Thursday, August 10, 2006

Just War Theory: the Only Game in Academia and the Military

In the Spring 2006 issue of The Objective Standard, Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein analyze "Just War Theory." In the article they state:


Just and Unjust Wars [by Michael Walzer] serves as the major textbook in the ethics classes taught at West Point and dozens of others colleges and military schools. More broadly, Just War Theory—for which Just and Unjust Wars is the most popular modern text—is the sole moral theory of war taught today.

As evidence of this I present some recent comments on the war in Lebanon by Mark Grimsley who has a blog named Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. Grimsley is a professional military historian who teaches at Ohio State University where he received his Ph.D. He has published several well regarded works on the American Civil War. In a recent post Grimsley provides numerous links about the ongoing campaign in Lebanon. One section is titled: "Articles on Just War Theory and the Problem of Moral Judgment in War." As the entries under this heading make clear, there is only one theory governing the "rules of engagement" in war and that is based on one interpretation of Judeo-Christian ethics.

As Brook and Epstein note:


To identify a nation as an enemy is to recognize it as a committed initiator of force that threatens one’s own life, that forfeits its right to exist, and that in justice deserves whatever is necessary to end the threat it poses. By Just War Theory’s moral standards, however, there is no such thing as an enemy nation. Even when a nation initiates aggression, it is not regarded as the proper object of retaliation, but as a haven of “others” to be served. (This notion is, unsurprisingly, rooted in Augustine’s religion, Christianity, which countenances us to love everyone— specially, as proof of extreme virtue, to “love thine enemy.”)

Walzer’s prescriptions are not the idle musings of an ivory tower philosopher; they are exactly the sort of “rules of engagement” under which U.S. soldiers are fighting—and dying—overseas. When our marines in Baghdad do not shoot back when fired upon from a mosque, or when our helicopter pilots are shot down while flying too low in an attempt to avoid civilian casualties while in pursuit of their targets, they are following the dictum that we should show a “positive commitment to save civilian lives” even if this entails “risking soldiers’ lives.”

Prof. Grimsley elaborates further on his views of "just war" in a blog post at Cliopatria. He is practicularly unhappy about the graphic "I'm a Fan of Disproportionate Response" that is on the sidebar of The Dougout:


Well, I'm not a fan of disproportionate response. The reliance on aerial and artillery bombardment troubles me; I cannot, try as I might, accept the proposition that it falls within the modern laws and usages of war. It violates the very core of those laws and usages: The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. Their deaths are permissible only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

I agree that "disproportionate response" violates what passes for international law and usages when it comes to civilized nations defending themselves. How is Hezbollah going to be made to follow these laws and usages? The question answers itself and also make clear that "Just War Theory" benefits the aggressor. It would be suicidal for Israel to adopt "Just War Theory." Such a course would be an open invitation to fascist aggressors to attack with impunity, hide behind civilians and when they start losing to whine to the U.N. for a "cease fire." As with all forms of altruism "Just War Theory" rewards evil and punishes the good.

Crossposted at The Dougout

7 comments:

Jason Pappas said...

This one by Grimsley took me by surprise: "It [Israel] cannot husband the lives of its soldiers, who are combatants, by sacrificing the lives of civilians, who are not." In other words, Israel should accept the deaths of its soldiers to avoid the deaths of Hezbollah family members and supporters. And why should they?

Grimsley is awash with moral equivalence between Israelis and Lebanese including Hezbollah. But it's worse, he sees Israeli soldiers a guilty of being soldiers while supporters of Hezbollah are innocent because they don't wear a uniform. “Soldiers engage in violence; civilians make no resistance” Actually, Israeli soldiers don’t just “engage in violence” as if they had nothing better to do. And Hezbollah-supporting civilians are not innocent, indeed, they are less innocent that Israeli soldiers who would love to say home and live in peace.

He thinks this is a game: “Soldiers have a chance to defend their lives. Civilians have none.” Actually Israeli soldiers are trying to defend their families while Shiite civilians in Lebanon are aiding and abetting the vicious killers who want to finish Hitler’s work. One side is guilty by the very nature of its aims: the Islamic side.

Of course, in the Civil War, Grimsley’s specialty, combat was fought in a different matter given the technology. If Grimsley’s rules wouldn’t totally rule out the use of air power, a few human shields would achieve that. Clearly, Grimsley is creating rules to outlaw modern warfare and put our Islamic enemy on a “level playing field.”

I don’t know the details of military discipline and ethics but I don’t assume, a priori, that wartime ethics are identical to peacetime ethics. His nonsense doesn’t pass any tests of plausibility.

Anonymous said...

Jason, I couldn't agree more. To some military "analyists" it doesn't seem to matter who the aggressor is.

Anonymous said...

Nice of you to link to me. Every little bit helps.

To get a few things straight:

I used the sentence "Civilians make no resistance" with deliberation. A person who bears arms, whether in or out of uniform, is no longer a civilian but a combatant and may be targeted as such. Furthermore, to bear arms without some distinguishing emblem that identifies you as a combatant is a serious breach of the laws of war.

I am not "creating" rules of engagement. I am applying the existing laws and usages of war.

You seem to be suggesting that Israel should dispense with adherence to the principles of just war. In that case, you might contact the IDF about abandoning The IDF Spirit, which is based on just war doctrine and contains a famous key passage:

Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

Jason Pappas said...

You’re right, mark g, I am questioning the “rules of engagement” and I don't blindly accept “existing laws.”

Anonymous said...

Mark G. seems to be arguing that the "The IDF Spirit" requires Israel to value the lives of their soldiers less than hostile foreign nationals in time of war. The result of fighting a war using such an inverted standard will be a never-ending conflict.

This "standard" denies Israel the ability to achieve real victory and therefore long-term peace.

Apparently, self-preservation and the preservation of liberty doesn't fit into "Just War Theory's" "moral" calculus.

truepeers said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
truepeers said...

Though I have not yet been to Mark G;s blog, what seems to be missing here is any realistic discussion of the necessary evil that must sometimes be done to remove a greater evil. Arguing from an abstract metaphysics and pandering to the reigning victimary orthodoxies of the university, with little reference to actual historical contexts and the brutal moral catch-22s they often pose seems rather fruitless. There is no doubt someting to be said for some kinds of just war theory and for treating all life with as much deference to its sacrality as reason will allow. But it is also true that many academics live in Gnostic dream worlds in which they imagine developing theories and laws that will help us transcend conflict once and fall all. But conflict, in human reality, cannot be transcended in any final utopian order and attempts to imagine so only create situations where disorder in the world is not regularly attacked early on with whatever minimal force is required, but allowed to grow into situations where a greater and less discriminating force is required to bring order back into our relationships. Ignore and appease Hitler in the 1930s... and you end up having to level almost every German city (I have heard this bombing called genocide by academics - what nonsense that is!). It is for just this reason that academic attempts to criminalize war are themselves the "criminal" acts of fantasists.

To quote another blogger on the current "White Guilt" attitudes of the liberal West towards Israel: "It’s a classic double bind. If we accept the dogma of “white guilt” and don’t fight back, then our enemies will take advantage of our self-imposed weakness to destroy us and set up Islamic fascist states whereever they can, such as the one now in Iran.

If [we] reject “white guilt” and fight back, then we lose the public relations battle, and confirm the thesis of the Islamofascists that they are both heroes and victims, and we are the oppressors.

Israel faces this dilemma today in much starker form than the other countries of the West. For Israel, there is no “daddy in charge” who will protect them from their own foolishness. They face the reality of kill or be killed. Once the rest of the West realizes that in fact we face the same dilemma as Israel, either in the short run or the long run, then we might have a chance at winning the war on terrorism. "

Having agreed with Grant so far, I must disagree however with his conclusion: "As with all forms of altruism "Just War Theory" rewards evil and punishes the good." - this is simply not true, many forms of altruism are necessary for human society to, first of all, come into being and then to continue to function; while altruism may create conditions for parasitical evil, the human good should not be conceived without recognition of the fundamental role that altruism or self-sacrifice plays in human affairs. For you and I to put our trust in each other in order to carry out any shared endeavour, we must imagine that each of us is capable of deferring, for some period of time, the satisfaction of his desires, a deferral for the common good, i.e. altruism.