The Moral Warrior

Ethics and Service in the U.S. Military

Martin L. Cook

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780791462423, 9780791462416
• eBook ISBN: 9780791484265
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For the first time in history, the capabilities of the U.S. military far outstrip those of any potential rival, either singly or collectively, and this reality raises fundamental questions about its role, nature, and conduct. The Moral Warrior explores a wide range of ethical issues regarding the nature and purpose of voluntary military service, the moral meaning of the unique military power of the United States in the contemporary world, and the moral challenges posed by the "war" on terrorism.

Part One:
Moral Facets of Military Service

One
The Moral Framework of War

Introduction

Violent conflict among human beings is, unfortunately, one of the great constants in our history as a species. As far back as we can see, the human species has engaged in war and other forms of organized violence. But it is equally true that, as far back as humanity has left written records, people have thought about morality and ethics. Although cultures vary widely in how they interpret death and killing from a moral and religious perspective, every human culture has recognized that taking human life is a morally grave matter; every human culture has felt the need to justify in moral and religious terms any taking of human life.

In the modern world, a large body of ethical and legal thought attempts to limit, constrain, and to establish criteria that sanction the use of violence in the name of the state and society. Through the mechanisms of The Hague and the Geneva Conventions, the Charter of the United Nations, military manuals such as the United States Army’s Law of Land Warfare, and similar documents, modern governments and militaries attempt to distinguish “just war” and just conduct in war from other types of killing of human beings. Morally conscientious military personnel need to understand and frame their actions in moral terms so as to maintain moral integrity in the midst of the actions and stress of combat. They do so in order to explain to themselves and others how the killing of human beings they do is distinguishable from the criminal act of murder.

Attempts to conduct warfare within moral limits have met with mixed success. Many cultures and militaries fail to recognize these restraints, or do so in name only. The realities of combat, even for the best trained and disciplined military forces, place severe strains on respect for those limits and sometimes cause military leaders to grow impatient with them in the midst of their need to “get the job done.” Events like the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam show that even forces officially committed to just conduct in war are still capable of atrocities in combat—and are slow to discipline such violations.

Despite these limitations, the idea of just war is one to which the well-led and disciplined military forces of the world remain committed. The fact that the constraints of just war are routinely overridden is no more a proof of their falsity and irrelevance than the existence of immoral behavior “refutes” standards of morality: we know the standard, and we also know human beings fall short of that standard with depressing regularity. The fact of moral failure, rather than proving the falsity of morality, points instead to the source of our disappointment in such failures: our abiding knowledge of the morally right.

Because of the importance of just war thinking, the general history, key provisions, and moral underpinnings of just war are things that every military person, and especially every senior leader, must understand and be able to communicate to subordinates and the public. It is important that senior leaders understand just war more deeply and see that the positive laws of war emerge from a long moral tradition that rests on fundamental moral principles. This chapter will provide that history, background, and moral context of ethics and war.

Background of Just War Theory

Most cultures of antiquity attempted to place some restraints on war. All recognized that there are some causes of war that are justifiable and others that are not. All recognized that some persons are legitimate objects of attack in war and others are not. All recognized that there were times, seasons, and religious festivals, and so on, during which warfare would be morally wrong or religiously inappropriate.

The roots of modern international law come from one specific strand of thought that emerged after the conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine in the year AD 312. Although there were important ideas of restraint in war in pre-Christian Greek and Roman thought and, indeed, in cultures all over the world, it was the blend of Christian and Greco-Roman thought that led to the development of full-blown just war thinking over the following centuries.

Christianity before this time had been suspicious of entanglement in the affairs of the empire. For the first several centuries of the movement, Christians interpreted the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and other places quite literally, and saw themselves as committed to pacifism (the refusal to use force or violence in all circumstances). Although many appreciated the relative peace, prosperity, and ease of travel the empire’s military force made possible, Christians felt prayer on behalf of the emperor was the proper limit of their support for it.

Much changed with Constantine. For many, war fought on behalf of a “Christian empire” was a very different thing than war on behalf of a pagan one. Furthermore, during the century following Constantine’s conversion, the empire began to experience wave after wave of invasion from the north, culminating in the fall of the city of Rome itself in AD 410—a mere hundred years after Constantine.

It was in that context that Christian thinkers, most notably St. Augustine, a doctor of the church and bishop of Hippo in North Africa, first worked out the foundations of Christian just war thought. History, Augustine argued, is morally ambiguous. Human beings hope for pure justice and absolute righteousness. Augustine firmly believed that the faithful will experience such purity only at the end of time when God’s kingdom comes. But until that happens, we will experience only justice of a sort, righteousness of a sort.

What passes for justice will require force and coercion, since there will always be people who strive to take more than their share, to harm others and to steal from them. In that world, the peacemakers who are blessed are those who use force appropriately to keep as much order and peace as possible under these conditions. The military officer is that peacemaker. Out of genuine care and concern with the weak and helpless, the soldier shoulders the burden of fighting to maintain an order and system of justice that, while falling far short of the deepest hopes of human beings, keeps the world from sliding into complete anarchy and chaos. It is a sad necessity imposed upon the soldier by an aggressor. It inevitably is tinged with guilt and mournfulness. The conscientious soldier longs for a world where conflict is unnecessary, but sees that the order of well-ordered states must be defended.

For Augustine and the tradition that develops after him, the theory of just war is an attempt to balance two competing moral principles. It attempts to maintain the Christian concern with non-violence and to honor the principle that taking human life is a grave moral evil. But it attempts to balance that concern with the recognition that, the world being what it is, the protection of innocent human life requires the willingness to use force and violence.

As it wends its way through history, the tradition of just war thought becomes more precise and more elaborate. In its development, it faces new challenges and makes new accommodations.

The Spanish in the New World, for example, were challenged to rethink the tradition as they encountered and warred against indigenous populations. Are such wars, too, governed by moral principles? Are all things permitted against such people? Or, it was seriously debated, are they even people, as opposed to some new kind of animal? Through that discussion came an expansion of the scope of just war principles to populations that did not share common cultures.

After the Protestant Reformation, as wars raged throughout Europe in the attempt to restore religious unity to Christendom, some thinkers (most notably Hugo Grotius) argued that just war must be severed from a distinctively Christian religious foundation. Human reason instead must provide a system for the restraint of war that would be valid despite religious difference, valid etsi deus non daretur, even if God did not exist! In other words, for Grotius and others, human reason is something shared by all people, regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or culture. Rationality, rather than revealed religion or religious authority, could suffice to ground moral thinking about war.

As a result of that secularization of just war thinking in Europe, the foundation was laid for the universal international law of the present international system. Natural law (moral rules believed to be known by reason alone, apart from particular religious ideas and institutions) and the jus gentium, the “law of peoples”—those customary practices that are widely shared across cultures—would ground just war in this changed religious-political system. In current international law, these accepted practices are called “customary international law,” and they set the standard of practices of “civilized nations.”

Since virtually all modern states have committed themselves by treaty and by membership in the United Nations to the principles of international law, in one sense there is no question of their universal applicability. But the fact that the tradition has roots in the West and in the Christian tradition does raise important multicultural questions about it.

How does one deal with the important fact that Muslims have their own ways of framing moral issues of war and conflict and even of the national state itself that track imperfectly at best with the just war framework? How does one factor in the idea of “Asian values” that differ in their interpretation of the rights of individuals and the meaning of the society and state from this supposedly universal framework? What weight should be given to the fact that much of the world, while nominally consisting of nation-states on the model established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, is in reality better described as “tribes with flags”? How does one deal with the fact that, in much of the world, membership in a particular ethnic group is more an indicator of one’s identity than the name of the country on one’s passport?

All of these questions are the subject of intense scholarly debate. All have real-world applications when we think about the roots of conflict around the modern world and attempt to think about those conflicts in the ways many of the participants do. But for our purposes, we will need to set them aside in favor of making sure we understand the just war criteria as they frame US military policy and the existing framework of international law.

This limitation of focus is required not only by limitations of space, but also by legal reality. Whatever one might want to say about the important cross-cultural issues posed above, it remains true that the United States and its allies around the world are committed by treaty, policy, and moral commitment to conduct military operations within the framework of the existing just war criteria. That fact alone makes it important that strategic leaders possess a good working knowledge of those criteria and some facility in using them to reason about war.

Ideally, however, strategic leaders would also have some grasp of the ongoing debate about cultural diversity and the understanding of war in fundamentally differing cultural contexts.

The Purposes of the Just War Framework

The principles commonly called “just war criteria” provide an organized schema for determining whether a particular conflict is morally justified. As one might imagine, any such framework will inevitably fall short of providing moral certainty. When applied to the real world in all its complexity, inevitably persons of intelligence and good will can, and do, disagree whether those criteria are met in a given case.

Furthermore, some governments and leaders lie. No matter how heinous their deeds, they will strive to cast their actions in just war terms to provide at least the appearance of justification for what they do. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it is testimony to the moral weight of the just war principles that just war language provides the shape of the lies even the greatest war criminals must tell. Rare indeed is the aggressor or tyrant willing to declare forthrightly the real causes and motives of his or her actions.

The twin realities of real-world complexity and the prevalence of lying about these matters suggest the importance not only of knowing the just war criteria as a kind of list, but also of skillful and careful reasoning using the just war framework as a strategic leader competency. Only if a leader is capable of careful and judicious application of just war thinking can he or she distinguish valid application of just war thinking from specious and self-serving attempts to cloak unjust action in its terms.

The Just War Framework

Moral judgments about war fall into two discrete areas: the reasons for going to war in first place and the way the war is conducted. The first is traditionally called jus ad bellum, or justice of going to war, and the second jus in bello, or law during war. Some interesting features of this two-part division are that different agents are primarily responsible for each and that they are to a large degree logically independent of each other.

Judgments about going to war are, in the American context, made by the National Command Authority and the Congress. Except at the highest levels where military officers advise those decision-makers, military leaders are not involved in those discussions and bear no moral responsibility for the decisions that result. Still, military personnel and ordinary citizens can and do judge the reasons given for entering into military conflict by those decision-makers and make their own determinations whether the reasons given make sense or not. A morally interesting but difficult question arises concerning one’s obligations and responsibilities when one is convinced that recourse to war is not justified in a particular case.

Just conduct in war concerns the rules of engagement, choice of weapons and targets, treatment of civilian populations and prisoners of war, and so forth. These concern the “nuts and bolts” of how the war is actually conducted. Here the primary responsibility shifts from the civilian policymakers to the military leadership at all levels. Of course, political leaders and ordinary citizens have an interest in and make judgments about how their troops conduct themselves in war. Militaries conduct themselves in light of national values, and must be seen as behaving in war in ways citizens at home can accept morally.

Modern war, usually fought in plain sight of CNN and other media, is, for good or for ill, especially subject to immediate scrutiny. Political leaders and ordinary citizens react to virtually every event and require of their leaders explanations of why they conduct war as they do. That is another reason strategic leaders must be adept in explaining clearly and honestly the conduct of their forces within the framework of the just war criteria.

I turn now to a discussion of the particular criteria of just war. These are the tests one uses to determine the justification of recourse to war in particular circumstances.

We begin with the criteria for judging a war just in terms of going to war in the first place. Lists of these criteria vary somewhat in detail, but the following list captures the essential elements:

1. just cause
2. legitimate authority
3. public declaration
4. just intent
5. proportionality
6. last resort
7. reasonable hope of success
8. end of peace
   

The fundamental moral impulse behind just war thinking is a strong sense of the moral evils involved in taking human life. Consequently, the ad bellum tests of just war are meant to prevent too easy a recourse to force and violence to resolve conflict. Each of the tests is meant to impose a restraint on the decision to go to war.

The just cause requirement is that we have a legitimate and morally weighty reason to go to war. At one time, causes like “offended honor” or religious difference were considered good reasons for war. As it has developed, just war tradition and international law have restricted greatly the kinds of reasons deemed acceptable for entering into military conflict. The baseline standard in modern just war thinking is aggression. States are justified in going to war to respond to aggression received. Classically, this means borders have been crossed in force. Such direct attacks on the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of an internationally recognized state provide the clear case of just cause, recognized in just war theory and in international law (for example, in the Charter of the United Nations).

Of course, there are a number of justifications for war that do not fit this classic model. Humanitarian interventions, preemptive strikes, and assistance to a wronged party in another state’s civil war, just to name some examples, can in some circumstances also justify use of military force, even though they do not fit the classic model of response to aggression. But the farther one departs from the baseline model of response to aggression, the more difficult and confusing the arguments become.

For that reason, international law and ethics give an especially hard look at claims of just cause other than response to aggression. To do otherwise risks opening the door for states to interfere at will with one another’s territory and sovereignty.

The legitimate authority requirement restricts the number of agents who may authorize use of force. In the Middle Ages, for example, local lords and their private armies would engage in warfare without consulting with, let alone receiving authorization from, the national sovereign.

Nowadays, different countries will vary in their internal political structure and assign legitimate authority for issues of war and peace to different functionaries and groups. In the American context, there is the unresolved tension between the role of the president as commander in chief and the authority of Congress to declare war. The present War Powers Act (viewed by all presidents since it was enacted as unconstitutional, but not yet subjected to judicial review) has still not clarified that issue. But while one can invent a scenario where this lack of clarity would raise serious problems, in the National Command Authority and the Congress have found pragmatic solutions in every deployment of American forces so far.

The public declaration requirement has both a moral purpose and (in the American context) a legal one. The legal one refers to the issue we were just discussing: the role of Congress in declaring war. As we all know, few twentieth-century military conflicts in American history have been authorized by a formal congressional declaration of war. While this is an important and unresolved constitutional issue for the United States, it is not the moral point of the requirement.

The moral point involved is perhaps better captured as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Moral Facets of Military Service
• Part Two: Moral Soldiers and Moral Causes: Serving the Needs of Justice in the New World Order
• Notes
• Index