Political Realism And International Morality

Ethics In The Nuclear Age

Kenneth Kipnis, Diana T Meyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000307320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

It is always appropriate to ask whether an expedient foreign policy is morally justifiable, just as it is always appropriate to ask whether a morally defensible policy is consistent with the national interest. The ongoing dialogue between morality and realpolitik gives much of foreign policy debate its characteristic bite. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers, political theorists, and lawyers– including Russell Hardin and Marshall Cohen–explore these contrasting themes. In essays that are at once insightful and accessible, noted political thinkers examine the tension of the conflicting demands of morality and national self-interest in the context of the foundations of international order, the possession and use of nuclear weapons, recourse to war, and the prospects for peace. A final postscript addresses the question of the responsibility of intellectuals in the national foreign policy debate. This book will appeal to scholars and students in any discipline dealing with international affairs as well as to lay readers who wish to explore the implications of taking morality and reason seriously in foreign policy.

Part One
Morality and the International Order

Introduction to Part One

Diana T. Meyers

The chapters in this part address the question of how morality applies to international relations. Although the adage "All's fair in love and war" reflects the pervasiveness of the assumption that morality has no part in international affairs, these chapters argue that morality should control relations among states, and the authors debate the particulars of international morality. Marshall Cohen takes up the fundamental question of whether an ethics of international relations is intelligible and urges that it is. Russell Hardin, James Child, and Jefferson McMahan assume Cohen's conclusion and inquire into the form that an ethics of international relations should take. Hardin rejects an agent-centered, deontological international ethics in favor of a strategy-based, consequentialist approach. Child resurrects the individual point of view and contends that even in mass society individuals are responsible for seeing to it that their governments comply with moral requirements. McMahan considers international morality from the standpoint of nation-states and affirms that morality imposes limits on nation-states' intervention in one another's domestic affairs.

Marshall Cohen begins his chapter, "Moral Skepticism and International Relations," with a reminder that the history of international relations is one of such appalling greed, cruelty, and duplicity that some commentators have doubted that moral standards apply in this realm. Nevertheless, Cohen's aim is to assess the cogency of moral skepticism in regard to international relations, and he argues that foreign policy should be governed by moral constraints. Cohen examines two forms of moral skepticism:

1. Realist skepticism—the view that power is the controlling force in international relations and that promoting the national interest must be the overriding goal of national leaders in conducting foreign policy
2. Hobbesian skepticism—the view that independent states remain in a state of nature in which no moral law is binding and that each state is entitled to promote its national interest as best it can

He maintains that both positions are open to fatal objections.

Cohen diagnoses the problem in the realist view as a tendency to conflate morality with moralism—judging and acting on the basis of "utopian ideals and sentimental slogans"—coupled with a yearning for absolutism—judging and acting on the basis of a set of exceptionless moral rules. However, neither moralism nor absolutism is morality, and states often conform to morality properly construed. The trouble with the Hobbesian view is that moral constraints do not presuppose the existence of a coercive institution to enforce them and that the state's duty to protect its citizens cannot justify an unlimited right to pursue the national interest. On the basis of this critique, Cohen argues that the "primary obligation of the nuclear age is to abstain from the first nuclear strike and to adopt policies that . . . reduce the temptation to make such a strike."

Russell Hardin agrees that moral considerations do have a place in international relations. But whereas Cohen's project is to show that moral theory must inform public policy, Hardin's is to show how public policy issues affect moral theory. In "Deterrence and Moral Theory," Hardin maintains that "because nuclear weapons may bring about the most grievous outcome imaginable, they elevate concern with outcomes over concern with actions." He defends this shift toward teleology by pointing out the inadequacies of a series of deontological doctrines in the setting of the nuclear deterrence debate. Hardin contends that the institutional nature of deterrence (that is, retaliation must be virtually automatic for deterrence to work) must color all moral discussion of this policy.

On the basis of this view, Hardin argues that it is a mistake to frame the issue of deterrence in terms of individual responsibility for choice and action. Likewise, to understand policy alternatives in terms of outcomes as opposed to strategies is not to grasp the context in which decisions about nuclear policy are made. Hardin takes issue with the doctrine of the double effect—its distinction between letting something happen and causing it to happen is irrelevant when the outcome being contemplated is the destruction of a large part of humanity. He takes issue with just-war theory—its distinction between the justice of a state's reasons for going to war and the justice of a state's conduct in war collapses where a deterrence policy requires action in advance of the occasion for it, that is, arranging for a retaliatory strike before a first strike has occurred. Finally, he takes issue with intuitionism, which fails before the novelty and awesome power of nuclear weaponry.

James Child's chapter, "Political Responsibility and Noncombatant Liability," takes exception to Hardin's rejection of the individual point of view in contemporary discussions of defense policy. Invoking a series of legal concepts, Child holds that individual citizens in a democracy bear a considerably greater burden of responsibility for their government's conduct than is ordinarily thought.

Using a pair of hypothetical states—one the aggressor that cynically puts its citizens at risk and the other the defender that must decide whether it can risk the lives of its attacker's noncombatants in order to defend itself—Child asks whether citizens bear sufficient responsibility for their country's foreign policy to have any complaint if they are killed accidentally by the defending state when it is seeking to destroy military targets. Child varies political institutions and first considers a democratic aggressor state that holds a referendum in which the majority votes to wage war. In this case, the state evidently acts as the agent of the majority when it attacks; those who voted for the attack are responsible for the acts they authorized their agent to perform. Thus, they are not entitled to immunity from risk. But what of the citizens who voted against the attack? Just as a corporate officer is obligated to blow the whistle on the illegal or immoral plans of his or her corporation, so opponents of the war can claim no immunity unless they protest the war, for example, through civil disobedience or emigration. Furthermore, Child denies that an aggressive dictatorship would absolve its citizens from responsibility for its wars. Most dictatorships have come to power through the traditions and institutions of their people and with the passive acquiescence if not the active support of their people. Moreover, because the dictatorship claims to act as the agent of its citizens, citizens have an affirmative obligation to distance themselves from their leaders. Even in a dictatorship, noncombatants who are killed collaterally may have no complaint against those who have taken their lives.

The focus of Child's chapter is the way in which entrenched political power, if not legitimacy, can render its citizens responsible for its acts and vulnerable to retaliation. In other words, Child considers the moral consequences that political association imposes on individuals. In contrast, Jefferson McMahan explores the moral prerogatives of states and, specifically, the ways in which political establishments gain moral protection from intervention. "The Ethics of International Intervention" addresses a twofold problem in the morality of international relations— what is international intervention, and when is international intervention justified? Starting from the claim that international intervention involves "coercive external interference in the affairs of a population that is organized in the form of a state," McMahan goes on to consider various refinements of this definition that would be necessary in order to hold that such intervention is always wrong. He then points out that the U.N. position on this matter is that intervention against the state is always wrong, although intervention on behalf of the state can be permissible.

Several arguments have been advanced in support of the U.N. view, and McMahan critically examines each of them. The paternalistic argument regards states as analogous to persons and maintains that, like persons, states cannot be forced to do things for their own good. However, this argument would prevent intervention on behalf of an oppressed minority. The communal autonomy argument maintains that the inviolability of the state protects the collective self-determination of its citizens, provided that the state is a legitimate one. Although it is notoriously difficult to provide workable criteria of legitimacy, McMahan grants that there is a presumption against intervention when states are clearly legitimate but notes that, in this view, there may be an obligation to intervene when states are blatantly illegitimate. Nevertheless, intervention is rarely justified, for it may interfere with the evolution of a tradition of communal self-determination. A final argument against intervention is the stability argument. One version of this argument rejects intervention on the grounds that it instigates counterintervention and leads to war. A second version rejects intervention on the grounds that it undermines the world order, which rests on a plurality of sovereign states. But a principle allowing intervention could be qualified to prohibit intervention that threatened to escalate; history does not bear out the claim that intervention will destroy the system of sovereign states. In synthesizing the lessons of his inquiry, McMahan concludes that an overridable presumption against intervention protects legitimate states and that intervention can be justified only at the lowest effective level.

1
Moral Skepticism and International Relations

Marshall Cohen

To an alarming degree the history of international relations is a history of selfishness and brutality. It is a story in which spying, deceit, bribery, disloyalty, ingratitude, betrayal, exploitation, plunder, repression, subjection, and genocide are all too conspicuous. And it is a history that may well culminate in the moral catastrophe of nuclear war. This situation has elicited a number of very different reactions from those who discourse on international relations. For some the moral quality of international relations from the Athenians at Melos to the Soviets in Poland is so deplorable that they question whether moral standards in fact apply to the international realm. George Kennan remarks, for instance, that the conduct of nations is not "fit" for moral judgment.¹ This ambivalent way of putting the matter betrays a nostalgia for moral assessment while announcing a skepticism about its very possibility. Benedetto Croce is beyond ambivalence or nostalgia. This self-professed disciple of Machiavelli boldly proclaimed that in the realm of international politics lies are not lies, or murders murders.² Moral categories and judgments are simply out of place in the realm of international affairs. The first task of this chapter will be to examine this extreme form of moral skepticism about international relations, first in its realist, and then in its Hobbesian, form.

The realists argue that international relations must be viewed under the category of power and that the conduct of nations is, and should be, guided and judged exclusively by the amoral requirements of the national interest. Sometimes they argue, as writers since Spinoza have argued, that if a statesman fails to pursue the national interest (and submits to some other, perhaps ethical, standard) he acts improperly and violates his contract with those he represents.³ On this view, the only proper question to ask of him is whether his actions and policies advance the national interest and increase his nation's power. But the suggestion that the statesman has a moral obligation to do for his constituency whatever he has implicitly undertaken to do (on a contract, or as trustee or agent) is no better than the argument that the corporation president has an overriding obligation to sell thalidomide for the benefit of his shareholders, or that the Mafia hitman has an overriding obligation to kill for his employers.⁴ And, in any case, these are not the terms a responsible constituency can be understood to have exacted from those who conduct its affairs. Often a democratic people will wish its affairs to be conducted in a morally acceptable fashion and it is, in any case, entirely appropriate to judge both a nation's, and its statesmen's, conduct by pertinent moral standards. A more tempting argument for the realist view that international conduct is improperly guided or judged by moral standards supposes that actions which seem to be politically acceptable in the international realm appear to be condemned by morality, and that morality must, therefore, be irrelevant to the judgment of international conduct. I argue that this view of the realists is founded on an overly simple conception of the structure of morality, one that they share with the naive moralists who are the main object of their attack. Once a more complex account of morality is provided, the realist view that international relations can only be measured against political standards of power and the national interest loses its plausibility. The substance of that more complex morality is, I believe, nonutilitarian, and I employ it to provide a moral assessment of the realist doctrine of the balance of power.

Hobbesian skepticism about international relations also rests on an inadequate view of morality. But here the problem is less with the Hobbesian account of the structure of morality than with the Hobbesian view of the conditions under which morality applies. For, in Hobbes's view, issues of justice and injustice do not arise in the state of nature even as, in the view of Treitschke and Bosanquet, ethical issues do not arise in the absence of "community" or outside the realm of Hegelian Sittlichkeit.⁵ I argue, however, that ethical principles apply in the state of nature even as they apply in the absence of the common life that allegedly characterizes national communities. Besides, the actual situation of states is very different from that of individuals in the state of nature.

Realism and Power Politics

Realist writings display many serious misunderstandings of the nature of morality and, as I have suggested, these misunderstandings contribute to the realists' skepticism about the role of morality in international affairs. The post-World War II realists, for instance, often fail to distinguish between the moral and the "moralistic" or between the legal and the "legalistic." All too often the realists suggest that because "moralistic" or "legalistic" attitudes and policies are irrelevant, and even dangerous, in international affairs, morality and law are irrelevant and dangerous as well. This is, of course, a non sequitur. There is no reason why the genuine moralist cannot agree with the realist that "moralistic" politicians often claim to discern moral issues where doing so is inappropriate and self-defeating. The moralist may acknowledge, for instance, that the diplomatic recognition of a Communist regime does not imply moral approval and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Moral Principles and Moral Theory
• PART ONE Morality and the International Orde
• PART TWO The Ethics of Nuclear Deterrenc
• PART THREE Nationalism and the Prospects for Peac
• Contributors
• Index