Military Ethics
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Military Ethics

Igor Primoratz, C.A.J. Coady, C.A.J. Coady

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eBook - ePub

Military Ethics

Igor Primoratz, C.A.J. Coady, C.A.J. Coady

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About This Book

Recent developments such as the 'new wars' or the growing privatisation of warfare, and the ever more sophisticated military technology, present the military with difficult ethical challenges. This book offers a selection of the best scholarly articles on military ethics published in recent decades. It gives a hearing to all the main ethical approaches to war: just war theory, consequentialism, and pacifism. Part I includes essays on justice of war (jus ad bellum), focussing on defence against aggression and humanitarian armed intervention, but also addressing topics such as conscientious objection and the relation of patriotism to war. Articles in Part II deal with the central problems of justice in war (jus in bello): civilian immunity and 'collateral damage' to civilian life and property. Essays in Part III look into the moral issues facing the military as a profession, such as the civil - military relations, the responsibilities of officers to their soldiers and to their military superiors, and the status and responsibilities of prisoners of war.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351917568
Part I
Can War Be Morally Justified?
[1]
On the Morality of War: A Preliminary Inquiry*
Richard Wasserstrom†
Americans—at least those who are not pacifists—have had the good fortune of not having had to worry very much until recently about the subject of the morality of war. Although the United States was involved in several major wars in this century, and although these wars were not by any means free of problems of morality, still the morality of the cause and the immorality of the opponents encouraged Americans to accept quite complacently the rightness of American behavior. Two things changed all of this. Atomic and hydrogen bombs increased the stakes of war enormously; the destruction of mankind is a consequence different in kind, not degree. And the Vietnam war, although commendable for little else, did succeed in making relevant and meaningful to all reflective persons the question of by what criteria wars are really to be assessed. For myself, at least, it is the present war that has led me to consider and to attempt to unravel what I have found to be extraordinarily difficult issues relating to the morality of war.
Yet, while the war in Vietnam is the occasion for this inquiry, it is not the subject of the inquiry. I have purposely, to the extent to which it is possible to do so, tried to exclude that war and my views about it from consideration. I have instead endeavored to identify a number of the issues that are raised by a discussion of any war, and to analyze and assess a number of the problems that intrude upon any rational consideration of the topic. The major focus is upon several arguments concerning the morality of war, chiefly the argument that any war is immoral if it involves the intentional killing of innocent persons, and the argument that any war is immoral because it involves the use of deadly force. But this Article is also concerned, in a quite general way, with elucidating and evaluating several of the different perspectives from which war can be morally assessed. In preparation for those discussions it deals with some preliminary but significant problems of definition and analysis.
A number of problems have been omitted, including some that are particularly acute today in the United States: those that relate to the obligations and rights of a citizen when his country is at war. Thus, this inquiry is not directed to a consideration of the duty, if any, to resist an immoral war or to the right to be free of certain obligations to one’s country, even in time of war. Nor, to take a related issue, is it addressed directly to the liabilities and duties of those engaged in war—the duty, if any, to refrain from committing certain acts, even in time of war and even if ordered to do them. These are large and important issues. They are not taken up only because the matters that are discussed require considerable analysis and are in some respects at least preliminary to them.
I
The issues dealt with are numerous, complicated, and, most significantly, relatively unattended to by philosophers. The subject of war has, in fact, quite clearly been slighted in two respects—war has not been the subject of extensive, serious, and critical inquiry within the academy, and such inquiry as has been undertaken has not benefited from the kinds of clarifying and critical examination—the narrowing of issues and the defining of terms—that are the peculiar province of the philosopher. There are at least two important areas in which the consequences of philosophical abstention are readily observable.
Consider first the discussions and arguments that typically take place today concerning the morality of war. Someone will insist that all war is immoral; another that it is immoral or unjust for us to be fighting in Vietnam; still a third that there is nothing immoral about war, as long as it is not a war of aggression. It is not clear, however, that these claims are sufficiently unambiguous to be dealt with sensibly. They may even be consistent. They must be broken down into several more specific claims before truly informed discussion can proceed.
There are, I think, at least three sets of questions that deserve to be distinguished and kept straight in discussions of the morality of war, even though they often are not. The first relates to the behavior of countries as opposed to persons. When we talk about the morality of war we sometimes appear to be assessing the intentions and behavior of persons and sometimes the intentions and conduct of countries. But are countries assessable on moral grounds in the same way and for the same reasons that persons are? The second concerns the rightness or wrongness of an action when contrasted with the praise or blame attendant upon it. Someone can do the wrong thing, and nonetheless be free of blame. When we talk about the morality of war, are the relevant categories those of rightness-wrongness or those of praiseworthiness-blameworthiness, or both? The third involves the differences between particular acts, particular wars, and war as an institution. We can evaluate the morality of individual actions leading up to or taking place within a war;1 we can evaluate the morality of a particular war; and we can assess the morality of war as a human phenomenon. Although the symmetry is, perhaps, imperfect, the differences seem no less significant than those between an individual law, a particular legal system, and the idea of a legal system.
A more serious omission relates to the most typical of all philosophical issues—that of definition. There is a lot of talk about war, but what do we mean when we say of something that it is a war? It is neither idle philosophical curiosity nor ingrained philosophical habit that requires that some attention be given at the beginning to analytical considerations. Rather, it is important that analysis be undertaken here, as elsewhere, because a great deal can turn on what the subject under investigation is taken to be. It is not simply that we need common agreement as to the nature of the subject under investigation—although that is an important enough goal. It is, instead, that we must make certain that we do not surreptitiously, and hence uncritically, resolve important substantive issues via the definitional route.
The danger of defining away important problems is illustrated first with one example not connected with war, and then with several taken from the literature on war. The non–war-related example comes from a quite well-known article by the philosopher Anthony Quinton entitled, “On Punishment.”2 In his piece Quinton deals with one of the issues that has floated through the philosophical literature on punishment for quite some time: the so-called problem of the punishment of the innocent. Without going into any unnecessary details, the problem is this. It is thought by some to count as a decisive objection to utilitarianism that it would permit, if not require, the punishment of persons known to be innocent if the consequences of punishing them proved to be more desirable than those of any alternative course of conduct.
For my purposes it is not important to try to assess the merits of this particular philosophical claim. What is of interest is the way Quinton deals with it. He says this:
For the necessity of not punishing the innocent is not moral but logical. It is not, as some retributivists think, that we may not punish the innocent and ought only to punish the guilty, but that we cannot punish the innocent and must only punish the guilty. Of course, the suffering or harm in which punishment consists can be and is inflicted on innocent people, but this is not punishment; it is judicial error or terrorism or, in Bradley’s characteristically repellent phrase, “social surgery.” The infliction of suffering on a person is only properly described as punishment if that person is guilty.3
Now, there are at least two criticisms that might be made of this account. First, it might be said that Quinton has simply erred in describing the nature of punishment. The guilt or innocence of the person punished—or even the believed guilt or innocence of the person punished—is not an important or central feature of all typical cases of punishment.4
Second, and more importantly, even if it were to be concluded that, within limits, Quinton is entitled to define “punishment” as he pleases, it would still be necessary to see whether major and problematic substantive issues had thereby been covertly resolved. Even if Quinton is right that punishing the innocent is not punishment, he has not at all succeeded in answering the question whether it is right intentionally to do to innocent persons the sorts of things that utilitarianism appears to permit and perhaps require. Yet his argument can be read as an invitation to regard the substantive moral issues as now resolved.5
Similar possibilities for this kind of confusion abound in the literature dealing with war. In particular, when the topic is the assessment of the morality of war, or participation in a particular war, it is easy to see how what is taken to be the typical or standard example of war may have a very great impact on the moral evaluation that is to follow. Thus, when a 17th-century writer says of war that it is “a just contest carried on by the state’s armed forces”6 he has already gone a long way toward judging the rightness of war. Indeed, it is not surprising that within the tradition that does assert the morality of some wars and some participation in wars, one approach that is adopted is to exclude from the very meaning of war precisely those cases that are hardest to justify.
So, John Ruskin in his essay “War” makes what appears at first glance to be a truly startling claim.7 “War,” he asserts, “is the foundation of all great art.”8 The history of western civilization, Ruskin says, is unambiguous on this score. Art reached its highest point with the Gothic period because of that era’s “passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war.”9 Then, the decline set in.
[A]s peace is established or extended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side of luxury and various corruption, and among wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly away; remaining only in partial practice among races who, like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live the lives, of soldiers.10
This is surely a provocative thesis. However, Ruskin renders it substantially less unsettling than it first appears to be, by acknowledging the troublesome cases and admitting that for these particular kinds of war his generalization does not apply. So, immediately after he reports that all great nations are “nourished in war,” and wasted by peace,”11 he goes on to note that
it is not all war of which this can be said…. It is not the rage of a barbarian wolf-flock, … nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of mountaineers, … nor the occasional struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power …. None of these forms of war build anything but tombs.12
An interesting example of this definitional problem and a more contemporary one is the argument advanced by Paul Ramsey, the Protestant theologian, in his book, War and the Christian Conscience.13 Ramsey’s general thesis is that war can be moral, that it is sometimes right to wage war, and that all arguments to the contrary are unconvincing. The most difficult argument for Ramsey, because it is one of the strongest against his position, is that the development of atomic and hydrogen bombs has made the stakes too high. The risks of total annihilation are so great, the argument goes, that no war can today be morally justified. Although this is an important thesis, for present purposes what is of interest is not its persuasiveness but rather one of the ways Ramsey selects to deal with it. What he says is this:
It seems to me that an answer to this question is to be found in the fact that megaton weapons are no longer weapons of war, and that their all-out use would not be war…. It is right that the enemy be made to realize that he will have to exceed the limits of warfare to gain his ends, that he will have to destroy utterly where he thought to conquer and to bend. Then only will he be deterred from using a weapon that is not a weapon of war.14
Were substantial quantities of nuclear weapons used against each other by the opponents in an international conflict today, that would not, Ramsey insists, be war at all. It would instead be “mutual devastation.”15
This approach is, I believe, strikingly similar to Quinton’s, and the risks are equally great. In part the problem is once again that the analysis just seems incorrect. Our sense of what it is that makes something a war does not readily rule anything out on the grounds that the weaponry employed is too destructive. But here, just as in the case of Quinton, there will be a point at which continued disagreement and argument concerning the correct analysis of war will be neither particularly productive nor important.
The danger of Ramsey’s approach is not so much that he has got the nature of war wrong, as that he will lead us to neglect what may be the central concern of many of those who are most worried about the possibility of war today. What Ramsey has not resolved, of course, is the problem of the morality of nuclear conflict and of the widespread use of nuclear devices. And yet he gives the appearance of having done so by tacitly if not expressly assuring us that in considering the morality of war we need not worry about mutual thermonuclear destruction. To be completely fair to Ramsey, though, it may be that he means to argue that all nuclear conflict must be immoral. If so, he makes the point somewhat elliptically.
It is important, therefore, for reasons that transcend mere philosophical curiosity, that we do say something more precise about the nature of war. Typically, if not necessarily, war is an inter-national phenomenon involving the use of a certain amount of deadly force under a claim of right. Typically, too, the analysis of what constitutes a war may rest on the analyst’s choice between war as a highly refined and rule-encompassed, gamelike activity and war as an all-out attempt by one country to dominate another. The manner in which these abstract features manifest themselves in any particular war will play a significant role in the moral assessment made of that war.
In the first place, war is something that takes place between countries, nation-states, rather than lesser groups or individuals. Private wars, if there still are any, are anomalies, and wars against poverty or disease are such only in a secondary or metaphorical sense. Civil wars and some private wars that have taken place (as, for example, in China) are neither metaphors nor anomalies. Rather, they are enough like the standard case of war to make it appropriate so to describe them.
Thus, in most if not all civil wars what is at issue is a claim that what has hitherto been one country is more properly two. If this is correct, then civil wars are different in just this respect from other kinds of internal strife, which are seldom even called wars, such as insurrections (where there is opposition to the enforcement of laws but no strong demand for rival nationhood) or revolutions (where it is assumed that there is one country and the fight is over who shall govern it and how it shall be organized).
The second significant characteristic, and p...

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