The Ethics
of Reluctance:
What We
Can't Learn from the Kosovo Campaign
LT John D.
Carlson, USNR
We
find ourselves at a moral crossroads as we close out the bloodiest century
of war-fighting in history and face the frontier of an uncertain new millennium.Two
perennial questions have re-emerged since the end of the Cold War, and
recently—particularly since the NATO air campaign in Kosovo—they have begun
to receive the critical re-appraisal due to them: first, in what do national
interests consist?And second, what
considerations equip us to decide when use of force is appropriate to defend
such interests?These are related
though not identical questions.One
design of this paper is to clarify the ethical sentiments embedded within
our political interests; to argue, therefore, that politics is ineluctably
a moral enterprise.Equally important
as we scour the ill-defined vista of 21st century foreign policy,
we need to ask what moral signposts are available to guide interventionist
commitments that entail use of force.To
this latter question I shall devote the bulk of this paper.
Throughout
this inquiry, I shall lay out and sift through several notable “theories
of reluctance” that emerged in the after-glow of the Kosovo bombing campaign.Oneversion
that I shall term “moral resignation” eschews intervention in wars perceived
to be driven primarily by “extraneous” moral sentiments.This
posture represents a troubling and impoverished vision of politics that
shuts out much of the available light that guides our moral and civic convictions,
that illumes our political and human identities.I
shall also consider briefly a kind of “strategic reluctance” evident in
the dialogue surrounding Kosovo, that is, a perceived unwillingness to
take certain risks or to make strong commitments whether from the political
pulpit or on the battle grounds.This
stance may betray tepid purposefulness; may announce the moral ambiguity
of one's cause; may even undermine the chance of a successful outcome.All
of these conditions may speak not to an awareness of the limits to force,
but a corrupting indecisiveness that, in turn, could well augur a prolongation
of the loss and suffering that war brings in her train.
Lastly,
I will turn to the wellspring of just war thought, drawing liberally from
Augustine and other seminal thinkers within the tradition.I
wish to suggest how they serve as moral advisors, able to offer still solemn
and pertinent counsel in guiding modern military decision-making.Specifically,
I wish to consider how the morality of another form of reluctance, a kind
of “principled restraint,” helps frame the discussion of when and how military
commitments ought to be carried out.I
will attempt to show how this more vital and noble form of reluctance distinguishes
itself from moral resignation or mere fuzziness about one’s cause and the
means necessary to achieve proclaimed ends.Using
some lessons learned from the air war in Kosovo, I hope to show how “the
ethics of reluctance” clarifies telling signs about our moral and political
commitments while alerting us to the dilemmas and perils of intervention.I
shall begin.
I.An
Uncertain Landscape:Re-conceiving
Political Interests
The
collective sigh of relief occasioned by the Cold War's end has been offset,
in part, by recurring confusion over what constitutes our national interests.More
than once, military leaders have waxed nostalgic—in jest of course—for
the simpler days of bipolarity when we knew definitively who our enemy
was:We did not then know what the
outcome would be, but at least we knew how and against whom to wage war.A
first order of business here is to sketch out the current political landscape,
to give some contour to the issues facing 21st century policy
makers, military commanders, and engaged citizens alike.This
task requires, too, giving some attention to the moral fabric or elements
of our democratic identity.
Since
the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, foreign policy
initiatives have focused on how to shore up our interests, as a hegemonic
actor, in a more globally complex and economically interdependent political
order. Technological innovations and the information age of mass, real-time
media communications have buttressed and accelerated our sense of mutual
dependence, have re-ignited the possibilities ofinternational
community while, at the same time, corroding some of the underpinnings
of our isolationist sentiments.Indeed,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has formally issued a death warrant on
isolationism: “We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have
a reason to exist….We are all internationalists now, whether we like it
or not.” [1]Reaping
the benefits of a global marketplace entails accepting reciprocal responsibilities,
the argument goes.As the Gulf War
bore out, those who profit most become obliged to preserve the political
order that sustains them.Similarly,
we who are threatened by a world in which, however far away, shameful acts
and atrocities are wrought on innocent peoples feel obliged to label them
“crimes against humanity,” to outlaw them (either through legal or economic
means), and, when appropriate, to physically prevent or respond to them.Sovereignty
remains important throughout such deliberations, but its semi-sacred status
is now up for grabs.Bidding us towards
an urgent reassessment of “first principles” that order international political
theory, Jean Bethke Elshtain proposes,
Maybe if some of the luster were taken off the surface sheen of sovereignty, and if one could begin to view sovereignty as a practical necessity, not a sacral principle, more experimentation with alternatives that preserve a commitment to political independence and the yearning of peoples for a security and stabilitybut avoid strong sovereignty might be possible.[2]
These
notions of sacredness and necessity require some unpacking, a chore I shall
postpone for the moment.Before decreeing
that isolationism is (or ought to be) dead, at last, we might be right
to call for previous autopsy reports.The
United States has wrestled with problems of economic interdependence and
pursuant political responses during and many times since the early days
of the republic.The ideals exhorted
by John Quincy Adams or in Washington’s Farewell address resound even in
deliberations to enter into World Wars I and II.It
seems isolationism represents a strand of political thought and sentiment
that has long survived in tension with interventionist and internationalist
stances.It might be wise not to
shed entirely this political wariness despite our increasingly interdependent
ties, institutions, and interests.I
introduce, though will not defend here, the isolationist view in part to
complexify the picture.That is,
I want to accent within our outlook on foreign affairs the place of a tradition’s
continuity and evolution (i.e., its response to change) instead ofsuggesting
prima facie that foreign policy in the new millennium calls for
a complete paradigm shift, one that must be crafted de novo.I
shall say more about the importance of other traditions later, but let
me attempt to illustrate my point another way.
Not So
Novel Ethics?
The
hard-knocks school of realism has endeavored since its earliest days in
ancient Greece[3]
to fence out the barbaroi who speak the strange tongue of political ethics—or
worse—those who conjure up the emotions when styling their political appeals.This
resistance to the ethical remains sturdy today.Former
President Bush’s acknowledgment that it was pity that prompted US intervention
in Somalia may be perceived as a kind of confession—for allowing empathy
to guide policy and for failing to deploy the sobering reasoning that a
robust raison d’etat enjoins.[4]Other
voices are more forthright in contending that there is no role in the arena
of international affairs for “disinterested and indeed frivolous motives,
such as television audiences’ revulsion at harrowing scenes of war.”[5]This
view of moral resignation I am describing refuses to admit that ethical
claims—which might include but would not be limited to affective reactions
to otherwise descriptive events—should enter into political affairs and
military decision-making.In refusing
to play the ethical card, moral resignation affirms that all hands must
be won with the strong suits of power, national security, or strategic
interest or perhaps with the trump card of national sovereignty.
But
is this to play with a full deck?Haven’t
firmly seated moral arguments been part and parcel of our political vocabulary
throughout this country’s history?Can
one think adequately about the Revolutionary and Civil Wars or either of
the 20th century world wars without taking stock of the perhaps
blurred ethical-political ideals at work therein.Isn’t
it also the case that in some measure what sustained the West’s cause during
the Cold War was not simply that the US and NATO were countering an expansionist
empire with a vast military arsenal, but that communist totalitarianism
and authoritarianism took its roots in ideals and values that the West—or
at least its dominant traditions—found morally abhorrent? Communism
was—and still is—wrong by virtue of the values it espouses, the anthropology
it presumes about its citizens, and the human ends and possibilities it
ordains.
Emotions,
furthermore, factor integrally into the political equation, and they need
not fall prey to the typecast ofirrational
pleas or hysterical fits. To weigh in on this matter, we might summons
up Augustine—bishop, church father, saint, late antique forbear of realism,
and inaugural orator of just war thinking—who lays siege to the Stoic demeanor
that calls for emotional detachment in all matters.Rather,
Augustine insists, emotions are motive; trained by the mind, formed by
reason “so that they may be turned into the instruments of justice,” they
impel us to action.[6]The
question is not whether we are angry or outraged or saddened, he
muses, but why and how passions may reasonably be brought
to bear on this situation at hand.Hesitant
over the conventional definitions of a commonwealth prevalent in his day,
Augustine proposes that a commonwealth is judged by the loves and values
its people hold dear.[7]In
our own day, we would hope that these include conceptions about the dignity
of human life, the values of freedom of worship and expression, as well
as the political and economic conditions that are necessary to sustain
these and other basic human ends and pursuits.These
are no doubt American political values, but they are moral values as well
to which we are deeply indebted and emotionally committed.
Furthermore,
ethical dimensions inescapably pervade classical political themes of justice,
human rights, order and the common good, and the kinds of government that
conduce to the ends and means of good human living.Passionate
moral views have always been crucial to how we understand human interests,
hence, how we collectively assay them through the prism of our national
and political identity.The point
I am trying to make is that moral criteria have not emerged de novo
in the post-Cold War world nor in the wake of wars invoking humanitarian
causes.The end of a forbidding,
omnipresent Soviet adversary—what Joseph Nye has poetically dubbed the
“loss of the North Star that guides American foreign policy”[8]—has
again re-cast our eyes inwards towards the morally suffused constellation
of our own political convictions. It has, moreover, opened doors of possibility,
closed for five decades, to act less reservedly upon such convictions.What
the “new” era announces is the potential to incorporate explicitly ethical
concerns without threat of nuclear war or a major confrontation with the
Soviet Union; of course, the unintended effects ofsuch
overtures would have, in earlier days, dangerously disrupted a tenuous
balance of powers and far outweighed any intended benefits to be derived
from intervention.There is still
a place for proportional reasoning today, for example, in the more cautious
approach the West takes in its relations with China.But,
it is the case for intervention under an “ethics of reluctance”
that I want to make.
So,
in what, then, do American interests consist?Perhaps,
it has been alleged, there really is “no single national interest.”[9]America's
interests are those interests Americans deem worthy of defending:economic
resources, security requirements, liberal and democratic values and, yes,
ideals native to our Judeo-Christian foundations that affirm human dignity
and sturdily undergird the case for certain fundamental human rights.The
so-called humanitarian causes often vitalized by mass media or what has
come to be called “the CNN effect” arouse our sensibilities on numerous
and not incommensurate levels—as sentient beings, as democratic citizens,
as believers and people of faith, and as Americans who prize at least basic
human and civil rights for all persons.That
our moral revulsion ought to be bracketed in the political sphere, as moral
resignation espouses, is to suggest that politics does not—that is, it
cannot and ought not—acknowledge or serve this very essential part of our
humanity.It suggests that politics
exists to serve some end in itself severed from concrete human concerns
including the ethical.
Politics
is always a means—indispensable yet finite, limited; as such, it must engage
human concerns and ultimately serve citizens as ends in themselves.While
we strive to extend and enhance the moral horizon of the political order,
limits must be discerned by what can be done without unbearable cost or
irreparable harm to other realms that we also deem important.Not
only must one consider the tangible presence of moral evil, but security
interests, diplomatic relations, limited military resources, economic considerations
must also factor into political deliberation—especially decisions involving
force.As this survey continues,
we must hold at bay the notion that either political interests or institutional
arrangements (whether theories of sovereignty or rules of war) exist for
some higher goal abstracted from the concrete preservation and flourishing
of the human person.
Problematic
Postures: The Vacuum ofMoral Resignation
Before
shifting to the question of when, where, and how military interventions
are justified, I want to say a bit more about the corrupt ethics of reluctance
at work in moral resignation.One
line of such thinking argues that the virtue of war and “its sole useful
function” is that it brings peace.Outside
parties should be reluctant to intervene (even on behalf of a beleaguered
people), for that is to meddle artificially with war's “natural corrective”
powers.From a purely consequentialist
point of view, it’s best to just “let minor wars burn themselves out.”[10]Looming
large in this venue is the providential specter of Kant’s “perpetual peace,”
a scheme that, even while eschewing the scourge of war, appeals to nature’s
use of it to reach some foreordained telos or endgame where war ceases
to exist.[11](I
don’t think this is the place where I need to challenge Kant’s prognostication
that wars will someday cease exist.)
Moral
resignation locates itself in a pseudo-Kantian or even Darwinian framework
where, in effect, as Thucydides said, the strong do what they will and
the weak suffer what they must.[12]Peace
incurs its moral status as the rightful outcome of the survival of the
fittest; war’s virtue lies in its corrective powers as part ofnature’s
chain of events.Augustine, too,
argued that the value of war is to be the peace that attends, for he gleaned
that peace is an aspiration that all humans, good and wicked alike, share
in common.But Augustine was also
concerned to assess the nature of the peace in question.For
him, the Pax Romana (not unlike the peace that Slobodan Milosevic
seeks in the Balkans) is peace through conquest, wherein the libido
dominiandi or lust to dominate betrays no true peace at all.
Famous cities were up to auction as if they were country houses; one whole community was butchered by order…And all this took place in the peace which followed war…Peace and War had a competition in cruelty; and Peace won the prize.For the men whom War cut down were bearing arms; Peace slaughtered the defenceless.The law of War was that the smitten should have the chance of smiting in return; the aim of Peace was to make sure not that the survivor should live, but that he should be killed without the chance of offering resistance.[13]
A
dominative peace becomes the unnatural ordering of parts to a whole, represented
in the Balkans, most recently in Kosovo, by the raping and murdering of
unarmed persons, the pillaging of homes and the destruction and intended
eradication of a living culture.This
kind of carnage was not unknown in Augustine's day, and he went to great
pains to detail how it consumed Rome even before the Vandals attacked.Peace,
for him, is not simply the absence of war, but an earthly state that makes
possible the enjoyment of other goods:love,
freedom, and truth.A “just war”
may, then, perforce be the only avenue available to reorder an unjust “peace”
of conquest.The imperfect justice
available in this world consists in a rightful moral order held in common
by citizens reasonably assured of the chance to pursue ordinary earthly
loves: the freedom to worship God and to partake of the gifts of family
and everyday life without threat to life and limb.Unlike
the view moral resignation holds, justice abides as the chief concern for
Augustine, not an unqualified peace per se.
Finally,
the insistence that any intervention by an outside force would lead “to
an unjust outcome from one perspective or another”[14]
crystallizes the stance of moral resignation.The
idea is that since no side (e.g., neither Serbians nor Albanian Kosovars)
has a monopoly on justice—since fallacy, vileness, and brutality reign
on both sides of the aisle—this relieves onlookers from any responsive
commitment.I shall address this
argument more pointedly when I take up the case for comparative justice
below.Suffice it to say for now
that a complex political order—one simultaneously fraught with the perils
of nationalism and brutal dictatorships as well as democracy’s promise
of basic freedoms and universal goods—obliges exemplars of such freedoms
to weigh and warn against the relative evils committed by all parties (including
one’s own).
II.
Intervention Perplexed
Up
to this point, I have tried to expand the possible venues for how politics
is conceived, to broaden narrow construals of national interests by permitting
ethical considerations to stand alongside or as part of security, economic,
and strategic interests.Gleaning
politics, in part, as a moral endeavor means understanding that decisions
to war are overlaid onto a dense fabric of national concerns that are woven
through and through with moral threads.This
is also where the political patchwork gets tangled, where foreign policy
thinking becomes jumbled and confused.Where
do we intervene?If we cross the
line in Kosovo, why not in Rwanda or Sierra Leone?Why
not Chechnya or Tibet?I want at
the outset to chase off the notion that expanding the moral-political horizon
of foreign affairs entails responding anywhere and everywhere human rights
violations exist.A political posture
of “consistency for its own sake” is surely a hobgoblin that is unable
to assume the appropriate guise for the complex, imperfect world in which
we live; that does not have to weigh competing goods and conflicting values;
that does not have to contend with scarce resources or to stare in the
face the often hostile world that 21st century princes and civic
bodies confront.Realpolitik
earned its name by entertaining questions of feasibility and necessity,
not by positing some hypothetical world in which ideal rules or maxims
could be consistently universalized in the political arena.We
stand, then, in need of a coherent brand of casuistry that reckons adequately
with both moral ideals and political realities—as well as political ideals
and moral realities—that inform the constitutive attachments and troubling
entanglements comprised in the web of global politics.Having
laid out some preliminary disclaimers, I return to the ethics of reluctance
and a discussion of restraint that outfit us with some methodological tools
for military decision-making in our day.
Vital Reluctance
in the Just War Tradition: The Usual Tenets
Despite
casting scrutiny on the claims of moral resignation, there is a place for
reluctance in our political ventures and foreign affairs.As
I mentioned earlier, in the context of national interests, the importance
of locating our moral and political views within a tradition is vital.I
want to turn now to one of our traditions that helps fathom the depth of
such interests and how they can be defended.The
“just war” tradition, rich in its espousal of principled restraint, offers
some tentative criteria for when intervention and force may be exercised.Just
war thinking acknowledges, to trot out the trusty refrain, that “war is
hell.”But, against those who decry
the idea of limited war (or “kinder, gentler warfare” as it has been derided
more recently), just war thinking resists appropriating the “war is hell”
truism as strategic doctrine.Rather,
it is a moral description that asserts the bald horror of war and makes
urgent the establishment of a threshold of limits to prevent excessive
destruction and gratuitous slaughter.Tenets
like last resort—the notion that war is only justified after all non-violent
political options are reasonably thought to have been exhausted—clarify
the moral quality of reluctance incumbent to decisions to wage war.[15]This
plea was voiced vociferously during the Kosovo campaign.Just
war thinking also requires that force be undertaken only where reasonable
possibility for success exists.Such
a measure wards against undertaking a just cause where the outcome may
be indecisive at best, suicidal at worst.Despite
the ineradicable stain that Rwandan genocide has left on the twentieth
century, some wonder what effect the much vaunted technological superiority
of Western firepower might have had on the “low-tech” and widely dispersed
decimation of eight-hundred thousand to a million people slaughtered by
machetes.[16]
Proportionality,
invoking a similar plug for moral restraint, requires that only the necessary
force be used in bello.Moreover,
as part of ad bellum considerations, proportionality requires that
the anticipated good sought through use of force outweigh the damage to
be inflicted in this effort.Finally,
discrimination between combatant and non-combatant targets represents an
ethical constraint that helps assure that just wars are always waged as
limited wars and only for the avowed reasons.New
technologies like precision-guided munitions and programmable flight profiles
as well as intricate efforts to avoid civilian populated targets, cultural
landmarks, religious edifices and other forms of sanctuary—all represent
laudable and now commonplace efforts in US and allied tactical strategies
to minimize collateral damage and apply classic principles of just war
thinking.Mistakes are inevitable,
their lethal outcomes tragic and destructive; such is the unavoidably flawed
nature of all human designs.Yet,
the relative paucity—some thirty incidents—of collateral damage in the
Kosovo air campaign testify to the ongoing possibilities for the ethical
deployment of new technologies.This
trend, when force is brought to bear, must continue.
However,
critics are also right to ponder how targeting “dual-use” facilities such
as electrical grids, water treatment plants, and bridges squares with the
discrimination criterion that affirms their “indispensable [status] to
the survival of the civilian population” as defined by the 1977 Protocol
to the Geneva Convention.[17]We
might further wonder in the new era of information warfare whether radio
transmission towers (presumably, as well, newspaper and other propaganda
mediums)warrant expanding the list
of legitimate targets.These methods
would seem to betoken relaxing traditional forms of moral restraint.Moreover,
if NATO stands in violation of the Geneva Convention, how can it also defend
the justness of its cause which aimed, in part, to prevent the kind ofviolations
of Albanian non-combatant’ rights that the Geneva Convention articulates?This
seems fundamentally contradictory.(Serbian
ethnic cleansing, of course, also violated systematically and to exponential
degree basic dictums of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)
In
the cases mentioned above, the injunction of proportionality seemed to
be applied such that the “good” of destroying infrastructure elements of
the Serbian war machine (as it contributed to the overall drive to force
Milosevic to the bargaining table) proportionally outweighed the harm inflicted
on Serbian civilians.The reasoning
seemed to be that the will of the Serbian population and war machine had
to be broken; and this called for some demonstrations of indiscriminate
power to show, as the saying is sometimes heard, “that we could reach out
and touch them.”But this willingness
to engage in a kind of “strategic monism”[18]
of non-discrimination, deploying ethically passé tactics of attrition,
is peculiarly reserved about considering that one can more legitimately
test the will of a nation by targeting the combatants waging the crimes
we purport to counter.Surely, the
families of Serbian soldiers who feel the pain of loss may begin to question
how vital Kosovo is with respect to the effort required to “secure” it.
Just
war criteria call for all combatants, especially those fighting crimes
like genocide, to exercise restraint and conceive war as a method where
the means employed morally coincide with the ends that are sought.Such
considerations, taken together, provide the framework for a version of
moral casuistry—a language of deliberation and reasoning—available to guide
political and military decision making.Worth
noting at this juncture is Prime Minister Blair’s speech about the “new
rules” for a “new world” in a “new millennium,” for three of his five points
for intervention resemble just war tenets.[19]Just
war thought, furthermore, is one articulation of a kind of moral realism
that locates centrally the ethical claims embedded within the tough-minded
realities of political calculation.Moral
realism is complicatedly related to particular versions of political realism
(i.e., Realpolitik); oversimply, it means one that does not rule
out political expediency and hard-nosed reckoning even while articulating
a robust moral vocabulary.[20]Moral
realism, on the one hand, resists that talk of ethics is somehow “less
real,” simply window dressing onto the world.Yet,
on the other, such thinking takes serious stock of the strategic factors
and security conditions that trouble moral-political reasoning.The
moral prince may have to rely on craftiness and shrewdness, even a willingness
to engage in noble lies.
Perhaps
the single most regrettable mistake in the Kosovo campaign was the immediate
announcement that no ground troops would be used.This
kind of “strategic reluctance” would plague support for and jeopardize
the success of the entire 78-day mission.Even
if no plan to use ground troops ever existed, showing our cards as early
as we did ensured that all bets were off before the ante was ever made.We
announced at the outset our weak-kneed resolve—that we were not, in Blair’s
language, so sure of our case.Moreover,
did a preoccupation with “combatant immunity”[21]
(i.e., a perceived concern that the allied nations would tolerate
no losses) betray “tactics of reluctance” that engendered greater willingness
to strike stationary infrastructure targets and put civilians at risk.Roving
paramilitary troops were surely harder to hit and would have foretold far
greater risks to NATO troops.Yet,
the perception that support for the campaign would not withstand allied
combat losses demonstrates that our political commitment had a definite
ceiling, one approximately 15,000 feet high.Had
the case for intervention been stated sooner in the US and more vociferously,
we might have avoided the need for an overly taxing strategic reluctance.
Just
War Thought (cont.):Comparative
Justice
Just
war theory is far-ranging:I have
considered it as a moral tradition owing its first intimations to Augustine;
as a type of moral reckoning or casuistry; and as one possible constituent
of moral realism.Clearly, these
dimensions all overlap.In this
section, I want to tease out the intricacies of necessity that drive political
and moral realism by surveying the oft neglected criterion of comparative
justice.This foray will allow us
to conceive of just war theory, finally, as a kind of moral outlook onto
the world.My hope, then, is that
by understanding the kind of moral backdrop that comparative justice assumes,
we can ascertain an ethic of responsibility that proffers ways to act that
are appropriate to the imperfect and complex arena of political relations.
Comparative
justice is an understudied criterion that has been formalized in the just
war tradition only more recently in the US Catholic Bishops' 1983 Pastoral
Letter The Challenge of Peace (its insinuations, though, date back
to St. Augustine).Simply
put, comparative justice “stresses that no state should act on the basis
that it has ‘absolute justice’ on its side.”[22]The
principle is designed to temper the zeal for war, especially a just war,
by resisting the invocation of moral crusade.Essentially
a kind of proviso, comparative (or relative) justice aims to attenuate
an overweening evocation of a just cause for fear it could lead to exceptionalism,
that is, to one side exempting itself from certain rules of war by virtue
of its superior moral claims (cf., the aforementioned discussion of non-combatant
discrimination).
While
this idea resists claims to “absolute” or “perfect justice,” I suggest
that it also counters the view of moral resignation that wagers since no
side has a monopoly on justice, onlookers are, thereby, relieved from any
responsibility at all.For example,
moral resignation might argue that since injustices and abuses reigned
on both Serbian and Albanian sides of the aisle in Kosovo, that any action
would lead “to an unjust outcome from one perspective or another.”[23]Another
view similarly hostile to just war thinking argues that “to maintain that
a given war is ‘just’ is to say that one of the belligerents is exclusively
right and the other is exclusively wrong, regardless of how the war is
conducted.”[24]We
might call this myopic outlook “immoral equivalence” for its refusal to
see some wrongs and misdeeds as worse than others.Against
both these views, comparative justice enjoins civic bodies and state actors
to reason through the moral intricacies of political dilemmas and may ultimately
call them to step off of the sidelines onto the side of greater justice
or, at least, the side of lesser evil. Thus, in Kosovo, we were obliged
to weigh the crimes committed by the KLA and random Albanians versus state-sponsored
ethnic cleansing and wide-scale, systematic human rights violations carried
out by the Serbian military upon ethnic Albanians.Even
while not siding explicitly with the cause of Albanian independence, comparative
justice hopes to provide enough sense of right to proceed on a path to
correct greater moral wrongs being committed by the Milosevic regime.
To
approach comparative justice from another angle, we might inquire what
kind of view of the human person, of the self and other, is at work here?And
how are we to adopt this conception in our political responses and civic
responsibilities?The outlook of
comparative justice I wish to lift up rests on a threefold design of moral
anthropology and human relations, the awareness of which helps articulate
moral rejoinders and political responses appropriate to the fraught state
of global affairs.To the first dimension
or layer, I assign a rather unwieldy term, our “ontological disposition.”By
that I mean, morally and politically speaking, we are situated in the world
both as interested parties and as judges of worldly affairs who are obliged
to reflect, evaluate, and react to political dilemmas.As
rational, discerning beings, we can assay moral norms of behavior that
demand conformance to some degree, yet we always do so in concrete ways
that admit to the importance of our sentient embodiment, the instructive
power of human experience, as well the civic ties and cultural mores that
constitute our identities.[25]
We
are not impartial, morally resigned jurists, but rather citizens of a common
world, members of one dispersed (though often cantankerous) human family.In
some broadly religious sense, empathy, mutual concern, caritas,
and comradeship bind us even when such latent forces are suppressed.I
am reminded here, in considering various encounters between members of
opposing armies, of Michael Walzer’s instructive account of naked soldiers.Soldiers
who are bathing or pulling up their trousers place within the enemy’s gun
site their undisguised humanity.Of
course, it is not just the naked soldier who is exposed.The
discovery of this shared humanity exposes the sniper to his own inner vulnerability
which may, in turn, shield the bathing soldier from the sniper’s fire.There
may be an unspoken soldiery code, if not human code, operative here but
there is no legal code that protects the nude in times of war.[26]Or,
the scene in the more recent Saving Private Ryan where the young
GI translator connects with a German prisoner of war depicts the invisible
bonds of comradeship capable of forging when a mutual language is discovered.Such
languages need not be verbal; common visual and experiential languages
can function equally powerfully.[27]
The
second grounds comparative justice regards is the moral state of our humanity.“There
are no just people-merely hearts more or less lacking in justice,” Albert
Camus once penned. Arguments about sin and human fallibility enter here.Though
an unbeliever himself, Camus contended that there is a “solidarity of all
men in error and aberration,...a wretchedness of the common condition”[28]But,
there is, likewise, he maintained a natural innocence that resides in life—all
life—as it struggles to sustain itself against death that comes either
from human perils or from natural forces.We
are all simultaneously guilty and innocent, Camus suggests.What
requires judgment, what comparative justice urges, are the relative degrees
of culpability and guiltlessness.Alliances
that sustain life must be defended; those that pursue death must be diminished
as best they can.Comparative justice
requires that some of the latter may be required to secure more of the
former.
The
wretchedness of the human condition is also the moral and political backdrop
that animates Augustine’s realism and that accordingly grounds the unavoidable
duty to respond to “the exigencies of human society.”For
Augustine, “a man acknowledges this necessity as a mark of human wretchedness,
when he hates the necessity in his own actions,…when he cries out to God
‘Deliver me from my necessities!”[29]Comparative
justice can only roundly be conceived against this backdrop of sheer necessity,
the kind of political necessity that warranted in a scheme of international
arrangements, the kind of moral necessity expressed by President Bush when
he viewed on television the pestilence of Somalian famine and chaos:“I—we—can’t
watch this anymore.You’ve got to
do something.”[30]Thesense
ofnecessity stemming from the revulsion
of images or terror-ridden narrative may compel one to act frequently and
against one’s druthers as Augustine points out.[31]Other
factors, including empathy overload, may mire and forestall the imperative
to act—all of which must be taken seriously—but they do not relieve necessity’s
wretched burden that something must be done.
The
third anthropological dimension I wish to introduce is our “epistemological
stance.”Tied centrally to our ontological
disposition and to the moral state of human affairs, this notion examines
the ways in which we think about and know our actions in the world.To
exercise principled restraint is to avoid completely ensconcing ourselves
in our own point of view.Despite
the relative evil and injustice of the opposing side, we can maintain and
affirm the value of human life qua life.For
this reason, we embrace fundamental rights and certain duties that may
not be forsworn because of the enemy’s race, religion, ideology, or even
immoral outlook.However, we are
not able to step into a sterile vacuum where complete impartiality may
be afforded, where “pure” insight is assured.We
are both informed and fettered by our cultural mores—religious, political,
ideological.Human knowledge can
never presume to elude fully these entrenched biases.
Nor
is perfect moral foresight feasible. Irreducibly human, we cannot transcend
into a realm in which “absolute justice” is accessible to us, where our
moral judgments or providential understanding achieve an omniscience commensurate
with God’s.“This means that the
ignorance of the judge is often a calamity for the innocent.”[32]Thus,
we cannot always anticipate the effects of our actions no matter how nobly
conceived.Witness the mass exodus
of Kosovar refugees following the commencement of the bombing campaign.Still,
unavoidable ignorance remains the ill-suited partner of unavoidable duty.Biases
and occlusions in our knowledge do not relieve us of the obligation to
reflect, to discern, to judge and to act—for that is the imperative necessity
renders.Rather, as we act upon
and interact in the world, we must recall that there are limitations to
human knowledge and, thus, form our moral judgments with such constraints
in mind.
Comparative
justice is the form of human justice appropriate given these limits of
the human condition.It represents
a political-moral scheme that eschews the irrational arbitrariness of supreme
injustice where people are slaughtered for the contingencies of their race,
religion, or ethnicity while shunning simultaneously access to “perfect
justice.”Relative justice is a via
mediathat recognizes human depravity,
skewed and finite moral knowledge, and allegiances split between ourselves
and norms and duties in the wider social order—yet acts in spite of these
things, appropriate to them as well.So,
if these three anthropological sub-tenets form the bulwark of comparative
justice, as I want to suggest, then what concrete advice does comparative
justice afford?The criterion itself
has been criticized that it is, in fact, no criterion at all;[33]
indeed, its own inventor, Fr. Bryan Hehir, worries that “the test of comparative
justice may be extremely difficult to apply.”[34]I
wish to revisit this dilemma and re-introduce comparative justice as a
sturdy criterion of just war thinking; to aid me in this effort I call
again on Camus, a man who was no just war thinker but whose reflections
on this matter are lucid and apropos:
Human justice...knows it is frail.Must we therefore conclude that such frailty authorizes us to pronounce an absolute judgment and that, uncertain of ever achieving pure justice, society must rush headlong, through the greatest risks, toward supreme injustice?If justice admits that it is frail, would it not be better for justice to be modest and to allow its judgments sufficient latitude so that a mistake can be corrected? [ital. added][35]
Comparative
justice, I would urge, forms not only a self-scrutinizing boundary that
keeps in check other in bello and ad bellum considerations,
but itself becomes a criterion that asks whether political actions involving
force and coercion extend to all sides the possibility to make amends.The
opposing side must always have at its disposal the chance for self-reform,
for recompense, for contrition—all of which entail the chance for reconciliation
and the welcoming back into the circle of moral and political life.The
desire to extinguish the enemy requires curbing in favor of intense moral
and political pressure (which may regrettably call for principled use of
force) to move the enemy towards admission and correction of inexcusable
wrongs.
Similarly,
it would be short-sighted to assume that the actions of one’s own side
are not susceptible to folly.Hence,
they must not be ultimate or absolute, that is, of such a nature that one
cannot later atone or make good for one’s own mistakes.The
most obvious transgression that comes to mind is use of nuclear weapons.One
might consider, too, the time or measures that will be required to thaw
the will of the Serbian people, frozen and hardened after much of their
infrastructure was destroyed.Another
departure, though, might consider the bombing campaign which turned into
homeless refugees nearly a million victims whom we aimed to assist; while
the outcome is grievous, it may, with much diplomatic effort and considerable
economic and military resources, be remediable.None
of these options yielded enviable outcomes, but had NATO allies abstained
from any involvement—donning the gloves of moral resignation that keep
the hands clean—this stance could have taken several lifetimes to reconcile
and atone for.[36]
III.The
End(s) of Peace?
Critics
look to the very imperfect peace in which Bosnia and now Kosovo repose,
an armed peace in which the withdrawal of outside forces would likely lead
to immediate resumption of hostilities.Sadly,
looting and murder rains down on Kosovo as counter violence befalls the
now Serbian victims of ethnic violence.However,
even as we labor to improve upon the still troubled “peace” in this world,
we should resist a creep towards a sort of perfectionism that may not be
possible in our own day.Augustine’s
pessimism for the kind of peace available in this world is instructive,
for earthly peace is always perverted by a wretchedness inescapable in
this life.Augustine reminds that,
“ such is the instability of human affairs that no people has ever been
allowed such degree of tranquillity as to remove all dread of hostile attacks
on their life in this world.”[37]That
kind of perpetual peace is reserved for a time yet to come, for a place
not of this earth.The peace available
to the political order is always a limited one that, even while informed
by the transcendent horizon of perfect peace, pales in comparison.What
is needed is a limited framework of peace that holds together the limbs
of our political bodies, “a kind of peace [that] still connects the parts
with one another and keeps the whole mass fixed in its earthly condition,
an appropriate, and therefore, a peaceable state.”[38]I
think we can say that about Bosnia and perhaps soon about Kosovo too.
Comparative
justice, I have tried to argue, seeks to hold such a peace together by
discriminating between levels of injustices, by responding to them in ways
politically feasible and morally appropriate to the peace of this world.It
would, in my formulation, seek to discriminate between the random violence
that will plague Kosovo for some time to come with the systematic, state-sponsored
ethnic cleansing that befell the province before NATO intervention.Both
evils call for reform, but one clearly calls for more severe measures if
an ethic of responsibility hopes to be maintained.Such
an ethic makes appeals to moral and political necessity, not simply to
expediency.The human justice of
Augustine commends to us a measure of humility—not glory or pride—that
is to accompany use of force.We
are enjoined to grant pardons not in order to allow impunity to wrong-doing
but out of necessity and for the amendment of the wrong-doer.Lastly,
severe actions, “as must often happen,” are obliged to be taken with sufficient
latitude to restore the rightful ends of peace that war aims to bring about.
Just
what are the rightful ends of peace?They
are little more than the basic goods held open for all persons to enjoy
in this life:
…peace that consists in bodily health and soundness, and in fellowship with one’s kind; and everything necessary to safeguard or recover this peace—those things for example, which are appropriate and accessible to our senses: light, speech, air to breathe, water to drink, and whatever is suitable for the feeding and clothing of the body, for the care of the body, and the adornment of the person.[39]
Politics,
while always an imperfect venture with earthly limits, is necessary for
the preservation of such minimal goods.These
goods along with others—the freedom to worship, to enjoy the fruits of
labor and the love of family and fellow being—are protected by the thin
but inviolable patina of basic human rights.The
best prevention of war—or the violence and genocide that precede it—consists
in shoring up around the globe respect for the intrinsic sacredness of
human life as “first principles” that undergird the very rights and duties
that protect them.And when preventive
measures collapse under the weighty exigencies of the human condition,
force must be deployed with clarity, resolve, and principled restraint,
yet in such a way so as to underwrite—not undermine—the rights war seeks
to protect and reinstate.Such considerations
must be tempered with the modesty and scrutiny needed to perceive one’s
own flaws and with the test of comparative justice that makes allowances—by
leaving room for reconciliation and amends—for the unintended effects of
one’s limited insights.