National Defence, Self-Defence, and the Problem of Lesser Aggression
My contribution for Cecile Fabre and my co-edited volume on Justifying National Defence, which we’re hoping to publish in 2012. Read on for the introduction:
Wars are large-scale conflicts between organised groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compelling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individuals and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour.
Although this question should obviously be central to both philosophical and political discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.[1] Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for.[2]
For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain).[3] The problem is more pressing, however, for the justification of national defence.[4] Although commonsense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.[5] We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so.
In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground commonsense views of permissible national defence.[6] Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.[7] The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles.
Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible killing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying warfare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.[8] We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context.
The chapter proceeds as follows. Section II sets out the argument against reductionism.[9] Section III considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section IV then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argument. Finally, section V sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alternative. Section VI concludes.
[1] For an overview of the recent debate, see Seth Lazar, ‘War’, in Hugh Lafollette (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of Ethics (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, Forthcoming).
[2] For example, of the five different inquiries into British participation in the Iraq war carried out in recent years, only the Chilcot Inquiry had the purposes and legality of the invasion within its remit, and it remains to be seen how prominent a role this will play in its final report, as contrasted with the emphasis on process. See Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Iraq War Inquiry Report Delayed’, The Guardian, November 16 2011; Mark Tran, ‘Q&a the Iraq War Inquiry’, The Guardian, November 24 2009. Similarly, the 2010 Strategic Defence Review, which had the remit to consider the whole military posture of the United Kingdom, confined itself to budgetary questions, without asking just what we should be using our military for. See David Rodin, ‘Defence Review Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat, to Our Military’, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/13/defence-review-is-opportunity-not-threat>, accessed 28/12/2011.
[3] See, for example Tony Coady, ‘The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention’, Peaceworks 45 (2002), Available free from http://www.usip.org/pubs/PeaceWorks/pwks45.pdf.
[4] This locution is somewhat unfortunate, because, on most accounts, rights of national defence accrue to states, not to nations.
[5] The most coherent articulation of conventional views about the ethics of war remains Michael Walzer’s classic, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2006). For international law governing the permissibility of armed resistance against armed attack, see, for example, article 51 of the UN Charter, and the recent Annex to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
[6] Obviously to justify warfare we have to justify other acts besides killing; clearly, however, if the killing cannot be justified, then the rest of the discussion is moot.
[7] The term is coined in David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002): 124. The most prominent exemplar is Jeff McMahan, see for example Jeff McMahan, ‘War as Self-Defense’, Ethics & International Affairs, 18/1 (2004), 75-80. Other adherents include Richard J. Arneson, ‘Just Warfare Theory and Noncombatant Immunity’, Cornell International Law Journal, 39 (2006), 663-88; Tony Coady, ‘The Status of Combatants’, in David Rodin and Henry Shue (eds.), Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 153-75; Cecile Fabre, A Cosmopolitan Theory of the Just War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Helen Frowe, ‘Self-Defence and the Principle of Non-Combatant Immunity’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, (2011); Lionel McPherson, ‘Innocence and Responsibility in War’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34/4 (2004), 485-506; Seumas Miller, ‘Civilian Immunity, Forcing the Choice, and Collective Responsibility’, in Igor Primoratz (ed.), Civilian Immunity in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 113-35; Gerhard Øverland, ‘Killing Civilians’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13/3 (2005), 345-63; David Rodin, ‘The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why Jus in Bello Asymmetry Is Half Right’, in David Rodin and Henry Shue (eds.), Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44-68.
[8] Walzer for the most part simply assumed exceptionalism, without seeking to defend it. While others have recognised the flaws in reductionism (e.g. Henry Shue, ‘Do We Need a Morality of War?’, in David Rodin and Henry Shue (eds.), Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87-111.), I am not aware of any fully-fledged attempt to provide plausible foundations for an exceptionalist alternative. Although see Yitzhak Benbaji’s work, for one recent counterexample Yitzhak Benbaji, ‘A Defense of the Traditional War Convention’, Ethics, 118/3 (2008), 464-95; Yitzhak Benbaji, ‘A Moral Right to Undertake the Duty of Obedience: A Contractarian Justification of the War Convention’, Ethics, (2011). And in this volume {Benbaji}.
[9] This argument is an attempt at a more precise and compelling formulation of a familiar objection, discussed for example at Jeff McMahan, ‘Innocence, Self-Defense and Killing in War’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 2/3 (1994), 193-221: 195-6; Richard Norman, Ethics, Killing and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 133; Rodin, War and Self-Defense: 133-8..
Category: War, Working Papers