Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations

"That’s right. It’s Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars , which was published in 1977. This is the most famous of the twentieth century works on the philosophy of war. It’s a fantastic book for a number of reasons. It should be read, not just by people who are interested in war, but by all philosophers: it combines really interesting philosophical arguments with historical cases, and that’s one of the things I really love, and that most people love, about it: it’s a wonderful blend of the philosophical and the historical. It’s an important book in the history of moral and political philosophy, as well. For a very long time, between roughly J. S. Mill in the middle on the nineteenth century, to the 1970s, there was really very little by way of normative work in English in moral and political philosophy, particularly in political philosophy. The 1970s witnessed a revival of normative political philosophy, most famously, Rawls’s Theory of Justice was published in 1971. The first issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs , which is one of the two main journals in political philosophy, came out in 1971. Then we had Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia , which is a response to Rawls, in 1974; and then came Walzer’s book in 1977. So it’s part of that ensemble of works which put the normative, the question of how we ought to behave or not to behave towards each other, particularly as political agents, very firmly on the table. It’s also a book which, though it came out at the end of the Vietnam War , was obviously very influenced and shaped by it. These are some of the reasons why I’ve chosen it. I should say that I disagree with many of the claims that Walzer makes in the book. He is known in political philosophy as a broadly communitarian political philosopher, someone who believes that the community, in general, and communal understandings and beliefs in particular, which agents generate, have a moral status, a moral value, that is not reducible to the moral status and value of individual members of those communities. That leads Walzer to make claims which, in my view—and I’m not the only one to think this—seem to be very problematic. For example, on the topic of when humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state is justified, Walzer has a very narrow and restricted account of justification for intervention. He shows deference towards communal understandings and traditions, some of which we ought to reject precisely because they are not sufficiently sensitive to the interests of individuals. For Walzer, a people has to rise itself before outside intervention is justified, and it’s never clear how homogenous or not his conception of ‘a people’ is. We might want to say to him, ‘Well, the people as a whole don’t rise, but we have a minority here, which is severely persecuted, which can’t rise up on its own. Why should we give deference to the communal understandings of the majority, vis-à-vis this particular minority?’ But the single most important point of disagreement I have with Walzer has to do with the role and status of soldiers. Walzer articulates the view, which is central to contemporary laws of war, that once the war has started, irrespective of the values for which they fight and kill, soldiers on opposite sides of the conflict are morally on a par with each other. So, for example, on the plausible assumption that Germany wrongfully invaded Poland in 1939, on the plausible assumption that German soldiers were killing Polish soldiers in pursuit of an unjust aggression, and that Polish soldiers were rightfully defending their country, even on those assumptions, for Walzer, a German soldier was as entitled to kill a Polish soldier in his own defence, as a Polish soldier was entitled to kill a German soldier in his own defence. Walzer gives several reasons in support of the claim that morally there is no difference between the German soldier and the Polish soldier. Those reasons are reasons which I, and many others, reject. The most important reason is that, for Walzer, a soldier is nothing but an instrument of his or her state in a foreign policy, so you can’t charge a soldier, an ordinary individual soldier, with the crime of aggression. That crime is not committed by the soldier, it’s committed by the soldier’s leaders. It’s appropriate to put Goering on trial at Nuremberg, but it’s not appropriate to put on trial, at Nuremberg, for the crime of aggression, the ordinary soldiers without whom the aggression would not have taken place. I disagree with that. The fifth book that we’re going to talk about gives a number of reasons as to why we should disagree with Walzer. But before I get on to that book, I just want to say a bit more about why Just and Unjust Wars , for all its argumentative flaws, is remarkable. It’s an extraordinarily compassionate, humane book. There are passages in the book where Walzer talks about soldiers in ways which I find really moving. One passage always comes to my mind when I think about it, a passage where, by using George Orwell’s description of an incident that happened to him whilst he was fighting in Catalonia, Walzer talks about what a soldier is to do when he’s faced with an enemy soldier who’s asleep, or naked, taking a bath, or having a cigarette. The question is: while that soldier is not threatening me, he’s not armed, should I kill him? May I kill him, nonetheless? Some people take the view that you can kill him, other people take the view that you cannot. But what I really love about this passage is that Walzer manages to convey how much of a dilemma it is, precisely because there is a sense in which that soldier, who is naked, or asleep, appears to us in his humanity. That’s one of the most important lessons of the book: when we think about wars, whether as philosophers, or soldiers engaged in that war, or as citizens about to decide whether to mandate a government to go to war, we should never lose sight of the humanity of our enemy, even if we end up killing that enemy; we should never forget that we are killing a human being, not a rat, not a horse, not a robot, but a human being. There are very few books of philosophy which are so replete and redolent with that sense of humane compassion, but that one really is, and it’s admirable for that."

"Yes, this is a classic book by Michael Walzer, who is a very distinguished political theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study. The book has gone through various editions, but it first came out in 1977 and was in part an attempt to make sense of the debates about Vietnam. But it’s really a counterstrike against what is still a very common view — that there is no such thing as morality in warfare, or maybe that the only moral duty in warfare is just to get the war over with as soon as possible. So there are no moral constraints in when war should be fought, or how war should be fought. Michael Walzer’s whole book is an attempt to revive a system of thinking – known as ‘just war theory’ – about when war is justified and how you can fight a war. So Walzer argues that there really is what he calls “moral reality” to war. That there is a shared moral vocabulary about things like killing civilians, killing prisoners of war, and aggression, that shows there really is an underlying moral code that governs that we do and we should think about war. There are two main elements to the way this book says you should think about whether a war is a just war. The first is whether or not it’s right to fight the war in the first place. For him, aggression is the great international crime. Going to war leads inevitably to the mutual escalation of warfare. If one side does something, the other side has to try to top that, and war gets more and more brutal. It makes states turn against their own citizens — states force their citizens to go off and fight, and so, according to Michael Walzer, who’s a great liberal, war is actually a form of tyranny. The second part of the way that he says you should think about war is how you actually fight it. You need to have a just cause for fighting, and self-defense is the classic just cause for fighting, but even if you’re fighting a just war of self-defense, you have to fight it with proper means – you’re not allowed to target all their civilians, you’re not allowed to shoot POWs, you’re not allowed to kill wounded soldiers. He was a dove on Vietnam , he was a dove on Iraq . He thinks it was right to fight World War II , which for Britain and France starts with German aggression against Poland, and for the US starts with Japanese aggression at Pearl Harbor . But the great thing about this book is that he’s a very worldly kind of political theorist, and he gives this gritty soldier level’s view of how wars are actually fought, and how diplomacy is actually carried out. He wants it to be a realistic, practical guide to war fighting–not a kind of abstract, theoretical exercise. The book is full of real world historical examples, including Nuremberg and Korea and the Six-Day War and the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. He uses examples from all over the place in history – everything from the Peloponnesian War to Vietnam. Yes, soldiers and decision-makers. He’s really thinking about what war looks like on the ground. So, one of the Nuremberg principles is command responsibility, that senior officials bear responsibility for what their subordinates do. But Michael Walzer makes the point, which any military person would make, that a lot of what people do in war is to try and break up a general’s control of his troops. You try to screw up people’s communications, you try to make the troops disobey orders, you try to break down the other guy’s military machine. You spend the whole war trying to break down command responsibility, and there’s something actually a bit weird that then, when the war is over, you turn around and say “Oh but you bear responsibility for all of this.” That’s an argument that seems influenced by him spending a lot of time talking to military people."

"This is another classic. He is a philosopher and he wrote it after the Vietnam war (1959-1975), asking the question – is war ever just? There is a long history of literature on what counts as a just war. Essentially, just war as a policy goes back to St Augustine. The early Christians were pacifists, but when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity in 312AD they needed a way of justifying war. Jus in bello – is the cause just? Jus ad bellum – is it fought justly and is it authorised by a right authority – the King or whatever? The fascinating thing in the Middle Ages was that there were two types of war – Just and Holy. A Just War was authorised by the prince or the monarch and had to be fought consistently with church rules. A Holy War was authorised by the Pope and there were no rules. So, when the crusaders sacked Jerusalem in 1099 it wasn’t, as lots of people think, because they were outside of Europe, it was because it was a Holy War. The just cause nowadays, according to Walzer, is self-defence against aggression. Yes. There is the distinction between the non-combatant and the combatant. Non-combatants, such as prisoners of war, old men, women and children, are to be protected and there are all kinds of rules about what we now call “collateral damage” which means that the collateral damage has to be proportionate – the cause has to be worthwhile enough that it doesn’t matter if you kill a few people. What Walzer does is to outline a set of principles that have been developed over centuries. I don’t think wars are ever legitimate, but I think there can be a justification for the use of force. For example, genocide. I think it is justifiable to use force to protect people from genocide. You wouldn’t, for example, as NATO did in Kosovo, use bombs to protect people. You would risk your life on the ground and go in to help. There is a big difference between thinking “My goal is to defeat the enemy that inflicts genocide,” and “My goal is to protect people who are victims of genocide.” I think it needs to be more like policing. The police would bring the aggressors in alive if possible, so they can be tried in a court rather than just killing them. What’s interesting is that, in his second edition, Walzer recognises that self defence isn’t the only just cause, that humanitarian intervention can be a just cause too. Although it’s a secular book, the principles are the same as the principles for just war in most religions. Islam is particularly strict on this. The First Caliph said that you shouldn’t kill civilians, that you shouldn’t slaughter sheep unless you need them for food, and that you shouldn’t cut down trees. The Israelis have destroyed thousands of trees in Palestine. That’s not allowed in Islam. So the religious, Christian rules of war were codified in the late 19th century at the Hague Convention and the Geneva Convention – this was international humanitarian law written down for the first time in the Western tradition, but it is not inconsistent with other traditions. They do. It’s terribly important for soldiers whose job is basically to kill people. There is a fine line between being a hero and being a murderer. They need to feel they are obeying the law. The difference between contemporary warfare and old-fashioned warfare is that contemporary armies now shoot from a distance. The worst atrocities are usually committed by paramilitary groups because ordinary soldiers are supposed to feel they are abiding by the law. There is a link between this and Clausewitz, because by World War II the distinctions between soldiers and civilians had broken down. If you think about the Blitz, the Holocaust , Dresden, it was a fusion of the trinity, justifying total war. There was a view that it was a military necessity to go to the extremes – that Hitler was so evil that you can justify killing civilians and that even these total wars can be legitimated in “just war” terms."