William Scott Green
University of Miami
I have never served in the military, and I have never been in war. My father was a Major in the United States Marine Corps, but he rarely spoke of his experiences in the Philippines. So the remarks that follow are in some sense an exercise in rank amateurism. I have no experience with war.
To help correct that deficiency, I turned to a book by an acquaintance of mine, Nathaniel Fick. The book, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer,1 describes Nate’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq and helps bridge the gap between our sometimes abstract and antiseptic academic theorizing and the embodied reality of the impact of war on a soldier’s life. Nate writes:
I drifted after leaving the Corps. At age twenty-six, I feared I had already lived the best years of my life. Never again would I enjoy the sense of purpose and belonging that I had felt in the Marines. Also, I realized that combat had nearly unhinged me. Despite my loving family, supportive friends, and good education, the war flooded into every part of my life, carrying me along toward an unknown fate. If it could do that to me, what about my Marines? What about the guys without families, whose friends didn’t try to understand, who got out of the Corps without the prospects I had? I worried that they had survived the war only to be killed in its wake.
After channeling all my energy into applying to graduate school, I got a phone call from an admissions officer: “Mr. Fick, we read your application and liked it very much. But a member of our committee read Evan Wright’s story about your platoon in Rolling Stone. You’re quoted as saying, ‘The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight; the good news is, we get to kill people.’” She paused, as if waiting for me to disavow the quote. I was silent, and she went on. “We have a retired Army officer on our staff, and he warned me that there are people who enjoy killing, and they aren’t nice to be around. Could you please explain your quote for me?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Well, do you really feel that way?” Her tone was earnest, almost pleading.
“You mean, will I climb your clock tower and pick people off with a hunting rifle?”
It was her turn to be silent.
“No, I will not. Do I feel compelled to explain myself to you? I don’t.”
I was frustrated as much by respect and attempts at understanding as by unfeeling ignorance. The worst were blanket accolades and thanks from people “for what you guys did over there.” Thanks for what, I wanted to ask—shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes? There wasn’t any pride simply in being there. The pride was in our good decisions, in the things we did right. I hoped that I’d done more right than wrong, hoped that I hadn’t been cavalier with people’s lives. I was learning to accept that sometimes the only way to fight evil is with another evil, however good its aim.2
Nearly every issue discussed in this volume is embedded in the experiences Nate evokes in this passage.
Just War theory is a species-specific activity.
So far as we know, only human beings engage in the self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-understanding that Just War theorizing represents. Stephen Toulmin trenchantly observed that we humans know and also are conscious that we know. He writes:
We acquire, possess, and make use of our knowledge; but at the same time, we are aware of our own activities as knowers…. Looking “outside ourselves” and mastering the problems posed by the world we live in, we have extended our understanding; looking “inwards” and considering how it is that we master those problems, we have deepened it.3
Toulmin avers that human understanding has two components. We are conscious that we know, and we also are conscious of how we know. We hold it important to have reasons for both what we think and what we do.
Just War theory is uniquely human not only because of the self-reflection it exhibits but also because of the activity it seeks to inform. What we mean by “war,” the behaviors and attitudes that we include in the category of “war,” suggest that war, too, is a uniquely human activity. As we commonly conceive it, war entails the planned, willful, premeditated, and collective inflicting of harm by one group of humans on another group of our own species. Specifically and conventionally, war has been construed as armed conflict between states about governance. As Brian Orend notes,
The conflict of arms must be actual, and not merely latent, for it to count as war. Further, the actual armed conflict must be both intentional and widespread: isolated clashes between rogue officers, or border patrols, do not count as actions of war. The onset of war requires a conscious commitment, and a significant mobilization, on the part of the belligerents in question. There’s no real war, so to speak, until the fighters intend to go to war and until they do so with a heavy quantum of force.4
This understanding requires some modification. Terrorism and cyberwar force us to rethink statehood and armed violence as distinctive markers of war. The free flow of information over the internet may even make certain forms of speech into de facto acts of war. In the final analysis, what ultimately may distinguish war from other forms of harm to others is less its organization than the intention, the motivation, of one socio-political entity to injure, weaken, dominate, or destroy another. War is something humans do on purpose. It is the opposite of accident. The very mindfulness and deliberateness of war gives Just War theory its strongest claim to urgency. If war, in the end, is a quintessential illustration of mind over matter, then Just War theory epitomizes mind over mind. It represents the theoretic cognition, the “thinking about thinking,” that the psychologist Merlin Donald, and after him the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, posits as the latest stage—following the mimetic and mythic stages—in the evolution of human cognition. Bellah argues that religion played a critical role in this cognitive evolution, and the religion papers in this conference lend some support to that claim.5
What kind of “thinking about thinking” does Just War theory represent? We know that Just War theory is an act of justification. Professor Scheible submits that, from a Buddhist perspective, Just War theorizing is an exercise in regret and remorse, or simply an excuse. Because war is in some fundamental sense exceptional and undesirable, it requires an articulation, an explanation, an accounting, a reason. Just War theory is our attempt to make right—or at least plausible—a uniquely human activity that we believe is wrong or at least problematic. That the classical cultures of West and East and the religions they produced ruminate continuously about war is testimony to its consequence.
Since the concrete criteria for rightness, justice, or even plausibility are particular to cultures and traditions, Just War theory is at the very least an exercise in validation that a culture or polity makes to itself of its own motives and actions in bringing organized harm to other human beings. It is a mirror of self-justification and legitimation. In response to a question, Professor Berkowitz remarked that the United States needed to punish the perpetrators at Abu Grahib “to send a signal of who we are as a people.” That signal likely would matter more to the United States than to others.
Consider the two most prominent framings of the Just War to emerge at this conference. The Augustinian/Thomistic variant contains four elements: competent authority, palpable evil, right intention, and peaceful purpose. Professor Tully’s admirably succinct definition of the Just War makes explicit seven components of legitimation, the ingredients of rightness:
A Just War is one which is openly declared as a last resort for a legitimate reason 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 during the war and following it.
The adverbs and adjectives in these definitions offer criteria of validation that for a large part of the Western heritage make a war just: the evil must be palpable and the purpose peaceful; the declaration must be open, the resort last, the reason legitimate, the political authority competent, the intention proper, the hope of success reasonable, and the prosecution proportional. Most of these modifiers—legitimate, competent, proper, reasonable, and proportional—are culturally specific value judgments, which by their very nature are subjective and non-empirical. They are matters of estimation and interpretation. Their concrete meanings and credibility depend on the prior consent and consensus of a political community. Who decides, and against which measure, the meaning, scope, and nature of legitimacy, competence, propriety, reasonableness, and proportionality?
If Just War theory is to make any claim to cognitive consequence by being more than arbitrary and self-serving—an exercise in convenience—should not its criteria of “justness” (as opposed to “justice”) at least approach neutral factuality or objective certainty? Do not the norms of validation in some basic way depend on our actually knowing what we did and why we did it?
We can be more concrete about this. One—perhaps the—dominant leitmotif of this volume is the consequential role of intention, both of governments and individual soldiers, in determining that a war is just. Nearly every paper raises, if not emphasizes, the significance of motive. Every religion, tradition, or philosophy considered above posits that right intention is a foundational legitimation for harming others. Take one obvious example from Professor Wallace’s paper. Civilian contractors who perform the same duties as professional soldiers are morally suspect because—it is supposed by some—their motive is profit rather than patriotism.
Just War theory thus appears critically to depend in meaningful measure on accurate knowledge, primarily of ourselves and our motives for harming others. If Just War theory depends on our achieving objective and factual knowledge of our motives and actions, what is the likelihood of that? Is such knowledge accessible?
Work in contemporary psychology indicates that the path to neutrality and factuality about our intentions, and thus our justification of war, is a cognitive minefield. The reason is that precisely when we explain to ourselves why we inflict harm on others—in both the personal and political realms—we human beings have a marked and documented tendency to be less than objective. In a word, we dissemble. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls this the “Moralization Gap,” and explains it as follows:
The Moralization Gap is part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology. Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals. People congregate in groups not because they are robots who are magnetically attracted to one another but because they have social and moral emotions. They feel warmth and sympathy, gratitude and trust, loneliness and guilt, jealousy and anger. The emotions are internal regulators that ensure that people reap the benefits of social life—reciprocal exchange and cooperative action—without suffering the costs, namely exploitation by cheaters and social parasites.6
Bluntly, this means that when we explain to ourselves our inflicting pain on others, we tend to lie to ourselves about what we did and why we did it. We self-deceive. We do this, the research Pinker reports suggests, in order to not give ourselves away with a stammer or a blush when we dissimulate. We lie to ourselves so we can lie more effectively to others in the service of maintaining social relations.7
The Moralization Gap, Pinker says, “consists of complimentary bargaining tactics in the negotiation for recompense between a victor and a perpetrator.”8 In a conflict,… “each side sincerely believes its version of the story, namely, that it is an innocent and long-suffering victim and the other side a malevolent and treacherous sadist.”9 The Moralization Gap means that we obscure our motives and distort our intentions to craft our best image of ourselves to ourselves. Think of Professor DeWald’s example of Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ virtual ignoring of plunder as a rationale of war when pillage was an obvious and unavoidable component of armed hostilities. Or reflect on Professor Imiola’s account of the conflicting cases made by proponents and opponents of the Iraq War.
The self-serving bias of the Moralization Gap blocks factuality in another way as well: it can lead political and military leaders to overestimate their competence and their ability to win.10 This kind of distortion affects the elements of competence and proportionality in our definition. Overconfidence can be a killer.
We may think that self-deception applies only primarily to individuals, but that would be a misreading. Pinker lists five categories or roots of violence, four of which he associates with neuroanatomy, with particular parts of the human brain. The first of these is “practical, instrumental, exploitative, or predatory” violence, which is “the simplest kind of violence: the use of force as a means to an end….violence… deployed in pursuit of a goal such as greed, lust, or ambition….” The second is “dominance—the drive for supremacy over one’s rivals,” which applies to groups as well as individuals. “The third root of violence is revenge—the drive to pay back a harm in kind.” The fourth is “sadism, the joy of hurting.”
The fifth and most consequential cause of violence is ideology, in which true believers weave a collection of motives into a creed and recruit other people to carry out its destructive goals. An ideology cannot be identified with a part of the brain or even with a whole brain, because it is distributed across the brains of many people.11
In ideology, the Moralization Gap can produce selective historical memory, generate resentment, preserve and nurture past grievances, and yield a perspective in which “People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.”12
The design of the mind can encourage the train of theorization to go in that direction because of our drives for dominance and revenge, our habit of essentializing other groups, particularly as demons or vermin, our elastic circle of sympathy, and the self-serving biases that exaggerate our wisdom and virtue. An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.13
To this, Pinker adds a litany of ways in which we rationalize our intentions and actions to diminish our sense of their harmfulness: euphemism, moral disengagement, phasing decisions in the practice of war, displacement or diffusion of responsibility, distancing, derogating the victim, relativizing harm, and advantageous comparison (“Other people do even worse things.”).14
If we take these results of empirical psychological research—which come up relatively little in the papers above—and add them to the complexities of moral theories, technological shifts, and historical evidence, we can see just how daunting and consequential Just War theorizing is. In the light of all this, perhaps when it comes to assessing our motives and intentions “invincible ignorance” is the rule rather than the exception.
Does that mean that the exercise is hopeless? Just the opposite. Because of our evolved capacities for self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-understanding, we have the capacity to know more about ourselves as a species than at any other time in our evolution. The fact that we know, through the work of experimentation and rational research, that we dissimulate and how we dissemble opens a path to self-correction. Pinker’s own work argues that violence is declining.
But we are a tricky species, and getting better takes work. In the end, the most essential ingredient to Just War theorizing may be relentless and uncompromising honesty, a clear-eyed empiricism that gradually unmasks us and engages our capacities as the one species that knows, and knows that it knows and how it knows.
Perhaps that is both the rationale and vindication of this conference volume. Through this collaboration we have learned many things. For my money, the two most important are that (1) Just War theorizing is very hard work, and (2) it has a legitimate, perhaps an essential, part in an American college education. War may be a uniquely human behavior, but it is disproportionately an activity of the young. In a literal sense, war assaults our future because it distracts and burdens the young (How’s that for a euphemism?). We thus owe it to them to help them think as clearly and honestly about it as possible. From that perspective, the work of this conference volume could not be more meaningful or consequential.
For just that reason, I want to close where I began, with Nate Fick, whose work so eloquently reminds us precisely and concretely how Just War theory matters.
At the conclusion of One Bullet Away, he writes as:
In June, one year after coming home from Iraq, I dragged a childhood friend to the Civil War battlefield at Antietam in western Maryland. I wanted to walk the ground. Among the split-rail fences and restored cannons, I saw RPGs and fedayeen. Where would I have put my machine guns to defend the Cornfield? How would Hitman Two have assaulted the Bloody Lane?
The sun was warm on my arms, and bees buzzed through the tall grass as we meandered toward Burnside Bridge. There, on the afternoon of America’s bloodiest day, troops made three unsuccessful attempts to cross Antietam Creek under withering fire. We stood at the center of the span with our hands on the stones.
“Was it a waste?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “They won, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. They freed the slaves, the way you freed the Afghans”.
I didn’t answer.
“Think about the women under the Taliban and the poor Iraqis under Saddam,” she continued, seizing a chance to change the subject. “You helped do so much good for so many people. Why can’t you take comfort in that?”
Staring down at the water, I measured my words, running through a justification I’d given myself a thousand times before. The good was abstract. The good didn’t feel as good as the bad felt bad. It wasn’t the good that kept me up at night. “You sound so unprincipled,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you find peace in what you and your men sacrificed so much to do? Why can’t you be proud?”
I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn’t beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that’s not why we did it. We fought for each other.
I am proud.15
And so should we all be.
1 Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) [Kindle edition]
2 Ibid., p. 368
3 Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p.1
4 Brian Orend, “War”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/war/>
5 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011i
6 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011) [Kindle edition], p. 490
7 Ibid. pp. 490-491
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., pp. 512ff.
11 All citations in this paragraph are from Ibid., p. 508
12 Ibid., p. 507
13 Ibid., p. 557
14 Ibid., pp. 565-568
15 Fick, Ibid., pp. 368-370