the state of nature, if reason exists there at all. Hence there is a great difference between Hobbes and Kant despite the importance each gave to the individual. Kant’s approach requires that individuals be moral equals, that no one is a means for some other person’s ends. This moral commitment perhaps forms the core of any doctrine of human rights. An action which expresses a moral law cannot be selective among those to whom it applies. In a sense, the law speaks through the person who acts because of it. In contrast, a Hobbesian society of enlightened self-interest, where the laws represent a sufficiently collective but not universal agreement, could accommodate a great deal of servitude. Plato’s Republic represents such a society.
John Stuart Mill, who distanced himself from Kant’s emphasis on duty, nevertheless sought to preserve his universal perspective and to mitigate Hobbesian self-interest, or what he called Egoism. The measure of an action’s moral worth, Mill held, should be its capacity to contribute to the happiness of the greatest number, where happiness is identified with both pleasure – Mill preferred the quality of pleasures to their quantity – as well as the absence of pain. Even if only a select few in society have the qualifications (and, he believed, the entitlement) to rank kinds of pleasure and to judge their capacity for distinguishing genuine happiness from self-gratification, Mill was determined that everyone should willingly take part in fulfilling the goal of a better society. Hence, for him, the value of learning and publicity (or perhaps propaganda):
education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole …; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action….12
Mill was particularly concerned to put his version of Utilitarianism beyond reproach. The critics of Bentham’s earlier version had derided it for the emphasis on pleasures to be sought and gained by an individual, and for the project of quantifying pleasures into measureable units, which would seem to favor physical ones. Mill accordingly stressed the importance of qualitative pleasures for society at large. He formulated the ideal of Utilitarianism as a systematic approach for judging what makes actions right or wrong for society in general. Mill’s doctrine was meant to unify people in their hope for social improvement and at the same time to enlarge each individual’s sense of freedom within a larger domain. Nevertheless, the method of estimating results can be secularized and narrowed down to questions of costs and benefits, which seems never to have been Mill’s intent, although it may be one of its consequences. In different ways, Mill’s doctrine shifts the burden of deciding a moral course of action from the individual to those who know better about what contributes to, or works against, the happiness of the greatest number. By turning towards the goals of many, the doctrine perhaps detaches itself from the moral agent around whom Kant’s own doctrine revolved.
Three ethical theories, each with a very different focus: self-interest, the happiness of the greatest number, and impersonal moral law. How interestingly ironic, therefore, that Hobbes, Mill and Kant should each have claimed that his own doctrine captures the essence of the so-called Golden Rule, the traditional injunction to treat others as one would wish to be treated. The Golden Rule, deeply entrenched in ethical thinking as a counsel of wisdom, although itself neither a theory nor the product of a theory, may nevertheless be articulated and explained by means of a developed ethical theory. Without question, the three philosophers believed this. Each may also have supposed that associating his theory with the Golden Rule would add to its respectability.
From the first precept or law of nature, which is to seek peace, Hobbes derives a second injunction, “that a man be willing, when others are so to, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself” – provided that in so acting the person avoids exposing himself to harm. This, he tells us, “is that law of the Gospel: ‘whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.”13 For his part, Mill claims that “the complete spirit of the ethics of utility” is to be read “in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth”.14 Finally, Kant contends that his second formulation of the categorical imperative15 improves on the Golden Rule which, he says, “is only a consequence of the real principle, and a restricted and limited consequence at that.”16
Clearly, these claims cannot all be right, if the Golden Rule is supposed to be reducible to three divergent theories. Neither could the Rule remain coherent by combining them. Perhaps one of the three philosophers has gotten the Rule right, perhaps none has. It’s not enough to say that both the theories and the Rule all emphasize taking a universal perspective as a guide to doing the right thing or avoiding the wrong. Hobbes is willing to adopt such a guide, but on condition that it preserves one’s self-interest, which appears to leave no room for acts of burdensome charity or ultimate self-sacrifice. However, as commonly understood, the Golden Rule does not require reciprocity but seems to allow asymmetry. The overarching universal perspective favored by Mill is at least consistent with promoting the happiness of the greatest number at the expense of that of a few, whereas the Golden Rule seems primarily focused on what should motivate treatment of another person at this moment, possibly without an intrusive concern for consequences. As for Kant, perhaps his characteristic emphasis on the primacy of the will and his disparagement of emotion divorces two important components of moral action which the Golden Rule aims to keep together in ethical conduct. Commenting on the scriptural message to love one’s neighbor, including one’s enemy, he writes:
There are two sorts of love: practical love that lies in the will and in principles of action, and pathological love that lies in the direction the person’s feelings and tender sympathies take. The latter of these cannot be commanded, but the former can be – and that is a command to do good to others from duty, even when you don’t want to do it or like doing it, and indeed even when you naturally and unconquerably hate doing it.17
The first reaction from this brief review is that Hobbes, Mill and Kant each fail to capture the real meaning of the Golden Rule. It seems another case where theory falls short of reality. However, this presumes that we can say, even roughly, what the Rule’s real meaning is. A quite different reaction is that, taken together, the three theories reveal the Rule’s real ambiguity. Then this would be a case where theory helps us discover that we don’t understand what we thought we understood. Perhaps, indeed, there was no ring to be snatched.
While philosophers down the ages have been examining the nature of ethical concepts and envisioning principles for an ideal society, nations have been at war with each other, and sometimes at war within themselves, which raises the question, “What can ethical theory teach us about war?” It can teach very little if such societies regard themselves as independent units – that is, if each is a society of enlightened self-interest concerned only for its own citizens, or if people are ends in themselves, but only as far as their border, or if the greatest happiness sought is restricted to that of a single group. If that is the case, then a state of war among nations would be a state of nature. The nations would be the gladiators described by Hobbes, eyeing each other warily and protecting their borders with garrisons and weapons. Hobbes accepted such a result, an ‘international’ state of nature, but he also recognized that this does not translate into a degenerate condition for the citizens of those nations which are in a “posture of war”. The sovereigns of such nations “uphold thereby the industry of their subjects”,18 which allows peace to prevail inside the borders. In contrast, the universal perspectives adopted by Kant and Mill suggest the conceptual importance of mutually crossing national boundaries. Of the three theories, that of Hobbes is universal in perhaps only a distributed sense: it applies to nations taken separately. Kant’s and Mill’s theories seem genuinely universal, that is, universal in a collective sense. However different their character, both theories imply how one society should deal with another, especially when they conflict, and rules of international conduct can be founded on reason.
The benefit that these three philosophers bring to the topic of war is to have provided an enriched set of principles of conduct. These emphasize the need for (respectively) enforced rules of fairness, a universal moral perspective that explains the rightness of an action or exposes its wrongness, and finally a demand that the rightness or wrongness of actions be weighed in terms of the consequences they produce. A nation with a developed sense of any of these types of rules already possesses some sense of itself as a moral agent, thus affecting its dealings with other nations and helping to block or delay reversion to an international state of nature in a time of war. Philosophers since the time of Mill – and more importantly, statesmen – have continued to foster the conception of the state as moral agent. But war between moral agents is war nonetheless.
The three types of theory are clearly not variations of a more general one. And despite their different emphases they are not complementary in the sense of making up a whole (as the discussion of the Golden Rule shows). The tensions represented in the approaches taken by these three philosophers continue to reveal themselves, but never actually to resolve themselves, in political and public disputes in the United States. An action that seems to be demanded on humanitarian grounds is judged nevertheless not to be in a nation’s interest to pursue (Rwanda, Syria); a policy cannot be approved or continued because, even if it gets results, it condones actions morally wrong and illegal in themselves and also demeans people (torture); a bombing campaign that deliberately targets civilians but will supposedly thereby save many more lives must be approved on grounds of expediency (Hiroshima).
If for only this reason, that philosophical distinctions about the meaning of right and wrong enable us more easily to identify the threads of tension as they pull against one another, working with ethical theories brings a benefit to practice. Michael Walzer provides a more general reason. He has written that we “act within a moral world”, that the decisions we have to make within that world are “difficult, problematic, agonizing”, that our “language reflects the moral world”, and that our understanding of a moral vocabulary is “sufficiently common and stable so that shared judgments are possible.”19 Clearly, then, our language of assessment and judgment does not and cannot stop at a national border. This makes all the difference in our conception of war itself as well as in our appraisal of claims that a particular war is just. Taking a life in war is no less an ethical topic than saving one is in medicine. Confronted with physical violence or aggressive self-assertion, our response might also be physical – to meet force with force - but minimally it will be a moral response.
Chemists invented chemistry, but logicians did not invent logic. Logic is embedded in our language. When we learn a language we learn how to form statements and how to connect them; we know what negating a statement does; we give reasons; we use basic patterns of inference to deliver conclusions. What is true of logic is true of ethics. Prior to any ethical theory, people have a working knowledge of the meaning of ethical statements. They can tell the difference between “ought” and “is”, though sometimes they confuse the two or try to derive one from the other. Those who develop an ethical theory therefore are already working on fertile ground. To be worth anything, however, their theories have to be tested at ground level and must make sense to anyone who speaks with a moral vocabulary.
What this means is that ethical theories are being constantly tested. The ground extends back to early history. Recalling Walzer’s claim that the moral vocabulary people use is “sufficiently common and stable”, we need not fear anachronism in our use of theory, or in understanding what people do and why, just as we do not hesitate to take a negation to be a negation, or a well-supported conclusion to have been intended that way, though the text being read is ancient. History puts us in touch with something in ourselves. Such a view was expressed by David Hume more than 250 years ago with elegance as well as with a cynicism about human nature caused mostly (I prefer to believe) by his work as an historian rather than as a philosopher:
It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit – these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind. Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English: you cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions are so many collections of experiments by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.20
What holds for ethics in general holds for the ethics of war. The approaches taken by Hobbes, Kant and Mill prime us for reading historical and traditional narratives. They help us to see the motives behind tactics and strategy. The three theories remain active but stay in the background, ready to spotlight the justifications a leader or a nation might give for engaging in war. Self-interest will rarely be dormant in almost any situation relating to matters of war, and the calculation of consequences as the means of advancing self-interest will also be prominent. Occasionally, too, and more frequently in our own age, some actions and policies will be promoted on the grounds of being in themselves the right thing to do (example: protecting lives of the innocent in Libya), while others will be resisted on the basis of self-interest (example: not protecting lives of the innocent in Syria). And sometimes the leaders on both sides in a war seem unaware that the justifications they offer fall well short of what the theories behind them demand. To an historian (and philosopher) like Hume, pretense amounts to a commodity among political leaders:
The general observations treasured up by a course of experience give us the clue of human nature and teach us to unravel all its intricacies. Pretexts and appearances no longer deceive us. Public declarations pass for the specious coloring of a cause. And though virtue and honor be allowed their proper weight and authority, that perfect disinterestedness, so often pretended to, is never expected in multitudes and parties, seldom in their leaders, and scarcely even in individuals of any rank or station.21
Hume seems to have been more concerned with the question of whether to believe the author of a public declaration. But the investigation of war can have different concerns: the facts (such as they can be discovered), the test of claims in relation to facts, the strength of evidence to support a justification, and the moral nature of what is being justified. This is what we should expect from a common and stable moral vocabulary if moral judgments are to be shared across time, even if they conflict.
As we know from Augustine, war is a recurrent, repellent human activity, yet so natural that he conceived it as a disordered way of seeking peace. Hume’s cynicism about human nature appears to be vindicated, for what we learn from experience is that we do not learn from experience. Wars seem to be inevitable among humans, much like disease. Aggression is a kind of contagion. To seek to protect life against the threat of death, whether from germs or guns, is an immediate, natural response, at once both physical and moral.
We are never indifferent when war or disease threatens us. Even a pacifist must decide how to face violence. The outbreak of war or the serious threat of war engages our fundamental instincts of self-preservation which every moral theorist, Hobbes not least, regards as a moral right. This makes it impossible to avoid making moral judgments about political decisions that threaten to lead to war, or about the events that constitute a war, or what policies should follow a war, above all about the nature of war itself. Our judgments are crammed with moral vocabulary or what is good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified, permitted or forbidden. It is easy to understand why, since the focus is on responsibility for life and death.
Just War Theory (JWT) deals with this recurrent phenomenon of human society. The word “theory” in this particular context is misleading, however, if it suggests a further theory to be added to the ones already described, distinguished by a set of self-contained general laws. JWT is really a complex mix of ethical arguments, political doctrines, historical paradigms, legal precedents, instinctual human truths, tribal conventions, and modern international conventions and treaties. Nevertheless, there is a common denominator. JWT’s takes a normative stance on war. It uses the history of wars not only to illustrate but to sharpen ethical arguments and political theories. JWT interprets international conventions about warfare as embodying moral commitments. It cannot therefore be neutral about the phenomenon of war. It seeks to be objective about the events of war but never with the detachment that science adopts towards natural phenomena. JWT holds that under some circumstances going to war is justified, that it is the right response to a serious and unavoidable threat, and consequently that it is not only possible but obligatory to fight well, if only to avoid greater costs and future suffering. It also holds that wars can be wrongly undertaken and badly fought. Given the moral stance it adopts about the phenomenon of war, JWT counts as a doctrine of applied ethics comparable to medical and business ethics, distinguished from these principally by the raw material examined.
JWT is not written during war. It is a product of reflections during peacetime, sometimes occasioned by a nation’s recent experience of war (as was the case with Walzer). In a psychological sense, JWT is an expression of rational optimism, a resolve to learn from mistakes and to manage, if possible, the deadly nature of war by means of a system of rules respected by all. JWT seeks to articulate and to either validate or else modify our inevitable judgments of right and wrong regarding warfare: the reasons for going to war, its conduct, and its aftermath. Such a resolve is healthy, even when balanced by the realistic expectation that, the next time around, the fighting will be different, not better. It has been possible for medicine to eradicate some types of disease. Disease itself is a different category.
When is a particular war just? The number of criteria has increased during the long period of JWT’s development. Here is a current set, adapted from Brian Orend:22
These criteria serve as requirements. The decision to undertake a war (including the commencement of that war) is just, according to JWT, if and only if the first seven criteria are met. A particular policy (authorized by a civilian leader or by a member of the military) prosecuted during a war or following it which fails to meet one of the last three criteria (7 through 9) might render that particular phase unjust. The first six criteria apply exclusively to nations and their governments. The last three criteria concern both governments as well as individuals: in particular, civilian leaders and military commanders with overall responsibility for operations. Violations of established rules by junior officers and ordinary soldiers would not render a war unjust. Actions of a criminal nature by these would be handled by military codes, such as the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for American soldiers. These criteria can be given a composite description:
A Just War is one which is openly declared for a legitimate reason as a last resort by a competent political authority acting with a proper intention and with a reasonable hope of success, and which is prosecuted proportionally by that authority both during the war and following it.
The summary makes it possible to spot the presence of different ethical theories. Utilitarian thinking is evident in the demand for proportionality and a reasonable hope for success, Kantian in the emphasis on proper intention. And the very declaration of war under these conditions is conceived to be one of legitimate self-interest. However, all of the criteria remain general and largely uninformative until applied to actual or possible decisions relating to war and the securing of peace. JWT concentrates on the application of these criteria, but the process of applying them to particular cases is not scientific.23 JWT is art rather than science. It has much more in common with Law than with Physics. Nevertheless, except for the case of leaders accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity at the World Court in the Hague, there is no international legal system for prosecuting offenders in an international conflict. Offenses come under the jurisdiction of a country’s civil code or the military code of its armed forces. JWT also concerns itself with more than large-scale legal infractions of national and military leaders. It is extended to the area of possible moral infractions committed by individual soldiers and their officers for which they would not be held criminally liable. Crimes and wrongs are not coextensive, and the crime of aggression is not a merely legal matter. Judgments of right and wrong in warfare do not wait upon legal decisions, as Walzer urged us to recognize. Centuries before Walzer, Aquinas saw this difference in a more intimate way. He reminded his readers that even a soldier or a policeman who legitimately kills in self-defense may nevertheless “sin if they be moved by private animosity”.24 The body may be exempt, the soul may not be.
However, the fact that JWT incorporates several ethical theories preserves the potential for tension or disagreement in applying its criteria to individual cases, whether contemporary or historical. Not only that, the criteria themselves, for instance the criterion of having a right intention, can be understood according to the different standards set by theories labeled as Utilitarian or Kantian, where the latter is more stringent. All this makes the presentation of JWT’s criteria as an unambiguous set of necessary and sufficient conditions somewhat misleading – a dream of Just War Theory in its aspiration to be a theory. Such concepts as “last”, “proportional”, and “legitimate” (or just) cause which is bound tightly to the concept of “aggression”, invite legalistic and academic disputes traceable less to facts than to preferences for one ethical doctrine over another. Other differences of opinion that invoke the concepts of JWT are perhaps grounded on political ideals and differences which can give a rhetorically charged meaning to terms like “unjust war” and “war criminal”. Hume would not have been surprised by this.
If generals make the mistake of training for the next war by re-fighting the last one, then Just War theorists face a comparable risk. Within the last quarter-century we have witnessed a successful ground war in Kuwait carried out in textbook fashion (the Gulf War), followed by ethnic massacres in Yugoslavia that for too long stirred an uncertain international response, followed by wars ‘declared’ by stateless forces on the United States and other nations in the non-Islamic world. Walzer focused mainly on the Second World War in Europe and the Vietnam War, while Orend (who often follows Walzer closely) gives primary attention to the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But events on the ground seem to be keeping ahead of Just War Theory. The ethical use of drones is a recent topic,25 as are cyber warfare on a massive scale and the physiological enhancement of soldiers beyond the limits of their current abilities.
Since the national commitment to fighting justly retains its force, probably the surest way of finding out how the principles of JWT might be adapted to evolving circumstances is to study how well they have worked in the past and to see where they needed rethinking and enrichment. The three ethical theories contribute to this process, at the very least in terms of making us better aware of the sometimes conflicting ethical demands they make. Imperfect in their application to practice, these theories remain the best guides we have. However they are to be understood, they are a product of human nature. The turbulent relationship between justice and war – the moral challenge of responding to the crime of aggression – has been a concern not just of philosophers but of statesmen and jurists for more than two thousand years. The challenge is thus a shared responsibility. But the fundamental reason for studying what we have learned in the past, and for keeping ethical theory at work, is that our genes have yet to change.
Department of English and Philosophy
United States Military Academy
West Point
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part http://josephkenny.joyeurs.com/CDtexts/summa/SS/SS064.html#SSQ64A7THEP1
Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 7, trans. Marcus Dodds (Barnes and Noble edition, 2006).
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994).
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Jonathan Bennett, 2008 (http://www.4shared.com/office/J5cokah7/Kant_Immanuel_-_Groundwork_for.html).
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2nd edition, 2002.
Brian Orend, The Morality of War (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006).
Stephen Pinker, “The Moral Instinct” (New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008).
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 4th edition, 2006).
1 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 7, p. 806.
2 ibid., Chapter 12, p. 824.
3 ibid., p. 821.
4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13.
5 ibid.
6 Leviathan, Chapter 14.
7 ibid., Chapter 15.
8 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Jonathan Bennett, Chapter 2 (italics not added; bullets deleted).
9 ibid., Chapter 1.
10 The research of Jonathan Haidt (as reported by Stephen Pinker in his essay, “The Moral Instinct”) suggests that the self should be seen as a suite of universal psychological characteristics that make the behavior of even primitive human societies less solitary, nasty and brutish than Hobbes had portrayed. (Steven Pinker, New York Times Magazine, January13, 2008.)
11 Leviathan, Chapter 13.
12 Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2.
13 Leviathan, Chapter 14.
14 Utilitarianism, Chapter 12. Mill adds: “ ‘to do as you would be done by’ and ‘to love your neighbor as yourself,’ constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”
15 “Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.” Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Bennett, Chapter 2 (bold font not added).
16 ibid., Chapter 2, footnote 12.
17 ibid., Chapter 1 (italics not added). The word “pathological” is meant to have a neutral psychological sense, indicating a state of feeling. It is not meant to suggest an abnormal state.
18 Leviathan, Chapter 13.
19 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 4th ed., p. 20.
20 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, “Of Liberty and Necessity”, Part I. Hume would have recognized these “constant and universal principles” at work today among Democrats and Republicans.
21 ibid.
22 Brian Orend, The Morality of War, Chapter 2.
23 “Casuistry” is the name applied to the practice of examining the relationship between individual cases of personal or social conduct and the moral principles or rules which apply to them. The aim is to approach the principles or rules through the cases in order to gain a better understanding of both. Given the difficulties of fulfilling this aim, the word’s pejorative sense is perhaps inevitable, though it is not an essential part of its meaning. Michael Walzer describes his own method of studying historical cases as “practical casuistry” (Just and Unjust Wars, p. 45).
24 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 63, Article 7, Response.
25 Germany’s buzz bombs sent out to attack London were so primitive a forerunner of today’s drones and laser-guided weapons that they can be treated as an instance of indiscriminate bombing.