Just a couple of lines to recommend a lecture on the question of proportionality in war by Professor Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University. It’s worth the full hour and twenty four minutes of your time but in case you need a couple of teasers to tempt you I’ll throw you these; he thinks that certain classes of Israeli and Palestinian civilians are not entitled to complain if they are harmed by enemy action and that the idea of proportionality in unjust wars makes no sense. I found the lecture here.
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Thanks for this great find; of course, he has also written a book on the subject:
http://books.google.com/books?id=emGM3EUlcAkC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Eamonn and Petra,
This was indeed a fascinating lecture and I also recommend McMahan’s Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2009). The importance of McMahan’s argument is that he demolishes the accepted idea of moral equality of combatants. This idea was well expressed by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars,(Basic Books, 4th edition, 2006)p.127:
I found McMahan’s analogy given in response to the question commencing at 51:48 to be compelling. He argues that a policeman has the right to use force against a murderer but the murderer has no right to defend themselves against the policeman.
I have long thought that Walzer’s split between jus ad bellum, the justice of war, from jus in bello, justice in war to be somewhat arbitrary. Walzer (on pages 127-8) gives a similar analogy to the one above about the policeman and the murderer but distinguishes war from such a domestic analogy because “there are rules of war, though there are no rules of robbery (or of rape of murder). The moral equality of the battlefield distinguishes combat from the domestic crime.”
Walzer seems to accept these “rules” as being morally valid. McMahan recognises the problem: if you have two sides fighting a war, both sides would argue that they are on the side of right and are fighting a just war. A difference in rules for the just side and unjust side becomes meaningless unless it can be clearly stated who is the just and who is the unjust side. Today, we have no body that can do this, hence the “rules” of war treat all combatants the same irrespective of whether or not they fighting a just war. As far as McMahan seems to be concerned, maybe one should be created.
I just watched the lecture by Professor Jeff McMahan on the morality of war and I must say that what it showed is the impossibility of coming up with such a theory that can also be applied to actual situations of warfare, be it the causes of war which are often multiple or the conduct of war which is often in dispute.
He had even trouble arguing that the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was an immoral act. That he believed that it was immoral or as he said that most Americans think it was justified doesn’t prove the morality or the immorality of the act.
I was also unimpressed by his view that the Israeli Palestinian conflict as he called it (it’s actually an Arab Israeli conflict) can be managed if everybody was a little “nicer” to the other side.
Still, it was worth watching if only because it tells us how serious students of just war theory (and more broadly the morality of war theory) think about these issues today. Thanks for posting it.
Jacob,
To be fair, McMahan only had a limited time in this lecture and he could not discuss all the issues in great detail. Regarding Hiroshima, for a moral argument against the use of the bomb, see G.E.M. Anscombe’s essay “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” available on line at http://www.anthonyflood.com/anscombetrumansdegree.htm
See also Michael Walzer’s argument in Just and Unjust Wars. The best moral argument I know in favour of the use of the bomb on Hiroshima is a chapter devoted to the morality of the use of the bomb in Robert Newman’s book, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (Michigan State University Press, 1995). For my own take on the matter of the Hiroshima decision (in favour), not that it is particularly important, you can read my blog post
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/05/10/the-atomic-bomb-and-hiroshima-the-%E2%80%9Cleast-abhorrent-choice%E2%80%9D/
“I found McMahan’s analogy given in response to the question commencing at 51:48 to be compelling. He argues that a policeman has the right to use force against a murderer but the murderer has no right to defend themselves against the policeman.” Michael Ezra
To me the view that murderers have no right to defend themselves against policeman problematic if for no other reason that it ignores both “human nature” and “natural law.” This would be especially true if the murder had good reasons to believe that he will be executed after a trial.
The law, as opposed to theory, does recognize human nature when it makes resisting arrest a crime, though how that impacts murder suspects is another matter.
Moral legal or war theory is one thing, the law the way it actually works, or the actual condition of warfare is something else.
Jacob,
I am not arguing that a murderer who is caught by the police and believes (with justification) that he will be executed for his crimes, will not fight to resist arrest. I concur that he may well do so, since what does he have to lose? The fact that he may well fight is different from whether he is morally right to do so. Those who believe that the death penalty is a crime in itself may well think so but this is not the argument I wish to discuss here. It might be better to consider a life sentence as opposed to the death penalty to reduce the morality of the issue to the question in hand.
It is generally accepted that a dangerous criminal loses rights. The mere fact that they are put in prison is evidence of the fact. By being detained in prison, the criminal has lost their right to freedom. I simply do not see how a suspected criminal, in a country such as the UK or the USA which have proper judicial systems and the right to a fair trial, should have the right, either legally or morally, to forcefully resist arrest. In the event that person is not guilty then they they may have some redress to compensation for the loss suffered for the wrongful arrest. Smashing the arresting police officer in the face with a brick does not seem morally justified.
In the event that the police officer has used unnecessary force to arrest the suspect, for example running him over in a car and breaking his legs, then the police officer may well be guilty of a crime themselves and should be arrested.
Michael, I agree very much with your HP post; obviously, the question what amount of force is justified is one that Israel had to face recently in Gaza, and there are people who argue it would have been better to go all the way and conclusively defeat/topple Hamas.
The questions raised McMahan and Walzer are doubtlessly issues you’ve thought much more about than I have — and you clearly know incomparably more about them that I do; my basic problem with all this is probably similar to what Jacob expresses: all these theories are very nice, but how do they translate to the reality of war? My sense is that Walzer’s ideas are largely obsolete, because most of the conflicts of the past few decades have been fought by armies/groups that couldn’t care less about whatever “just war” theories say. In this sense, McMahan’s approach is more “realistic” since his message is basically that everyday morality/ethics should also be the guideline in war.
Yet, it seem to me the issue you pick out illustrates the problem very well: who judges which combatant is the “murderer” and which is the “policeman”?
When I read what you wrote, I was reminded of something an Israeli soldier who had served in the recent Gaza campaign wrote shortly after the end of the war:
An Open Letter To A Citizen Of Gaza: I Am the Soldier Who Slept In Your Home
http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=689705&ct=6710711&printmode=1
– and I thought in particular of this passage:
“I can surmise that you are intelligent and educated and there are those in your household that are university students. Your children learn English, and you are connected to the Internet. You are not ignorant; you know what is going on around you.
Therefore, I am sure you know that Quassam rockets were launched from your neighborhood into Israeli towns and cities.
How could you see these weekly launches and not think that one day we would say “enough”?! Did you ever consider that it is perhaps wrong to launch rockets at innocent civilians trying to lead a normal life, much like you? How long did you think we would sit back without reacting?
I can hear you saying “it’s not me, it’s Hamas”. My intuition tells me you are not their most avid supporter. If you look closely at the sad reality in which your people live, and you do not try to deceive yourself or make excuses about “occupation”, you must certainly reach the conclusion that the Hamas is your real enemy.”
So here we have a real life case where the Israeli soldier is absolutely sure that morality was on his side — but do you really believe that we would find anybody in Gaza who would accept that?
And that is just talking of Gaza, not to mention the rest of the world…
“To be fair, McMahan only had a limited time in this lecture and he could not discuss all the issues in great detail.”
I am sure, Michael Ezra, that Professor McMahan could have offered a more sophisticated defense of his position. I was reacting though to what he said and not to what he could have said. It’s his conclusion that dropping the bomb was a war crime that interested me. I also reacted to the smug atmosphere of agreement I sense from the audience’s comments.
I tend to agree with you that:
“The potential loss of life was horrific. As Truman subsequently wrote to a correspondent, the use of the atomic bomb was “a means to end the war and save 250,000 men from being killed on our side, and that many on the Japanese side, plus twice that many being injured for life.” [16] Truman’s figures, frequently criticised as excessive, may have been underestimates. Former President Herbert Hoover had compiled a report predicting that the invasion would cost 500,000-1,000,000 lives.”
But this is precisely what the Professor rejected. He also assumed that Truman’s claims were false, as if anyone could know for sure what would have happened. To me it’s sufficient that the US administration came to the conclusion that many more lives would have been lost if the bomb hadn’t been used.
Everything else is rear view mirror stuff.
What I would like to see from moral war theorists is an answer to the question as old as Plato:
What do you do with an enemy who doesn’t accept your moral precepts? An enemy who believes that might makes right and doesn’t care about the death of civilians or non combatants?
In other words how do you fight a moral war against an enemy who believes in death and killing that loves death more than life as the some fascists did and as some Islamicists seem to?
This isn’t a theoretical question it is actual. I is what we are facing in Afghanistan and what Israel is facing with Hamas, with Hezbollah, both Iranian and Lebanese.
How does moral war theory address their beliefs?
Petra and Jacob,
Thank you for your comments. Just War Theory (JWT) is not new, it pre-dates Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan by some time. It has been considered for generations and important religious thinkers in the Jewish tradition ( for example Maimonides) and the Catholic tradition (for example St. Augustine and St. Thomas) have considered various aspects of this doctrine.
Consider a pretty standard example of an ethical dilemma:
Imagine ten innocent people are caught and an executioner is due to shoot to death all of them. You walk past and the executioner offers to spare nine of them if you kill one. Would you pick up the gun and shoot one?
You may think that it is better for you to kill one innocent since the effect of that is to save nine further innocents. But what do Jewish teachings say? Maimonides said: “Let the whole Jewish community perish but do not surrender one Jew to the murderers.” Catholics may look to St Paul who said that we should not “do evil that good may come of it.” I am not saying that you have to agree with Maimonides or St Paul but I just provide these comments to demonstrate that none of this is new.
I do not think it is fair to say that Walzer’s arguments are obsolete or that JWT does not matter. Just because there are those who do not act morally, it does not mean to say that nobody should act morally. Even if you have not studied JWT, I think it is fair to say that many people have some idea of what is morally right and what is morally wrong and the wholesale killing of innocents is more likely to fall into the latter category. As a result, I hope we can agree that the actions of Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001 was morally wrong. Based on this, you may think, as I do, that it justified a response and as the rulers of Afghanistan would not surrender Osama bin Laden, it was morally acceptable for George Bush to go to war with Afghanistan, i.e. it was a just war.
But within a just war there are limits of what we might think is morally acceptable even if we have not studied JWT. For example, would it have been morally acceptable for George Bush to press a button and launch a powerful nuclear missile on Afghanistan killing the whole population of the country? You may concur with me that that would have been a disproportionate and an immoral response. (You also may not agree with me on this point, but for the sake of argument let us assume you do.) This means that you would agree that it is morally right to go war with Afghanistan but wrong to launch a nuclear attack and hence there is some moral limit where you draw the line. Just War Theorists consider what that line is. They consider jus ad bellum, moral reasons for going to war in the first place and jus in bello, moral behaviour in war. Under no circumstances do I think that these concepts are obsolete.
As both of you have mentioned Israel, and you seem to have an interest in this subject, whilst it is slightly dated, I think it is worthwhile reading the following book:
William V. O’Brien, Law and Morality in Israel’s War With the PLO, (Routledge, 1991)
The book discusses at some length subjects such as the 1982 Lebanon War and the law of belligerent occupation in relation to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s actions are considered both from a legal aspect and from the theory of just war.
When it comes to the Hiroshima decision, as I have said, I concur with the decision, but that does not mean to say I do so easily. There is no doubt that the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki intentionally killed many tens of thousands of civilians. The reality is, as General Sherman put it, war is hell. But just because we may disagree with McMahan on the Hiroshima decision, it does not mean to say that we should disagree with him on everything. I actually feel his book, Killing in War, is essential reading and I urge you to do so.
Finally, I wish to address the point about fighting a moral war against an immoral enemy. We are taught as children, or at least I was, that two wrongs do not make a right. These are serious matters and Presidents and prime ministers who make such decisions have to consider their moral actions. A substantial area that troubles just war theorists is the idea of nuclear deterrence and the use of nuclear weapons. If, for example, in the Cold War, Russia had launched a nuclear attack on Pennsylvania killing millions of innocents, would it have been morally acceptable for America to launch a retaliatory missile on the city of Leningrad and also kill millions of innocents? It may be immoral to do so, but the threat that America might retaliate in such a manner may have prevented Russia launching a nuclear strike on an American city in the first place. Hence you may have to threaten to act in what you may consider an immoral fashion. (For a detailed discussion on this area, see John Finnis, Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, [Oxford University Press, 1987]).
Much of the argument surrounding Israel’s war in Gaza comes down to proportionality. Hamas may have sent thousands of rockets into Israel over the years, but away from the terror and the fear they created, how many people were actually killed by the rockets. You may consider that Israel’s action was proportionate and justified and I am not going to argue with you on the point, but what I am interested to know is if you think that there is a limit where you would not justify Israel’s actions if it crossed the line. To use a biblical analogy, if you think it would have morally wrong for the Israeli army to march into Gaza and kill the first born Arab child in every household, then you set a limit on what is morally acceptable in war. Thinking about these issues, may make you, like I have done, decide to read a number of books on the ethics of war. I hope it does.
Michael Ezra,
Thanks for the long post, it deserves some thought and a considered reply.
I don’t have the time right now but I will reply later on today or tomorrow.
Michaels Ezra I have read some books and papers on the morality of war including Michael Walzer though not Jeff McMahan.
I agree with you that various thinkers have been critiquing war for centuries:
Anti-war polemics have as long a history as its glorification. Thucydides in his Peloponnesian Wars described how shocked and outraged Greeks felt when a school room of children was massacred in that long and brutal conflict:
“The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked the houses and temples and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women. . . . Everywhere confusion reigned and death in all its shapes; and in particular they attacked a boys’ school . . . into which children had just gone, and massacred them all.”
Similarly it’s obvious that in the Hebrew bible the polemics of the “prophetic books” about eternal peace isn’t a critique of war in general and probably of the wars described earlier in the earlier narratives such as the book of Judges.
Tacitus’ “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace” is also an implicit critique if not of war at least of its excess. Hence since antiquity writers and thinkers have set limits on what is allowed in warfare: limits which were of course more often transgressed than not.
Still these writers took it for granted that war is a natural human activity. They never envisioned a time without war except in some future messianic time: a “kingdom of peace.” Even Plato in the Republic takes the presence of war between Republics for granted.
What is new about modern theories of war is that they assume that war itself is not necessary or natural and that by “criminalizing” we will be able to abolish it at some not to distant point in time.
This is how I interpret Jeff McMahan’s comparison between warfare between societies and criminal activity within a society.
If war itself is a crime then all parties involved in conflict are equally guilty of crimes. From this perspective there can be no difference between aggressor and defender.
The only distinction between combatants allowed is that between the perceived weaker and the stronger party. This I take it explains some of the obsessions with the Gaza war. Israel is perceived “a mini superpower” and “the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza as a weak and aggrieved party which is being oppressed by the Israelis.”
That some Jewish thinkers also share such a view isn’t surprising since many of them feel very uncomfortable with the exercise of autonomy were you have to defend yourself and can’t rely on others to defend you.
The Ghetto may have been a place where Jews didn’t make war, but neither did they have peace there.
I am therefore not impressed by the morality of Maimonides on this issue. It comes from a time when Jewish had t submit to Muslims (in his case) and to Christian overlords. Moreover Maimonides like his Christian counterparts believed in a God that would avenge all wrongs and bring about a messianic world hence their submission in the here and now would be rewarded later on.
From a socio-psychological point of view such beliefs in morality are a way of compensating for the powerlessness one experiences in the temporal world.
In addition such morality does not obviate the rule of might makes right but transfers it to God who is viewed as the ultimate power who will avenge all wrongs.
There is a similar view in Christianity expressed for example in story “Pilgrim’s Progress” when the protagonist Christian is said that God will avenge all that he suffered in this world by punishing the unbelievers.
Today’s antiwar moralists are or seem to be secular yet their view that war itself is an unnecessary activity shows a blatant disregard of political reality; while the view that is criminal by its very nature shows a confusion of social reality: the world is not a single society and there is no universal policeman yet.
Look at it this way, in the post world war world there have been many laws passed against genocide, and against war crimes yet there have been as many war crimes and more genocides committed than before the passage of such laws: Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, The Sudan, the Congo, Vietnam, Iraq under Saddam, (the gassing of the Kurdish villages) The Iran-Iraq war, to name only some of these horrid conflicts.
That such events can take place under the expansion of human rights and anti war organizations as well as the establishment of a universal court should tell us something. The head of the Sudan has been indicted yet most Muslim countries offer him protection and see the indictment as an attack on a Islamic country.
Finally, the main problem with anti war moral theory is that it confuses morality with politics. (Morality doesn’t trump politics in human affairs national or international and we need to own up to this unpleasant fact.) This is its main weakness and this is why rather than make war less likely the opposite is bound to happen.
Any way your question about whether there are limits to what Israel can do when fighting a war the answer is of course. However, we are not there yet, not by a long shot.
I have more to say, but for the sake of time and space I’ll stop here. If I left anything out let me know and I’ll try to address the other issues in your post.
Jacob,
Thank you for you response. You say the following:
I do not agree with this. Just War Theorists accept that there is such a thing as a Just War. As an example, I do not think that serious thinkers on this subject think that the decision of Britain to declare war on Germany in WWII was an unjust decision. What was unjust was Germany’s decision to invade Poland and that is before we even consider the Nazi party and their treatment of Jews.
Since they do not see war itself as a crime, your following statement does not hold either:
You go onto say the following:
Again this is not correct, traditional Just War Theory and the law of war makes no distinction at all between combatants. This is Michael Walzer’s position. He says (p.36)that the following is “expressed again and again in letters and war memoirs.”:
What McMahan does is refute this argument of moral equality of combatants, but he does not differentiate, as you imply, “between the perceived weaker and the stronger party.” His differentiation is between the just and unjust side in the conflict. (He also accepts there are instances where both sides may be unjust).
You may well not be impressed by Maimonides, but let us be honest about this, are people (especially Jews) going to pay more attention to Michael Ezra, to Jacob A or to Maimonides? To a number of people,the bible gives them their moral guidance and this is no less true for Jews who pay attention to Halakah.
Tradition is a journal of Jewish religious thought. In the introduction to Tradition, Vol 39, No. 4, 2006 Marc Stern, the Assistant Executive Director and General Counsel of the American Jewish Congress, says the following (p.7):
The editor utilised the whole of that edition of Tradition to halakhic and moral decision making in war. Soldiers, even Israeli soldiers, have to make moral decisions regularly. Michael Walzer noted this when he quoted (p.304) an Israeli officer from the Six Day War as saying:
But perhaps you agree with Richard Bishop a specialist in military law and law professor at Yale University Law School who said, (Commentary, December 1972) when discussing war crimes:
Applying this dictum, maybe your opinion is as valid as Maimonides, but even if it is so, I am not sure it helps. An army in a moral country does tend to have a moral code of the rules of war, and soldiers can suffer a court-martial for breaching the rules of engagement. These rules tend to have a moral and legal basis to them and someone or some committee/body has to come up with this code. Therefore, the view of those that draw up the code count for more weight than mine or yours.
In response to my question about the limits of war for the Israeli army, you say the following:
I do not think that this answer is sufficient. Someone has to give guidance to the 18 year old conscript into the Israeli army who is thrown into battle. When can he kill civilians? When can he not kill civilians? Is he allowed to torture a suspected terrorist that he has caught? If he can torture them, what form of torture is allowed? Can he kill the suspected terrorist’s family? Can he bulldoze down the house of his family? Can he fire white phosphorus shells in populated areas? Etc., Etc., Etc. Even the Israeli army turn to philosophers for assistance in this area:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1117736.html
Finally, I want to say that is simply not true (and I am not saying that you are arguing that it is true) that all moralists who discuss war are anti-war. In fact, I think the following essay by David Mellow is a very worthwhile read: “Iraq: A Morally Justified Resort to War,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2006. The title alone makes clear the author’s conclusion.
Michael Ezra, I doubt that we will agree on this topic so I will be brief.
You seem to be very upset that I, a non specialist, should be questioning the validity of just war theoretics. Well, such is life, Michael. The specialist proposes and the layman or laywoman disposes.
Aside from trying to show me wrong by bringing up some counter examples, you haven’t said anything about just war theory to change my mind on the subject.
As to the examples you brought up, I will address only one:
You say: “Just War Theorists accept that there is such a thing as a Just War. As an example, I do not think that serious thinkers on this subject think that the decision of Britain to declare war on Germany in WWII was an unjust decision.”
By serious thinkers of course you mean people who agree with you. In any case, while I think there are just wars and not just WW2, there are also “serious” people who have been writing about WW2 also being an unjust war. Needless to say I think these folk are out to lunch, but they are there.
Take as an example the writer Nicholson Baker who wrote “Human Smoke” which to quote a an npr website controversially cast Churchill and FDR as World War II aggressors. While I can’t prove this I suspect that ten years prior such a book would never have been printed by a reputable publisher and certainly not reviewed by such publications as the NY Times. Yes, most reviewers disliked the book but still they reviewed it and the author has become celebrated. He was just interviewed by WBUR’s “On Point.”
Baker, btw, seems to think that there was no difference between antisemitism in the US and in Nazi Germany which is an outrageous thesis.
In any case, I also believe that the theoretics about just war has also contributed to such a book being taken seriously.
Then there is the writing of Chris Hedges who has written about the immorality of war in general to great acclaim.
One final example, you might find the paper called:
“NON-CULPABLE IGNORANCE AND JUST WAR THEORY” by Jovan Babic interesting in this respect:
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:lIHoKk94HOgJ:www.komunikacija.org.rs/komunikacija/casopisi/fid/XXXIV/04/download_gb+NON-CULPABLE+IGNORANCE+AND+JUST+WAR+THEORY&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AFQjCNGnpWhPsihjBkguHxpYrAQwGpKdkQ
Finally the matter of Maimonides:
You say:
“You may well not be impressed by Maimonides, but let us be honest about this, are people (especially Jews) going to pay more attention to Michael Ezra, to Jacob A or to Maimonides?”
You are being too modest, here. No one should be paying attention to me. I also don’t expect just war theorist to pay any attention to my views. I suspect that your own views are being discussed within this scholarly community.
I also understand that Maimonides was a great philosopher and also a great Jewish religious thinker. But that doesn’t mean that his views taken singly can’t be criticized.
His view quoted by you that:
“Maimonides said: “Let the whole Jewish community perish but do not surrender one Jew to the murderers.””
is fantastical to me. Why is it more moral to destroy a whole community for the sake of one individual?
Just peace theory if there were such a thing would condemn such thinking.
Moreover, why is there no option of fighting back?
I find this, as I do Kant’s “categorical imperative” a bit sado-masochistic. It doesn’t matter how serious these thinkers are taken or how innovative they were in other areas of philosophy and religion.
As to you point about the Gaza war and how to deal with its excesses:
“Someone has to give guidance to the 18 year old conscript into the Israeli army who is thrown into battle. When can he kill civilians? When can he not kill civilians?
Well, no, the worse thing that could happen to any army is to have a cadre of partisan ideologues telling people how to think about what they are doing.
You tell the 18 year old or the 35 year old that their mission is to win the war; to fight hard and defeat the soldiers of the enemy force; to avoid civilian casualties whenever and wherever possible; to never to target them deliberately.
However, by its very nature war is a confused field of operation and mistakes will occur and not all the good intentions and just war theory in the world will keep an army from killing its own soldiers by mistake and for soldiers form killing civilians by mistake.
The lecture hall and classroom is a very different place from the war room.
I hope you don’t take umbrage, but I don’t think it will be useful to continue this discussion since we have radically different views of the nature of war and the place of just war theory within it.
Did anyone notice that McMahan thinks that there is at least a good argument to be made for the morality of killing Israeli settlers? Frankly, although I find many of McMahan’s ideas interesting and insightful, I find it difficult to take a philosopher of ethics very seriously if, for all his philosophy, he winds up taking immoral positions on important questions. If I remember correctly, the only important concrete questions on which McMahan takes a position are on the killing of Israeli citizens in general (where he takes the correct, albeit fairly conventional position that killing them is wrong), on the killing of settlers, and on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe that it would have been profoundly and fairly obviously immoral *not* to have carried out the atomic bombings so, at least from my point of view, McMahan is getting it wrong two times out of three.
Now, in both these cases, my disagreement with him may be based on different assessments of the facts rather than a matter of principle. With respect to the bombings, he seems to think that it would have been possible to force Japan to some kind of acceptable surrender without either an invasion or the atomic bombings and that the decision makers in this case knew or should have known this. I think that this position is ridiculous, based both on the general character of Japanese fascism and militarism and on the specific situation that the US faced at the time. With respect to settlers, McMahan’s claim that “most of them carry arms”, a claim that I find highly unlikely, suggests to me that he has no real acquaintance with the complexities of the situation and is subscribing to a stereotype of the settlers that is common in left-wing and academic circles.
In either case, McMahan’s failure to make a reasonable assessment of the actual situation suggests that he really is living in an ivory tower and that makes me much less inclined to take him serioursly.
Jacob,
Thank you for your response. I do not have any problem with the fact that you are no fan of the Just War theory. In fact, I think there are some good reasons to be critical of it, not least the idea of equal morality of combatants that Jeff McMahan has demonstrably shown.
I would say that blaming moral philosophers in the Just War field for being responsible for the taking of Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke” seriously, is perhaps taking things a little too far!
I am not saying that Maimonides cannot be criticised; in my earlier contribution, I specifically stated, “I am not saying that you have to agree with Maimonides…” All I am saying is that it is Maimonides view is an important one that people do take seriously. The idea of not surrendering a single Jew to murderers and Maimonides opinion, in their dire situation, became something that was discussed by Judenrat leaders in the Holocaust when they were being forced to hand over lists of names of Jews for “deportation.” Indeed, this opinion of Maimonides was even quoted by Judge Benjamin Halevey in the Kasztner Trial, one of the most famous court cases in the history of the State of Israel.
As a side note, this opinion of Maimonides does not mean one cannot fight back, the opinion is purely about surrendering Jews. You may think that the opinion is “fantastical” but when it comes to opinions or facts on Jewish morals or law, some people think that rules about not turning on a light switch on Sabbath is ridiculous, but for those who take such matters seriously, it is important.
Whilst you have been attacking Just War Theorists, you have already come up with a moral opinion yourself (incidentally, one that is in line with Just War Theory and the law of war) that soldiers should “avoid civilian casualties whenever and wherever possible; to never target them deliberately.” But you have not elaborated further than that. If the intentional killing of civilians may make a soldier liable to tried and found guilty of war crimes, then in what circumstances can he kill civilians? If soldiers know this in advance then it may make decisions on a battle field much easier.
Soldiers are taught to obey orders but what if they are given an illegal order? They must be taught what is right and what is wrong and it does not just involve “killing civilians” since, for example, prisoners of war,captured enemy soldiers and their treatment must also be considered. They are not civilians but the Geneva Convention has numerous clauses about prisoners of war. What is known as the Nuremberg Defence: “I was only obeying orders,” is not recognised as a defence to war crimes.
Whilst I am not disputing that mistakes get made on the battlefield and under no circumstances do I think that a lecture room is where soldiers can learn all they need to know about war, soldiers still need some guidance and moral values.
As I have said earlier, Just War Theorists try and consider possibilities that may come up, for example nuclear war. So far, these discussions have remained in books, lecture rooms and discussed my military strategic leaders and others. I hope we can agree that it stays that way.
I thank you for this exchange.
DavidS
“Did anyone notice that McMahan thinks that there is at least a good argument to be made for the morality of killing Israeli settlers?”
He did say that, however, since he also said that Gazan civilians who support Hamas had no case for complaining about “civilian casualties” I took his comment as an attempt to balance his views and not to seem too pro Isralei.
He also stated that not killing of settlers might be allowed but their children and I assume women and old people.
Still, like David I found his comments a bit too much off the cuff. It didn’t seem to me that he really thought about it too closely.
What I also find strange was that one of the questioners assumed that killing Israeli civilians may be ok because all Israelis serve in the military.
Professor McMahan disagreed but I had the feeling that the audience was pro Palestinian and that the Professor was trying to placate them by including Israeli settlers who carry guns in his list of allowable targets.
The speech showed me how difficult it is to divorce moral war theory from politics.
Michael, in case you still come back to this thread: this is just to say that it was great to have your obviously very knowledgable perspective here; I meant to come back to this debate, but was side-tracked the past 2 days.
At this point, I just wanted to note that I of course followed the debate about Kasher/Yadlin’s views in the wake of the Gaza campaign, as you probably also did — there was also a related post here:
http://blog.z-word.com/2009/04/a-partial-defence-of-kasher-and-yadlin/
– with some interesting exchanges.
It won’t surprise you if I say that in this debate, it was the Kasher/Yadlin arguments that I found convincing, not least perhaps because from an Israeli perspective, it’s easy to see that they are trying to solve real dilemmas and address real situations, as opposed to ivory-tower musings which e.g. Walzer’s writings on the subject often seem to be from my pov.
Corrected post. I am sorry about all the errors in the previous version.
DavidS: “Did anyone notice that McMahan thinks that there is at least a good argument to be made for the morality of killing Israeli settlers?”
He also said that Gazan civilians who support Hamas had no case for complaining about “civilian casualties” I took his comment as an attempt to balance his views and not to seem too pro Israeli.
He also stated that killing of settlers might be allowed but not their children and I assume women and old people.
Still, like David I found his comments a bit too much off the cuff. It didn’t seem to me that he really thought about it very closely.
What I also find strange was that one of the questioners assumed that killing Israeli civilians may be ok because all Israelis serve in the military.
Professor McMahan disagreed but I had the feeling that the audience was pro Palestinian and that the Professor was trying to placate them by including Israeli settlers who carry guns in his list of allowable targets.
The speech showed me how difficult it is to divorce moral war theory from politics.
Michael Ezra, I almost missed your response. I noticed a marked difference in tone in this last post for which I am grateful.
Since I don’t intend to get involved in any more far reaching discussions about just war theory I will only answer a couple of points you made here:
First, your comment about the way Maimonides’ views were used during the Holocaust is new to me and I thank you for the information.
Second, comparing discussions about turning on a light switch on Saturday to discussions about surrendering Jews to an enemy is illogical and is guilty of the logical fallacy of faulty comparison. (I am not frum (religious) but I see no harm being done to anyone if someone refrains from turning on a light switch.)
“Whilst you have been attacking Just War Theorists, you have already come up with a moral opinion yourself (incidentally, one that is in line with Just War Theory and the law of war) that soldiers should “avoid civilian casualties whenever and wherever possible; to never target them deliberately.” But you have not elaborated further than that. If the intentional killing of civilians may make a soldier liable to tried and found guilty of war crimes, then in what circumstances can he kill civilians? If soldiers know this in advance then it may make decisions on a battle field much easier.”
I deliberately refrained from “elaborating further” because as a former GI (Vietnam War era) I do know that soldiers are told not to follow illegal orders. This was before international courts charged with examining war crimes. We didn’t need these courts to tell us that it is wrong to kill civilians.
Btw: did just war theory lead to instituting of these courts, and are these courts totally divorced from politics? These are genuine questions as I don’t know the answer.
“Soldiers are taught to obey orders but what if they are given an illegal order? They must be taught what is right and what is wrong and it does not just involve “killing civilians” since, for example, prisoners of war,captured enemy soldiers and their treatment must also be considered. They are not civilians but the Geneva Convention has numerous clauses about prisoners of war. What is known as the Nuremberg Defence: “I was only obeying orders,” is not recognised as a defence to war crimes.”
True enough, but ironically, the Nuremberg defense was pretty hypocritical as Goldhagen has shown in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” Many Germans officers and soldiers exceeded orders when it came to killing Jews. They didn’t just follow orders and when they were at a certain point told not to kill they kept on killing anyway. The notion that most German Nazi soldiers killed Jews because they were “following orders” seems not to have been the case.
Anyway, I have my doubts that teaching morality to soldiers on the battle field will significantly change behavior since it seems to me that most soldiers act according to moral principles they grew up with and learned at home, school, and their community.
@DavidS,
McMahan discusses the killing of Israeli settlers in the West Bank on pages 222-224 of Killing in War. If you click on the link below, and then click on the further link “page” you should be at p.222 and you will be able to read the full discussion:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HJzzX-cMJr4C&pg=PP1&dq=mcmahan+killing+in+war#v=onepage&q=entirely%20counterintuitive&f=false
I bring to your attention his concluding sentence on the matter:
@Petra,
Thanks for your response and for bringing to my attention the earlier debate on this blog on Kasher & Yadlin. It is a shame I missed that debate - although, in case you had not noticed - it is still continuing in the New York Review of Books. There have been a number of subsequent exchanges in that journal since that post and I detail them below in the event that you (or anyone else) is interested and missed them:
June 11, 2009
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22761
August 13, 2009
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22979
September 24, 2009
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23091
October 8, 2009
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23143
In my opinion, the really interesting paper by Kasher & Yadlin is not the one in SAIS Review referred to in the the blog entry that you linked to but the following one:
Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin, “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” Journal of Military Ethics, Vol 4 No.1, 2005 pp.3-32
In fact, much of that journal issue is devoted to discussing that paper. As they say in response to the comments on the article, their own idea may be the major elements of something that could be called, “The Doctrine of Just War of Fighting Terror.”
I would say that the writings of Walzer and McMahan should not simply be dismissed as “ivory-tower musings.” In the acknowledgements to Killing in War, McMahan says:
He names a number of these people and credits them:
I think the importance is that whether it is in Israel, the United States or the United Kingdom, philosophers are doing their bit to assist soldiers in moral dilemmas they may come up across in the course of their duty. By upholding a moral standard, soldiers may not just fight well, but also set an example to others. It would be a terrible shame if an army had no morals and actions such as those notoriously committed by Second Lieutenant William Calley became common place.
Jacob,
Thank you for you response and I am pleased to see we are all friends again.
Regarding the comment about turning on a light switch on the Sabbath, I used that example on purpose. The point I was trying to make was that if someone is religious they will try and follow religious law and morals irrespective and I see nothing really wrong with that, or at least not from the Jewish and Christian traditions. You state, in comparison to Maimonides opinion:
The implication of your point is that there is harm being done if someone follows Maimonides. Let us recall Maimonides point that I quoted earlier: “Let the whole Jewish community perish but do not surrender one Jew to the murderers.” This is an extreme thing that he is saying but put simply it could be interpreted as an argument that there are no circumstances when someone should hand over an innocent Jew to a murderer. Now, you do not have to agree with this, but the point is, if someone was religious and they were told to hand over an innocent person to be murdered they simply may not do it irrespective of the consequences. One does not need to be religious to know that killing of innocents is wrong. I pass absolutely no moral judgement on them one way or the other since I have no idea what it must have actually been like to have been a Judenrat leader, but we know that some committed suicide rather than hand over innocents to be murdered, that is how strongly they felt about the point.
Michael Walzer took the trouble to think about this prohibition of killing innocents and he wondered whether there could be exceptions where it is morally acceptable. As a base, he used a phrase from Winston Churchill, there could be a “supreme emergency” where the killing of innocents (or more precisely non-combatants) is allowed. A supreme emergency would exist if you have risk to your own life. He takes the example of British cities being bombed by the German air force early in WWII. At that point, if Churchill felt there was a fear that Britain would have been overrun by Nazis and the only way to stop it was to bomb German cities which would involve innocent civilians being deliberately targeted, this is an example of a Supreme Emergency where such an action would be morally acceptable. Contrary to this, and somehow I do not think you will like his argument, he considers the bombing of Dresden by the British air force in 1945. He argues that by this point in time, Britain was not at risk of being overrun by Nazis, therefore there was no Supreme Emergency and thus the bombing of Dresden was not morally acceptable.
You ask the following:
I actually do not know the answer, but I think it is fair to say that whoever drew up the Geneva Convention had some grounding in the morals and ethics in war that Just War Theorists and other moral ethicists discuss. Law does not tend to come out of nowhere. As I commented earlier, the Israeli army have used philosophers to assist in drafting their army code and I would be surprised if the US or British army were any different.
I wish to comment on your point:
I am not sure your logic follows here. I doubt that many people who are taught morals at home, (unless they come from a military family) get a lecture from mummy and daddy about how to treat enemy captured soldiers and whether enemy spies can be treated differently to enemy soldiers in uniform. If however the 17 year old who joined the army can learn morals from school at the age of say 16 why can they not also learn from someone who teaches them in the army at 17? Moreover, if they are learning morals from “their community” and if they are, for example in a Jewish community, then maybe it is things like Maimonides opinions that they have learnt! We can also note that there are a number of cases, as I am sure you are aware, where people who sign up for the army do so in part to get away from their family and environment as they have not been fortunate in that regard. The army can do a great job with some young men who come from families where the father is in jail, the mother is addicted to drugs and many of their friends are in gangs. For these people,the morals they learn in the army maybe the best morals they ever learn.
I don’t know if anyone is still reading this thread, but the NY Times published one of the sanest comments on war and human rights I have seen in a long time:
“Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast”
By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN
“AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.
That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.
When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.
Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide….”
Read the rest here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print