JSCOPE 2004
A Joint
Services Conference on Professional Ethics
29 –
Worthy and Unworthy Wars:
by
Timothy L. Challans, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Combat
Studies Institute
Command and
(913) 684-2045
“War
is bad in that it makes more evil people than it takes away.”
Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace
Introduction
The debate concerning the morality of the first two
military operations in the new millennium’s indefinite War on Terror has
been instructive. Voices from the
professoriate and the Pope have judged the operations as being morally wrong
based on just war theory.[1] At the same time, other voices from the
government and their supporting think-tanks have judged them to be morally
justifiable based on that same just war theory.[2] It appears that just war theory is so
flexible that people can get anything out of it that they put into it. If the theory is so flexible as to generate
not only inconsistent but also contradictory judgments, perhaps it may be
worthwhile to ask the question whether or not there may be something wrong with
just war theory. This question has gnawed at me for some time,
though, long before our current war.
Dragging over seven hundred cadets at
Kantian political and moral theory offers a considerable critique of just war reasoning, a critique that we should come to understand. Kant turns the project of reasoning about war on three issues: the end in the form of a goal, the means in the form of lawgiving, and the critical method employed to arrive at the moral evaluation itself. The end shifts from that of a pursuit of justice (in the language of the jurists connoting justification) to a pursuit of peace. The means shifts from that of an international law among states to that of a cosmopolitan law among peoples. These first two issues connect deeply with his moral and political theory. Kant’s practical philosophy, his moral and political theory in other words, contains qualities that just war theory lacks. Kant, being both a child and father of the Enlightenment, developed a practical philosophy that mirrored the qualities of other Enlightenment contributions. The natural philosopher Isaac Newton, whom Kant admired greatly, generated a system of ideas, later called classical mechanics, a system that was coherent and simple, yet possessed great explanatory power and offered a bewilderingly wide range of applications. Likewise, Kant’s practical philosophy presents us with a system possessing the same qualities—coherence and parsimony—along with a bewilderingly wide range of applications, including the subject of war and morality. A Kantian exploration of worthy and unworthy wars should challenge the received judgments and conclusions of just and unjust wars.
A Shift of
Ends: From Justice to Peace
Kant
opposed the standard view of traditional just war theory. When considering the corpus of Kant’s work on
moral and political theory, he changed the language away from that of
justice. A close examination of Kant’s
whole moral project and its application to the international arena will show
that he rejects the discourse surrounding the idea of a just war, justice of war,
justice in war, or the justification of war. Kant never did engage in the same language of
the just war theorists and rejected their project famously, “for Hugo Grotius,
Pufendorf, Vattel, and the like (only sorry comforters)…are always duly cited
in justification of an offensive war…”[3] Jus ad bellum has always offered more
enabling than limiting criteria, for Kant adds “there is no instance of a state
ever having been moved to desist from its plan by arguments armed with the
testimony of such important men.”[4]
Kant
differed from the sorry comforters in that they generally worked within the
natural law tradition, and Kant’s moral philosophy departs from that
tradition. Suarez, Grotius, and
Pufendorf worked within the tradition of natural law. Natural law had both religious and secular
versions. Suarez following Aquinas held
a religious origin of natural law, and he thought that there could be no obligation
without an obligator.[5] Grotius opened the door to a secular natural
law by introducing the idea that we could have obligations without an
obligator.[6] For Pufendorf, state interest, raison d’ état, became part of natural
law.[7] “The natural lawyers saw that the ideas of
the skeptics and raison d’ état
theorists could be put into a juridical or ethical form simply by construing
self-preservation as a universal right.”[8] Self-preservation is a right that Kant
subscribes to, but the natural lawyers provided a moral justification for a
political theory based on state interest by wrapping natural law around raison d’ état. This leap of logic is illegitimate for
Kant. Kant’s political theory is not
based on state interest or the rights of states. A world in which people embraced cosmopolitan
law, a law of peoples, requires the people to be the moral agents on a
cosmopolitan world scale. The law of
peoples is a construction, then, by and for people. It is a law to be created by people instead
of a law to be discovered, as is the case with natural law—made by people
rather than found in nature.
Cosmopolitan law, not international law, then, is the centerpiece of the
possibility of peace. Cosmopolitan law,
based on the rights of persons qua persons would pass the criteria of moral
worth where international law does not.
International law is the instrument of governments, not of peoples. Governments work to further state
interests. Even international bodies
that embrace international law are trapped by individual state interests. The state is the locus of international law,
not the people. “The complaint often
made against both the League of Nations and the United Nations is that these
were leagues of states and not of peoples; and that if only
peoples could get together behind the backs of the their governments, they
could at least establish peace.”[9]
The pursuit
of peace instead of state interest in the name of justice changes not only the
end but also the means of international relations. The pursuit of traditional just war theory,
along with international justice and international law, has generated some
inconsistencies and contradictions that the traditional view cannot solve from
within. Even by Kant’s time, the world
had known guerilla warfare, partisan warfare, civil war, intrastate conflict,
and, yes, even terrorism. Since the
traditional theory and the practice center upon the rights of states engaged in
interstate conflict, the theory has
long been inadequate to deal with the growing phenomenon of intrastate and other types of
conflict. The pursuit of justice is a very
different pursuit from that of peace, in that the pursuit of justice motivates
war. We know that Kant thought peace was
the highest good, and the corpus of his moral writings lead one to think that
he disapproves of war. “It can be said
that establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of
the doctrine of right but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right
within the limits of mere reason; for the condition of peace is alone that
condition in which what is mine and what is yours for a multitude of human
beings is secured under laws living in proximity to one another, hence those
who are united under a constitution.”[10] Kant is not interested in whether or not wars
are just, and his theory does not leave us simply with the evaluation of the
justice of a war.
A Shift of
Means: From International Law to a Law
of Peoples
Kant
clearly stands apart from traditional just war theory, for just war theory in
general and international law in particular are vehicles for states to pursue
their own interests, states’ reason, or raison
d’ etat. Statists defend and exploit
a theory that is based on the rights of states to pursue their own
interests. Kant’s philosophy is
universal, not particular; cosmopolitan, not communitarian; international, not
statist. International law does not have
its sights set above the interest of particular states. Kant’s political theory is not grounded in
the particular interests of states, embodied in international law, developed
through the actual choices of state actors.
In the statist view, state actors and individual people within states
identify only with their particular state.
Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal requires people to identify with the world
community, to be citizens of the world.
As such, then, normative
operating principles for moral agents in a global community would be based on possible choice, rather than actual choice. Kant’s theory features
cosmopolitan law rather than international law; jus cosmopoliticum, the rights of peoples rather than the rights of
states.[11] For Kant, there are two requirements or
preconditions for possible choice: one
is the law of peoples itself, and the other is that each state must have a
well-ordered constitution, which means that states would be republics in the
Eighteenth Century sense, that is, they would be representative democracies.
Kant’s idea
of possible choice instead of actual choice is a critical part of a pursuit of
peace, which can be the only end for right constitutions. Kantian political morality would also differ
from any positive law account. Kantian
theory does not generate a legalist framework that relies on precepts based on
actual agreement. Instead, Kant’s
constructivist account of morality is based on possible choice rather than
actual choice. Proper laws bind mankind,
whether they obligate us domestically or among states, because “they could have
arisen from the united will of a whole people.”
For Kant, a law’s conformity with right did not depend upon the actual
consent of a law making body, which is the basis for a positive law
account. Instead of actual consent,
possible consent is the basis for its rightness. “If it is only possible that a people could
agree to it, it is a duty to consider the law just, even if the people is at
present in such a situation or frame of mind that, if consulted about it, it
would probably refuse its consent.”[12] The difference between actual and possible choice, a Kantian
idea, has its best exegetical popularization through the work of John
Rawls. Moral agents in an original
position, behind a veil of ignorance, which removes their identities and
therefore any self-interest, would be obligated to choose principles based on
possible choices rather than their actual choices. These cosmopolitan principles based on
possible choice would no longer be bound by the actual desires and inclinations
of statists working only in the interests of their particular states.
A Shift of Moral Evaluation: From Moral Justification to Moral Worthiness
Kantian
theory as a whole changes the emphasis from that of moral justification
to the notion of moral worthiness.
Moral worth is a second order evaluation. It requires reasons that are not just
normative but also motivational. Even if
a war were entered under maxims consistent with the normative criteria of the
Categorical Imperative, this is no guarantee that the war would be morally
worthy. Naked self-interest, raison d’ état, does not warrant moral
worthiness. In order to be morally
worthy, the war would also have to meet Kant’s motivational criteria, which
means that the motive of the war could not be self-interest. The only morally worthy motive for war would
be out of respect for the moral law, which would, by the way, include
self-defense and protecting the oppressed.
Kant endorses military undertakings “voluntarily and periodically by the
citizens of a state in order to secure themselves and their own country against
attacks from without.”[13] If the motive is out of inclination,
self-interest, then the war would not be morally worthy. Kant never engaged in the language of the
just war theorists, and he never engaged this subject in the language of
justification. Actions can be morally
justified without being worthy, but cannot be worthy without also being
justified. Moral justification is a
first order normative consideration and moral worthiness is a second order
motivational consideration, generally understood as a commitment to morality.
On the Vagaries of Just War Thinking
Like
Wittgenstein’s fly that is trapped in the fly bottle, we are trapped by the
conceptual and linguistic confusions and inconsistencies of just war
thinking. Peace, as Kant reminds us, is
not a natural state of humankind. In
order to work toward the proper goal of peace, Kant turns to a theory of right
(from the German Recht) instead of a theory of justice. Most just war theorists translate jus ad bellum as justice of war, comprising criteria to measure reasons for going to
war. They translate jus in bello as justice in
war, consisting of criteria to evaluate actions during war. And they translate jus post bellum as justice
after war, encompassing criteria to assess conditions reached after
war. Despite the standard usage of jus due to its resemblance to the word justice, jus derives from the Medieval Latin ius and is more accurately translated as right. So, jus ad bellum is more accurately
translated as right to war, jus in bello as right in war, and jus post
bellum as right after war.[14] The upshot of this difference in
translation—from justice to right—is that the whole of just war
criteria, heretofore thought of as being couched in the language of
justification, should have been couched in the language of right—a word with many
referents, including the notions contained within a full-blown Kantian theory
of right, in the sense of right action as well as moral worth. The continued historical use of the language
of justice and justification on the part of the just war jurists forced the
language toward the legalistic casuistry of particular cases and away from a
principled and more proper theory of right.
Kant never
thought that traditional just war thinking was adequate; his critique stands
today—too much is justified. Michael
Walzer conjoins the language of justice and rights in Just and Unjust Wars, arguably the most influential book on the
subject in the last century by the most prominent contemporary comforter. He bases his just war theory on the concept
and language of rights, using an allegory based on what he calls the legalist paradigm. “If states actually do possess rights more or
less as individuals do, then it is possible to imagine a society among them
more or less like the society of individuals.”[15] He uses the family of analogies associated
with conflict regarding individual persons in order to illuminate our
understanding associated with conflict regarding states on an international
level. Specifically, the rights regarding
the self-defense of individual persons work analogously—as a domestic analogy—for states. After setting up the basic analogy, or family
of analogies, he constructs several refinements of his analogy in order to
accommodate some of the differences between individuals and states. Unfortunately for his theory, however, the
actual historical development of the concept and language of rights for persons
very likely derived from the concept and language of rights for states. “The natural rights theorists then simply
took the jurisprudence of war which had developed among humanist lawyers, and
derived a theory of individual rights from it.”[16] If this developed as Richard Tuck argues,
then Walzer’s legalist paradigm is backwards:
Walzer theoretically derives an understanding of a state’s rights from a
person’s rights, but jurists historically derived an understanding of a
person’s rights from a state’s rights.
If Walzer does not have it backwards, then he is at least employing
circular reasoning. And Walzer is
presently the leading figure representing the Just War Tradition. Kant is the only major philosophical thinker
Walzer does not mention in his book, and not accidentally, for Kant remains
completely separate from traditional just war thinking.
International
law and states’ rights are part of Kant’s political theory, but his focus is on
a law of peoples, and the rights of all.
Kant’s political theory required jus civile, jus gentium,
and jus cosmopoliticum. At least
one contemporary philosopher reads Kant’s theory as being consistent with just
war theory. Brian Orend gives a Kantian
interpretation of international law that has Kant’s moral theory accommodate
the basic tenets of the tradition. Orend
makes a case that each of the points making up the standard Just War Tradition
can be consistent within Kant’s moral theory.
For example, Orend argues that the Categorical Imperative does not
discount following jus ad bellum
criteria as moral principles: just
cause, right intention, legitimate authority, last resort, probability of
success, proportionality, and comparative justice.[17] Kantian moral theory can accommodate jus ad bellum criteria, but the
accommodation by the larger theory does not mean that the individual parts
provide the necessary and sufficient conditions, not collectively, and certainly
not when used selectively, as they most certainly always are. If Orend is right, then Kant must fall within
the camp of other just war theorists—Orend makes Kant a sorry comforter—and Orend would have to explain away Kant’s
disapprobation of the sorry comforters. Orend thinks Kant’s remarks about the
comforters are anomalous to his larger work, which places Kant squarely within
the Just War Tradition, also fixated on whether or not wars are justified. Even if Orend is right about the consistency
of the normative reasons for just war precepts, he has only considered one
aspect of Kant’s moral theory: whether
or not actions performed under such maxims would accord with the Categorical
Imperative. Even if actions under such
maxims would be right, there is another aspect of Kant’s theory that is just as
important, whether or not they are morally worthy. There is plenty of room for argument that
these principles do not accord with universalized maxims and would not pass the
test of the Categorical Imperative. One
such counterexample would be that of a just cause existing due to injury. If this were a just cause, then states could
redress injuries suffered by other states ad
infinitum, which would hardly lead to peace. Pursuing peace is different from pursuing
justice.
A Kantian
Reconstruction and Evaluation
So, how
does Kantian political theory change our judgments and conclusions from the
just war thinkers? Significantly, just
war thinkers justify preventive war.[18] Kant does not, his disapproval of the sorry
comforters being evident in that they “are always duly cited in justification
of an offensive war.”[19] Current just war theory, along with its
practice, contains inconsistencies. One
such tension is that between some statutes that protect state sovereignty (in
the UN Charter) and others that provide for humanitarian intervention (in the
Declaration of Human Rights, also part of the UN Charter), which would entail
the violation of state sovereignty. The
tension exists between two statutes, one that protects and one that violates
state sovereignty. Two principles are in
tension: sovereignty and humanitarian
assistance.[20] Since current just war theory has been
cobbled together over the centuries, we cannot expect a general consistency, in
theory or in practice. However, Kantian
theory, which has great general consistency, could work out this tension. The details of such a resolution would take
more space, but the following is a sketch of such a solution. In Kantian theory, duties cannot conflict,
but only do so in appearance. The
grounds of the apparently conflicting duties would be in conflict. “When two such grounds conflict with each
other, practical philosophy says, not that the stronger obligations takes
precedence but that the stronger ground of obligation prevails.”[21] The ground of human rights and their
protection may override the ground of sovereignty and its protection. If this is the right interpretation, then it
would overturn our recent judgments and intuitions. Specifically, the United Nations, under
international law, has disallowed humanitarian intervention, even in cases of
grave breaches of human rights law, as in the case of genocide. Specifically, the United Nations did not pass
resolutions sanctioning intervention in the Balkans precisely because such
intervention would contravene the protection of state sovereignty, despite the
fact that multitudes of people were victims of genocide on a huge scale. Although it may have existed on a smaller
scale, genocide was not unknown as one of the horrors in Kant’s world. Much greater brutality on a more massive
scale emerged due to revolutionary advances in nationalisms and hatreds, but
these differ in degree and not in kind.
However complex conflicts happen to be, Kant’s theory is capable of
working out the details of any inconsistencies.
Not only
would Kantian theory resolve this contradiction, but it would reverse the
conclusions drawn from traditional just war thinking that most Americans,
government officials, schools of government, policy wonks, and their supporting
think-tanks would hold today. By virtue
of fact that the power brokers hold, defend, and propagate their viewpoint, let’s refer to their view as the
received view. The received view in
America is that the United States should get out of the Balkans, a mistake in
their view, and stay in Iraq, a step in the right direction in their view. After all, they argue, Iraq is vital to
American national interest, yet the Balkans are not. Furthermore, based on the language of our
National Security Strategy and National Military Strategy, since Iraq is more
vital to our national interests than the Balkans, then our military operations
in Iraq have been more justified based on that interest. Satisfying state interest is the goal of just
war thinking. Self-interest, whether for
individuals or for states, is not the morally relevant feature for Kantian
ethics, however. In fact, lack of
interest or inclination is one of the defining features of Kant’s moral
system. So, according to a Kantian moral
evaluation, the received view would be reversed—military operations in the
Balkans would be more worthy morally than our operations in Iraq. Kantian moral theory would yield different
conclusions from the conclusions of the received view due to just war thinking.
Current
just war thinking is inadequate to solve the tension between the requirements
of sovereignty and human rights.
Furthermore, just war thinking can legitimize war that is morally
unworthy and can condemn war that is morally worthy. Kantian theory can resolve the tension
between these two requirements, thereby facilitating worthy wars. Kant establishes a framework that includes
“all three relations of public right: the right
of a state, the right of nations,
and cosmopolitan right.”[22] We can think of the right of nations, jus
gentium, as protecting sovereignty, and cosmopolitan right, jus cosmopoliticum,
as protecting human rights. A more
detailed account to demonstrate a consistency between principles of sovereignty
and human rights within Kant’s own framework is appropriate. Part of this account, though, would include
an examination of Kantian obligations and the distinction between universal
principles versus absolute rules. Kant’s
system is not made up of absolute duties that apply in all places at all times
to all people, as most laypeople interpret it.
Instead, Kant’s system is one of universalized maxims, or principles
that can accommodate differences due to time, place, or circumstance: different sets of morally relevant
descriptions. Several Kantians view
humanitarian intervention to be consistent with Kantian theory. The contemporary notions and language of
human rights were not widely acknowledged in Kant’s time, “but if Habermas is
right, then human rights must be the domain of cosmopolitan law, which
institutionalizes basic rights of individuals and the rule of law at the
supranational level.”[23] The problem with protecting human rights
(covered in jus cosmopoliticum) in many cases has to do with resistance
presented by the requirement to override state sovereignty (covered in jus
gentium), which is also supposed to be protected. Habermas observes that “the weak link in the
global protection of human rights remains the lack of any executive power that
could secure, when necessary, the General Declarations of Human Rights through
interventions into nation states, despite their ‘supreme power’ over their
territory,” and he suggests a revision to allow intervention in warranted
cases.[24] John Rawls says that “an outlaw state that
violates these [human] rights is to be condemned and in grave cases may be
subjected to forceful sanctions and even to intervention.”[25] Rawls continues: “Is there ever a time when forceful
intervention might be called for? If the
offenses against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to
the imposition of sanctions, such intervention in the defense of human rights
would be acceptable and would be called for.”[26] Since universal principles are not absolute,
one principle can give way to another under certain circumstances, as the
protection of sovereignty can give way to the protection of human rights. General consistency within Kantian theory is
thus maintained.
Placing
Kant’s Theory in Context
Kant
lived during the peak of war conventionality, embodied in large measure by the
Great King whom Kant admired.
Conventions on the battlefield as well as the moral and legal
conventions defining limited cabinet warfare were maturing a century after the
Treaty of Westphalia. Before that time,
the world experienced war for the most part without conventions. The conventional period would scarcely last
two centuries, with war becoming more and more unconventional, exemplified by
the nationalistic imperial Napoleonic warfare of annihilation, and
unconventionality would be further advanced by industrialized warfare in the
American Civil War. This industrialized
version of annihilation in the Civil War is what the historian Russell Weigley
has termed to be “the American way of war.”
The old conventional logic of battle, decision, victory, defeat &
capitulation broke down even further during the Twentieth Century. The most basic distinction to be made within
a war convention is that between combatant and non-combatant. But this distinction continuously lost its
significance during the last two centuries.
The distinction faded considerably during Napoleonic warfare and during
the American Civil War during the 19th Century.
For the 20th Century, at the beginning one out of ten casualties was a
non-combatant, but at the end nine out of ten casualties were
non-combatants. This combatant /
non-combatant distinction is practically extinct here at the beginning of this
next century. Consider also the
emergence of two watershed events that further define the American way of war
in this new epoch: preventive war and the warrior ethos (both of which are huge
mistakes).[27] Jean Bethke Elshtain, a noted just war
theorist, has joined the ranks of Kant’s comforters by justifying the current Global
War on Terror in her new book, Just War Against Terror.[28] So, at the beginning of the new millennium,
the legal and moral conventions of war are “more honored in the breach than in
the observance.” Since conventions are
now broken more than they are followed, it no longer makes sense to talk of war
as unconventional, because the
breaches of the convention are being justified by just war theory. We have progressed through four moral epochs
in the history of warfare: pre-conventionality, conventionality,
unconventionality, and now we have entered an epoch of
post-conventionality. But the answer
does not lie in traditional just war theory; it has died and we should not try
to resurrect it.
The
standard constellations forming the zodiac of traditional just war theory
include luminaries such as jus ad bellum,
jus in bello, and jus post bellum. Just war thinkers canvassed these zodiacal
houses in history as the dark journey of warfare forced their gazes to search
for moral elucidation. Theological thinkers
fixed their gaze solely upon the cluster of stars making up jus ad bellum, searching for glimmers of
hope to ease the conscience of the religious soldier, who was ostensibly
conflicted by the requirement to kill while religious proscriptions at the same
time forbade killing.[29] Justifying political decisions for going to
war did far more to ease the conscience of the king and the advisor-priests
than the soldiers, who faced the brutal realities of actual fighting.[30] The jus
in bello constellation was in the ascendant for the soldiers themselves,
and jus in bello emerged from jus militare, from the battlefield
itself.[31] Jus
post bellum comes into clearer view late in the twentieth century, the idea
dawning after millennia of historical reflection, the idea that the way we end
wars should receive as much attention as the way we begin them. Other constellations rise and fall through
the ages, to include bellum romanum, bellum internecinum, bellum punitivum, jus civitatis, and jus
gentium. The zodiac is not complete,
though, until Kant allows us to see the vague outline of a new constellation—jus cosmopoliticum—a constellation still
only dimly visible to only the most observant even two hundred years after he
pointed it out to us. Bringing Kantian
theory into sharper focus helps us to see the value of the contribution he made
to our moral and political thinking.
Kant deserves credit for leaving a legacy, for giving the world the
ideas for the League of Nations (a name he coined), the United Nations, human
rights law, and international court systems; “Kant has been vindicated.”[32] Much of the civilized world views these
developments as advances. “So if anyone
could be said to have invented peace as more than a mere pious aspiration, it
was Kant.”[33] Too many wars can and have been justified,
but how many will be worthy? The most
important work necessary to answer this question is theoretical work, and
further work exploring Kantian theory is warranted as we move into a century of
unprecedented danger. Just as
Enlightenment thinkers helped us separate astrology from astronomy, alchemy
from science, Kant helped us move toward a more suitable moral and political
theory. “Two things fill the mind with
ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more
steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral
law within me.”[34]
Conclusion
Will
the Just War Tradition go the way of the Great Chain of Being, the Domino
Theory, and other failed theories in the history of ideas? Not any time soon. I have no illusions that the world, and
especially America, is close to being ready to abandon the Just War Tradition
and embrace a more demanding ethical understanding of conflict. But there is a growing number of people
worldwide who are dissatisfied with the dissonance between their well-formed
moral intuitions and the conclusions entailed by traditional just war
reasoning. If wars were not just, then
it would be hard to engage in the socialization process that the military
profession requires—a pragmatic concern—by means of historic, heroic narratives
that romanticize the most sublime activity of human experience: war.
If wars were not just, it
would be difficult to perennially re-professionalize the military, and it would
stymie the institution’s desire to recapture some imaginary psyche from the
past: the warrior ethos or the warrior
spirit (psyche is Greek for soul,
or spirit). The justification of war is
a psychological prerequisite that eases the conscience, just enough, so that
new generations of soldiers can march off to war with enthusiasm, their war, a
war that draws them as they search for their fair share of battlefield virtue,
doing their duty to earn their honor.
Warriors need war. So, if
replacing the just war project in favor of a moral project, replacing
justification with moral worth, is too difficult, perhaps there is a more
modest, reachable goal—a compromise—one that requires a
thought-experiment. Perhaps it is
possible to hold in one’s mind at the same time two evaluations, one pragmatic
and one moral. Now, even philosophers
who are pragmatists would not like this suggestion, for their moral project
depends on the convergence of pragmatic and moral concerns. In the meantime, though, one could imagine
that pragmatic concerns and moral concerns could be conceptually
separated. One could arrive at a
pragmatic evaluation that a particular conflict is justified, necessary, using
the concepts and language of justification.
At the same time, one could arrive at a moral evaluation that the same
conflict is immoral. Do we have a
soldiery that is enlightened enough today to accept that their war would be justified but immoral? What would this require psychologically? It would mean that they go to their war as
soldiers not warriors, reluctantly not enthusiastically—they would not find the
treasure of glory and honor and virtue but instead gain the pyrrhic wisdom that
war is not ennobling. Some could think
this way; most could not. But if we had
a soldiery with such an understanding, and a people who shared this
understanding, then humanity would be moved halfway toward having a moral
framework within which they can move closer to the goal of peace. The oft-quoted Hemingway line demonstrates
that this idea is not impossible: “Never
think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”[35]
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NOTES
[1] For example, the American Philosophical Association’s three divisions, Eastern, Central, and Western, have overwhelmingly voted to condemn Operation Iraqi Freedom as being both illegal and immoral based on just war thinking.
[2] Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
[3] Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §8:355, p. 326.
[4] Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, §8:355, p. 326.
[5] Suarez insisted “that moral obligation arises solely from God’s command and that without command there is no law.” J.B. Schneewind, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, Volume I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 68.
[6] “What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him.” Hugo Grotius, “On the Law of War and Peace,” in J.B. Schneewind, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, Volume I, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 92.
[7] “Meinecke observed that ‘The remarkable fact is that only one of them, the German Pufendorf, directly accepted the doctrines of raison d’ état and State interest.’” Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3.
[8] Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, p. 6.
[9] Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 103.
[10] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), § 6:355, p. 491.
[11] See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[12] Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: That may be Correct in Theory,” in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 296-297.
[13] Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, § 8:345, p. 318.
[14] “The rights of states consist, therefore, partly of their right to go to war, partly of their right in war, and partly of their right to constrain each other to leave this condition of war and so form a constitution that will establish lasting peace, that is, its right after war.” Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, § 6:343, p. 482.
[15] Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 58.
[16] Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 11.
[17] Brian Orend, War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective, (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), p. 49.
[18] “The Israeli first strike [1967] is, I think, a clear case of legitimate anticipation. To say that, however, is to suggest a major revision of the legalist paradigm. For it means that aggression can be made out not only in the absence of a military attack or invasion but in the (probable) absence of any immediate intention to launch such an attack or invasion. The general formula must go something like this: states may use military force in the face of threats of war, whenever the failure to do so would seriously risk their territorial integrity or political independence.” Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 85. Walzer’s book is popular on campuses throughout the world, and his work is a contribution to the scholarship in the field and to an appreciation of the dimension of ethics in military practice. Unfortunately, Israeli exclusionism in Just and Unjust Wars has triggered many students and intellectuals to refer to his book in an underground fashion as Jewish and Un-Jewish Wars.
[19] Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, § 8:355, p. 326, emphasis mine.
[20] Paul Kennedy and George Andreopoulos, “The Laws of War: Some Concluding Reflections,” in The Laws of War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 224.
[21] Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, § 6:224, p. 379.
[22] Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, § 8: 365, p. 334.
[23] “As Hannah Arendt argued in light of the rightless condition of ‘stateless peoples,’ human rights cannot any longer be enforceable only by nation states. If there is any room for coercion in cosmopolitan law, it is in the enforcement of human rights precisely against states that use their sovereignty to abuse human rights for particular political, religious, or nationalist goals. If the regulation of global processes such as market effects is the legislative side of global governance, then enforcing claims of citizens against states is its judicial side.” James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, “Introduction,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), p. 18.
[24] “Since human rights must in many cases be implemented against the will of the governments of nation states, the prohibition against intervention in international law must be revised.” Jürgen Habermas, “Human Rights, International Law, and the Global Order: Cosmopolitanism Two Hundred Years Later, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, p. 130.
[25] John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 81.
[26] John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 94n.
[27] The soldier whose purpose was to support and defend has been supplanted by the warrior whose purpose is now to “deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.” The new tenets of the Soldier’s Creed make the very appropriate acronym, DEAD.
[28] See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
[29] “The Christian doctors, from Augustine to Aquinas in the Middle Ages, followed by Francisco Suarez, Alberico Gentili, and Francisco de Vitoria in the sixteenth century, were above all concerned with defining the just war, jus ad bellum: wars in which Christians might fight with a clear conscience.” Michael Howard, The Laws of Land Warfare: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, edited by Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 2.
[30] For example, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Henry V there is a long discussion justifying war to the king and his priestly advisors. King Henry, before invading France, asks the Bishop of Canterbury, “My learned lord, we pray you to proceed, / And justly and religiously unfold / Why the Salic that they have in France / Or should or should not bar us in our claim.” Canterbury gives him justification: “Then hear me, gracious sovereign, and you peers / That owe your selves, your lives and services / To this imperial throne. There is no bar / To make against your highness’ claim to France.” William Shakespeare, King Henry V, edited by Andrew Gurr, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), I.2, pp. 77, 78.
[31] “Whereas the theologians concentrated on jus ad bellum, the right to go to war, the laws for the conduct of war, jus in bello, were an entirely secular creation developed to suit the needs of a rigidly stratified social order in which the right to bear arms was a jealously guarded privilege.” Michael Howard, The Laws of Land Warfare, p. 3.
[32] Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, p. 234.
[33] Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 31.
[34] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, § 5:161, p. 269.
[35] Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War, (London: Scribners, 1991).