Killing in War

"That’s right, both books address the following perennial question: on the plausible assumption that it’s prima facie wrong to kill another human being—that what we have to justify is the act of killing rather than the decision not to kill—under what conditions, and why, is killing ever justified? War, of course, is the paradigmatic social phenomenon where killing takes place on a very large scale. That moral question is a very ancient question: we find it addressed in the Bible, in some of the most ancient Chinese writings, in the Qur’an, we find it in Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas, in fact throughout the history of moral and political thought. Just war theories, in a nutshell, claim that we are justified in going to war only if we meet a certain number of conditions. We have to have a just cause for going to war, the war must be proportionate, that is to say the harms it brings about must not outweigh the good that it causes, it must be the option of last resort, and we must not deliberately target innocent civilians or non-combatants (the two are not co-extensive categories). Both Walzer and McMahan address that last point. Walzer takes the view that we may not, except under conditions of supreme emergency, deliberately target civilians. We may, however, target enemy soldiers, and we may do so in our own defence even if, in so acting, we further an unjust cause, for example a war of unjust aggression. Now, McMahan very strongly disagrees with that. He is at the forefront of a movement which is sometimes called revisionism, about war—or the neo-classical understanding of war—a movement which says that whether soldiers are permitted to kill other soldiers partly depends on whether they are killing in pursuit of a just or unjust cause. If we go back to the example I gave earlier of Germany’s invasion of Poland, according to McMahan and the other revisionists, of whom I am one, precisely because ex hypothesi the German soldier kills a Polish soldier in defence of an unjust cause, that German soldier is not morally permitted to kill the Polish soldier, even when the Polish soldier starts shooting at him. What he must do is surrender. A lot of people will take that view. There are several responses to this. One response consists of saying that if you have the option of surrendering then that’s what you should do. If you don’t have the option of surrendering—if the choice is between allowing yourself to die on the one hand, and killing someone whom we may well agree you ought not to kill because he’s acting in rightful defence on the other hand—then you ought to allow yourself to die. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There are two contexts in which we might be prepared to hold that view. The first is a context of violence outside the context of war. Imagine a bank robbery, and the robber is armed. Now, suppose that as he starts shooting, the police turn up and start shooting at him. At this particular point, his life is under threat. He has two options. Suppose that things have got to the point where if he does show he wants to surrender, he’s not going to be believed. He has two options. He can either protect his life by killing the police officer who’s shooting at him, and that will give him enough time to make his escape; or he can not shoot back, knowing that he will die. A lot of people would say that in this particular case, he ought not to kill the police officer. Now, my question, and the question that McMahan asks as well, is this: what’s the difference between this particular case, and the case of soldiers? The norms that govern the use of violence in war are not sui generis to war: they are the same as the norms that govern the use of violence outside war. The second scenario where we might want to say, as you do, that we can’t expect someone whose life is under threat not to shoot back, is actually a case drawn from war. That’s the case where a soldier starts shooting at initially defenceless, unarmed civilians. We all agree that he may not do that: in law it’s a war crime, it’s as simple as that. Now, suppose that one of those civilians finds a gun, and starts shooting back. Take, for example, the case of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Do we really want to say that the Nazi SS soldiers who were defending their lives from the leaders, the fighters of the uprising, were entitled to shoot back? I would say no, they were not. This is a case where initially defenceless civilians suddenly find themselves in a position to defend their lives. Why is it that at this particular point, their tormenters, their attackers, are entitled to give priority to their own life? I don’t think they are. Yes, but again I think there are many contexts in which we would not hold that to be true. Imagine a woman who is being raped: she starts defending herself and it becomes clear that she will manage to kill her rapist unless he kills her. It’s not clear, to me, that he’s morally entitled to kill her in this particular case. A choice has to be made about who is going to bear the cost of dying. Why should the person who is completely innocent of wrongdoing, up until the point at which that choice has to be made, be the one to bear the cost of dying? You might say there is a sense in which we can excuse the wrongdoer who so acts, but to say that you have an excuse for so acting is not the same as to say that you are justified in so acting. The real life example of this is a Croat, Dražen Erdemović, who entered the fighting with the Bosnian Serbs, in Bosnia. He actually handed himself over to the prosecuting authorities for his part in a massacre in which hundreds of civilians died. He was put on trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia . His defence was duress: he argued that his commanding officer had told him that unless he shot at those defenceless civilians, he would be killed alongside them. Now the court, very interestingly, did not dispute the fact; the court agreed that he had been put under such duress. But it also argued, that this, at best, provided him with an excuse for acting as he did, but not with a justification for doing so. The duress defence served to mitigate his sentence, but he did still have to serve a sentence. That, I think, is how we should construe those cases. There are many subtle moves in the argument on this particular point, but that, in effect, is how I understand Jeff McMahan’s position. There are another two things he says which have been very important and influential. One has to do with non-combatants. It follows, from his account, that non-combatants are not always as immune from being killed as tradition has tended to think. If what makes you liable to being killed is the contribution that you make to an unjust war, then, insofar as, as a non-combatant, you too might end up making a significant contribution to the war, then you are liable to being killed. The easiest example to illustrate this is of the civilian leader who orders the army into war. But there are other examples, such as the case of the industrialists in Nazi Germany—I. G. Farben being the clearest example, Krupp being another—whose leaders were put on trial for participation in the crimes of aggression and genocide. There are other very, very tricky cases. What about the journalist who incites racial hatred? I would say that the journalists from Libre des Mille Collines in Rwanda, who broadcast heinous messages of hatred towards the Tutsis, likening them to cockroaches who had to be killed, were legitimate targets. Then you have to start thinking about the case of citizens who vote in favour of the war, and who pay for it. That’s where it becomes very, very difficult. McMahan is very wary of group liability, as I am. In my case it’s connected with cosmopolitanism: it’s the view that every single human being matters, irrespective of group membership, so by implication, group liability is worrisome because it makes you vulnerable to burdens, liable to burdens, just by virtue of your membership in a particular group, and not by virtue of what you actually did. It’s a great book because it’s not very long but it manages to deploy a very powerful thesis. It rejects the thesis that soldiers are morally on a par by putting forward its own account of when soldiers, and indeed non-soldiers, may permissibly kill in war. It does so with extraordinary clarity and analytical rigor. In the course of defending that view, it makes interesting points about non-combatants. It’s also full of insights that just war theorists are still mulling over, for example to do with various conceptions of proportionality in war. It is also unflinchingly honest. To say, as he does, that there are non-combatants whom traditionally we think should not be killed, but in fact may be killed, is a very brave thing to do. In fact, he has come under fairly sustained attack for saying this. I admire philosophers who are willing to go, with relentless scrutiny, where their argument will take them, and who don’t want to evade the most controversial implications of their argument by fudging the issue. That’s why I think it’s a great book. You can only do that incrementally by—when the opportunity presents itself—really pushing people to articulate how far they are willing to go with this. One of my favourite strategies when I teach that material is to present students with William Godwin’s very famous burning building example. In Godwin’s case you have to choose between rescuing the chambermaid on the one hand, and Archbishop Fénelon on the other. I describe to my students a variation on the case: you have a choice between saving your compatriot on the one hand, and a distant stranger on the other hand. Everything else is equal: they are the same age, you don’t know either of them personally. It’s interesting that people who, until you present them with this very stark choice, would say exactly this, that we have nationalistic urges, and so on. At that particular point, far fewer people than you might think will say that they are morally entitled to save their compatriot, just purely on the basis that he’s (or she’s) a compatriot. When you push people, those affiliations are, perhaps, less deeply entrenched than we might think. Admittedly, I’m in an optimistic mood today, if you had caught me on another day I might have said, much more pessimistically, that we can only hope that, bit by bit, people will somehow get convinced of the truth of cosmopolitanism, but that really it’s a vain hope. I sometimes think it is a vain hope. Look at the responses to the refugee crisis. Today, in my optimistic mood, I’ll say there are signs that criteria for exclusion are no longer adhered to as strongly as they would have been before. As a cosmopolitan, as a humanist, I welcome that."