Walzer, Just War and Iraq

Ethics as Response

Ronan O'Callaghan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317382423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years questions of ethical responsibility and justice in war have become increasingly significant in international relations. This focus has been precipitated by United States (U.S.) led invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In turn, Western conceptions of ethical responsibility have been largely informed by human rights based understandings of morality.

This book directly addresses the question of what it means to act ethically in times of war by drawing upon first-hand accounts of U.S. war fighting in Iraq during the 2003 invasion and occupation. The book focuses upon the prominent rights based justification of war of Michael Walzer. Through an in-depth critical reading of Walzer's work, this title demonstrates the broader problems implicit to human rights based justifications of war and elucidates an alternative account of ethical responsibility: ethics as response.

Putting forward a compelling case for people to remain troubled and engaged with questions of ethical responsibility in war, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including international relations theory, ethics and security studies.

1 Morality, community and the justification of war

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675527-1

Introduction

In an interview with The Art of Theory in 2012, Michael Walzer claimed that the biggest success of his theory of war was its adoption as a text by the West Point Military Academy during the Vietnam War. According to Walzer, while servicemen may not have agreed with his views on the war, their discomfort with the war had made them receptive to his moral arguments. Walzer, in this respect, wants his arguments to have practical impact: he wants publics to engage with them and, particularly for those involved in fighting wars, to be challenged by moral dimensions of contemporary conflict. This is, undoubtedly, an important and noble aim. Indeed, provoking people to think critically about war is perhaps the overarching theme that ties together the vast majority of academic literature on ethics and war. Nevertheless, Walzer’s desire to achieve practical impacts also carries some weighty risks: principally, the risk that his moral defence of war will be deployed as a strategic tool to justify violence. In other words, Walzer’s pride at his work’s military adoption should be, perhaps, tempered by a sense of unease: the nagging worry that his justifications can be employed in the service of immoral goals. Given the risks associated with justifying war in moral terms, it is crucial for us to understand what morality means to Walzer and how this relates to his justification of war. Therefore, the central focus of this chapter is to explain Walzer’s justification of war by unpacking his understanding of morality. To this end I will be critically engaging with Walzer’s depictions of morality, community and ethical responsibility. In addressing these themes, this chapter will provide an account of Walzer’s overarching philosophical and political project, thereby providing a platform to elucidate an alternative understanding of what it means to act ethically in times of war.

This book describes Walzer’s conception of ethical responsibility as auto-affective. This means that Walzer believes that ethics can only emerge from within the stable boundaries of self-determining subjects. Hence, the way in which we relate to other people is predicated upon a movement from self to other that begins with the self: we start with separated and internally coherent subjects who can subsequently engage with their outside. In turn, this model of ethical responsibility is mirrored in Walzer’s depiction of morality. For Walzer, we start with morality produced within particular communities and this creates the possibility of producing inter-communal, sometimes universal, codes. In this sense, we start with separated, internally coherent communal subjects and this opens the possibility of ethical engagement between communities. This understanding of ethics is important to Walzer’s justification of war because he maintains that violence is justified only when it is necessary to protect the self-determining communal subject. In this sense, this chapter highlights why it is important to understand Walzer’s theory of war within the context of his wider communitarian writings. By situating Walzer’s just war theory within the communitarian arc, we can more clearly see his justification of war in terms of a defence of communitarianism.

The challenge to Walzer’s auto-affective ethics presented in this book arises from a Derridean understanding of the relationship between meaning, subjectivity and responsibility. This model of ethics will be more clearly articulated in the third chapter. Nevertheless, to understand the critique presented within this chapter, it is important to explain the Derridean concept of the law of supplementary commencement. Derrida (1997) argues that when we attempt to locate a singular and definitive ontological origin, what we actually find is a chain of supplementary origins: what Derrida describes as a non-origin. The supplementary non-origin indicates that the foundation we hope to locate was always already in motion and, therefore, there is never a clear starting point through which we can ground ontology. As will be illustrated throughout this chapter, supplementary commencement challenges auto-affection by highlighting the relational dimensions implicated in the emergence of a coherent inside, in particular the constitutive role of alterity in the production of the communal subject. Walzer’s model starts with the assumption that self-determining, internally coherent subjects exist prior to their relationship with the outside – prior to ethical relationships. The Derridean critique, however, explains why the relationship with alterity is constitutive of subjectivity itself. In this sense, the self-productive model of subjectivity, community and meaning implicit to Walzer’s argument constitutes an inadequate ontological foundation.

Walzer, as discussed in the introduction to this book, grounds his morality in the language of rights. The language of rights constitutes a universal structure that allows Walzer to theorise morality in war – morality shared across all communities. In addition, Walzer considers this language to provide morality with a secular ontological foundation. Nevertheless, this ontological foundation contains important theological components. In destabilising the foundations of Walzer’s ontological system, and paying close attention to the necessity of alterity in its production, we can grasp the theological dimension necessarily retained within this supposedly secular morality. I contend that the universal morality necessary for the foundation of Walzer’s laws of war embodies a form of what I term ‘secular theology’.¹ By this I mean that Walzer’s ontology is punctuated by unacknowledged transcendental appeals to faith, without which he would be wholly unable to establish or sustain his system of morality. Reading Walzer’s morality in terms of secular theology allows us to re-present Walzer’s ‘moral reality of war’ as the unfounded imposition of a particular interpretation of morality as ontological fact. In this way, Walzer’s wartime morality is reconceptualised as a socio-political strategy designed to protect a particular understanding of self-determination intimately related to a particular understanding of ethics.

There is a thin man inside every fat man

Walzer’s seminal work on war, Just and Unjust Wars, was primarily a response to what he perceived to be an ethical debasement of the subject spearheaded by realist thinkers. What is perhaps most interesting about Walzer’s response is that it challenged realism on its own terms. Forgoing the traditional liberal stance that morality was something that needed to be worked into the mechanics of war, Walzer argued that morality was already, and always had been, a tangible component of the reality of warfare. In this way, Walzer challenged realism, not with what could simply be dismissed as moral naivety or good intentions, but with reality itself, claiming that the reality espoused by realism constituted a crude fiction used to justify immoral actions: ‘we do not have to translate moral talk into interest talk in order to understand it; morality refers in its own way to the real world’ (2006a: 14). In contrast to the deceptive language of realism, Walzer describes the language of just war theory, at various junctures, as: the ordinary language of war (2005: 8); a common heritage (2005: xi); the most available common moral language (2005: 7); and a moral doctrine that everyone knows (2006a: xix). Walzer’s underlying argument is that when we discuss the issue of war, we ‘talk the same language’, the language of just war – and only the wicked or the simple would reject its terms (2006a: xxiii). In this respect, although Walzer states his intention to defend the business of arguing about war, he quite literally wants to fix the terms of this debate: ‘it is in applying the agreed-upon terms to actual cases that we come to disagree’ (2006a: 11–12) – that is, Walzer presents us with the necessity for an agreed-upon common language that allows us to critically engage with the moral reality of war, and this language is embodied by the terminology of just war theory. Fundamentally, Walzer is proposing a counter-ontology to realism’s language of power and interest, in which just war’s vocabulary allows us to illuminate the moral reality of war.

While Walzer’s depiction of a shared moral language may seem relatively straightforward, its articulation proves more complex than it initially appears. The fundamental complication within Walzer’s understanding of morality derives from his claim that there are two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, languages of morality: what Walzer terms thick and thin moralities. For Walzer, this dichotomy represents a dual affirmation of particularism and universalism, a politics of difference coupled with the acknowledgement of universal rights (1994: x). Thick, or maximal, moral language is described as the shared meanings of a singular political community, representing its collective conscience and common life: Walzer’s conception of particularism (1994: 8). Morality is negotiated thickly between members of a community, ultimately creating a common social vocabulary. Through this shared vocabulary, members define their laws, ideals, values and institutions. There are important ontological problems with Walzer’s conception of community, problems that will be addressed in the following sections. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily concern the laws of war because thick morality cannot be universalised. Walzer assures us that the authority of maximal morality is rooted in the singular community and any attempt to enforce thick standards in another community (by an outside party) violates that community’s right to territorial integrity, political sovereignty and self-determination (2006a: 53–55, 61).² Because Walzer’s rules of war are designed to be enforced across communities, we must turn our attention to the language of thin, or minimal, morality, the universal moral vocabulary and therefore, the universal dialect of wartime morality.

Walzer quickly asserts that minimalism is best understood as an effort to recognise and respect a doctrine of rights (2006a: xxiii–xxiv). While Walzer is unsure where rights derive from (whether they are natural or invented), he assures us that they are inseparable from our sense of what it means to be human and constitute a palpable feature of our moral world (2006a: 54). In turn, although Walzer recognises that rights are a form of Western maximal language, he assumes they are translatable (1994: 10). In his conceptualisation, Walzer describes the rights of life and liberty as something more than simply minimal – what he terms ‘ultra-minimalism’ (1994: 16). In this sense, the rights of life and liberty represent the core minimal essence of universal morality. In the context of war, Walzer asserts that the rights of life and liberty ‘underlie the most important judgements that we can make about war’ (2006a: 54) and we can only justly send armed men and women across a border in defence of life and liberty (1994: 16). Importantly, Walzer argues that justice in war can be derived exclusively from the protection of life and liberty: ‘For the theory of justice in war can indeed be generated from the two most basic and widely recognised rights of human beings – and in their simplest (negative) form not to be robbed of life and liberty’ (1983: xv). The rights of life and liberty are, in this regard, the foundational components of Walzer’s universalism. In fact, Walzer maintains that life and liberty should be viewed as absolute values that dictate every moral judgement we make at times of war (2006a: xxiv). Absolute, for Walzer, is best understood in terms of inviolability: life and liberty are rights that cannot be violated without acting immorally. In this context, the War Convention (Walzer’s codification of the moral rules of war) is underpinned by the defence of life and liberty and is therefore ‘written in absolutist terms: one violates its provisions at one’s moral, as at one’s physical peril’ (2006a: 47).

It must be underscored that Walzer’s conception of rights is not equivalent to that espoused by classical rights theorists, as exemplified by the Rawlsian (1999) model that presents individual rights as the foundation of universal morality and justice. In contrast, Walzer argues that rights emerge from the jagged bedrock of particularism_ we start with communal systems of morality that coalesce into universal rights. In this way, the codes of maximal morality produced within individual communities provide the foundation through which the universal laws of war can emerge. As Walzer explains, ‘[m]orality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on special occasions’ (1994: 4). In other words, we start with particular codes of morality and these facilitate the emergence of universalism. Here, Walzer performs a clever linguistic trick: rather than offering a singular universal morality, he creates the image of numerous and diverse maximal moralities dovetailing into a set of universal guidelines. Walzer claims that minimal morality represents a catalogue of common responses that combine to form a set of standards to which all societies can be held (1994: 10). As such, Walzer’s universalism resembles the intersection of a vast inter-communal Venn diagram, symbolising a negotiated minimal code rather than the enforcement of a singular set of universal values.

The intersecting point of Walzer’s moral diagram captures the minimal essence of life and liberty and the moral rules constructed to protect these absolute rights. This image mirrors Walzer’s depiction of the War Convention, which he assures us is the product of centuries of inter-communal arguing and debate over the morality of warfare (2006a: 44–45). Walzer, in this way, illustrates his interpretation of the Orwellian metaphor of the thin man inside the fat man: thin morality emerges from thick moralities; universalism is founded by particularism. This conception of morality tells us a great deal about Walzer’s view of ethics. Ethical responsibility begins with the coherent communal subject and responsibility is defined in terms of the relations between members – maximal morality. In turn, the existence of a coherent and stable inside makes the inter-communal rules of war, or minimal morality, possible, i.e. ethical responsibility starts in the self (the communal subject) and can subsequently extend to others in certain circumstances. This appeal to particularism, however, does not resolve the question of foundation in Walzer’s work. Walzer starts with the communal subject but this doesn’t explain how this subject comes into being. Therefore, we must look at the articulation of Walzer’s broader communitarian project in order to understand how community, which creates the possibility of both maximal and minimal morality, is founded.

Self-determination and membership

The prologue for Neil Gaiman’s The Doll’s House (2010) recounts the meta-narrative of community, the tale of how the story of community’s origin is passed down the communal lineage. Gaiman describes the ritual iteration of a communal origin: a boy on the cusp of manhood is brought to the barren centre of the desert by a male relative to hear the tale of who his people really are.³ The telling of the story is a performative and constitutive exercise: performative in respect of the pedagogical roles the participants play; and constitutive, because it is the telling of the story itself that completes the communal subject. A boy leaves to hear the tale but a man returns to the tribe: ‘When he returns to the tribe he will truly be a man: he will have heard the tale. At night he will sleep in the young men’s hut’ (2010: 15). The man who returns is entrusted with the continuation of the narrative. The communal subject is duty bound to repeat the ritual later in his life, a circular motif that is the continuation of community itself. Gaiman’s story recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) depiction of the mythical scene of communal foundation. Nancy argues that the mythical scene of community symbolises the desire to trace the lineage of community back to a singular starting point in which the retelling of the origin story is pivotal. This ideal of community is auto-affective: community is created and sustained by the self-repetition of the story of its origin. In other words, the auto-affective mythos proclaims that community gives birth, and re-birth, to itself through the articulation of a narrative: the tale of who we are, where we come from and what life means to us.

This image of community is fundamental to Walzer’s ontology. Walzer maintains that self-determination is the primary condition necessary for communities to produce their own unique articulation of society – their maximal world. In this respect, Walzer is telling us that authentic communal life must be created by members of the community. The exclusion of alterity is necessary to maintain this foundation because the possibility of a self-determining community is underpinned by the assumption that there are others who are outside and not part of the self being determined. In Walzer’s terms, in order for members of a community to build a particular maximal world they must be separated from strangers who do not share their maximal life. Walzer’s justification of violence is intimately tied to the member/stranger dichotomy. Walzer argues that war is justified when a community’s common life is threatened by nefarious border crossings of strangers. The crime of war is defined as the point at which a stranger threatens to cross the border and violently change a community’s common life (2006a: 51–53).⁴ For Walzer, intrusive strangers threaten to destroy the common life by illegitimately changing social meanings: ‘Tyranny is always specific in character: a particular boundary crossing, a particular violation of social meaning’ (1983: 28). Thus, the purity of the political community and the meanings it shares is threatened by what lies outside its borders. Self-determination, the core principle of Walzer’s ontology, takes on a rather literal meaning: the self must be able to determine itself free from the coercion of others.

Before we begin to unpack the implications of Walzer’s justification of war, it is perhaps necessary to briefly reiterate Walzer’s maximal morality. As previously explained, maximalism describes morality shared between members of a political community. Walzer explains that shared values are the result of cultural memory, customs and shared social goods that coalesce into what he describes as a common life (1994: 8). As such, maximal morality derives from a collective historical process. For Walzer, community is the space in which maximal morality comes into being: ‘the political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history and culture come toge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Morality, community and the justification of war
• 2 Violence, ethics and the invasion of Iraq
• 3 Derrida and ethics
• 4 Non-combatant immunity and the sacrifice of rights
• 5 Double effect and its parasites
• Conclusion: Ethics as response
• Bibliography
• Index