From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality

Kevin Carnahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351999441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For the last several decades, the Just-War debate amongst theologians has been dominated by two accounts of moral rationality. One side assumes a presumption against harm (PAH), and the other identifies with a presumption against injustice (PAI). From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality argues that the time has come to leave behind these two viewpoints in favour of a prudentially grounded approach to Just-War thinking.

In Parts 1 and 2 of the book, Kevin Carnahan offers immanent critiques of the PAI and PAH positions. In Part 3, utilising Paul's treatment of the atonement and use of the idea of the imitation of Christ, he lays out an alternative to the ways in which theologians in favour of the PAI or PAH have construed the Christian narrative. In Part 4, Carnahan then develops a neo-Aristotelian account of prudence as a higher order virtue governing the interpretation of moral reality. Drawing on this account, he explores what Just-War rationality would look like if it were prudentially grounded. The work concludes with a case study on noncombatancy in the 2011 Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

This book offers a compelling new perspective on this important and pertinent subject. As such, academics and students in Religion, Theology, Philosophy, Ethics and Political Theory will all find it an invaluable resource on Just-War theory.

Part 1

The limits of moral clarity

Against the PAI

1 Introduction

In the mid-1960s, Paul Ramsey turned his considerable intellect to thinking through the conflict in Vietnam. Here, he judged, he had much to contribute. Arguments about the war were becoming ever less civil, and ever less thoughtful. Reductive consequentialist, lesser-evil, and aggressor-defender models of war threatened to collapse American wartime morality into overly simplistic questions about how many would be killed in the process of fighting. America’s legitimate authorities were besieged by irresponsible critics who had stepped out of their proper social roles as moralists and subjects.

In order to cool divisive arguments about the war, Ramsey argued for a careful distinction amongst the roles of persons in society. People functioning as moralists or theologians, he argued, were properly limited to laying out the principles of moral thought, and should not usurp the role of magistrates who were responsible for military and political policy. People functioning as citizens were to recognize a presumption in favor of the judgments of legitimate authorities.

For his own part, Ramsey claimed to restrain himself to the role of the moralist in his own discourse on the war. What was most important for the moralist, he discerned, was to reclaim an image of the good war that challenged those who had reduced moral thought about war to calculations of lesser evil. Ramsey’s position was a manifestation of the PAI theory (on theory, see Introduction, 2.1–2.3).¹ Wars take their moral character from the causes that they serve, and the conflict in Vietnam, it seemed to Ramsey, was fought for a very good end, and against a grave injustice. The United States, as a force for justice and order in the world, had the obligation to spread justice as far as possible. Communism was an implacable evil. Thus, there was a just cause for war in Vietnam.

Ramsey further argued that administration critics could produce no viable prudential argument against military action in Vietnam. Prudential calculations, Ramsey explained, are too uncertain to produce a strong argument, and not proper subjects for moral judgments. Ramsey never seemed to note that, despite his claims to have placed the moralist above the fray of debate, his arguments when put together amount to an apparently ironclad case for intervention in Vietnam. If deontological criteria established the just cause of the war, and there can be no viable moral argument from prudential criteria against the war, there ought to be no public debate at all.²

Four decades later, George Weigel and James Turner Johnson, two later exponents of the PAI theory, found themselves in what they perceived to be a very similar situation as America pondered and deployed force in Iraq in 2003. Johnson critiqued those who overstepped the bounds of moral analysis and their roles as moralists by offering predictions of a “worst case scenario in which the use of force against Iraq would cause regional instability, have a severe impact on the Iraqi population, escalate into a wider conflict, violate the immunity of noncombatants, and have other unpredictable bad consequences.”³ The prudential just-war criteria, Johnson constantly reminded, are recent additions to just-war thought, secondary to the deontological criteria, and properly deployed by sovereign authorities. Weigel fought against the crypto-pacifism of critics of the invasion by reminding them of the “charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service.”⁴ This divine gift is reserved for public officials and not accessible to moralists or theological critics of political policy. At the same time, Weigel and Johnson argued that the war in Iraq was waged for the good ends of spreading justice, order, security, and democracy and for the cause of punishing the evil of the illegal and tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein.⁵

Notably, in the aftermath of the conflicts that they were treating, all of the above scholars admitted that their moral analysis at the time of the conflict had been flawed. In 1981, after the Vietnam War, Ramsey would “freely grant that, earlier than I, Reinhold Niebuhr was wiser than I” in opposing the conflict in Vietnam.⁶ In the end, Ramsey allowed himself the judgment he had so long denied to others: “the Vietnam war was disproportionate and therefore morally unjustified.”⁷ Weigel and Johnson have been more qualified in their self-criticism, but have also confessed to significant errors. We should feel, Weigel writes, “the sense of responsibility to be borne by the U.S. and its coalition partners: we were in charge, and it seems that we had failed to think through, prior to the invasion, the worst-case scenarios, several of which were to unfold with savage rapidity.”⁸ Johnson laments that “the subject of exactly how [the end of a just peace] would be accomplished within a society that had been systematically ravaged and demoralized for an entire generation did not enter into the debate” prior to the war. “I must,” he writes “add myself to the list of those at fault for not trying to draw more attention to this aim of peace and the obligations that commitment to this entail.”⁹

Despite these admissions of fault, which seem to suggest a pattern of error amongst those who assume some version of a PAI theory, there has been no effort by these scholars to systematically analyze the weaknesses of their own positions. In this chapter, I argue that there are significant weaknesses in the positions represented by the above scholars who represent the PAI theory. As will become clear below, often I find the arguments for their positions to be vague, and thus will undertake to explore several possible interpretations of their positions. Whichever version of the arguments are treated, however, I find that their arguments have the tendency to overinflate the status of legitimate authorities, draw overly grand images of the just causes and ends of war, undercut the significance of prudential judgments in public debate about war, and overstate the case for restricting moralist from making certain types of judgments. I will begin by looking at the argument from tradition, which is often put forward as underwriting the entire position, and will then turn to each of my particular critiques.

2 The argument from tradition

One argument that must be treated when approaching PAI theory is the claim that this must be the correct model for just-war thinking inasmuch as it is the model that is historically faithful to what James Turner Johnson has called the “just-war idea.” According to Johnson’s recent writings, the major voices who have been participating in just-war discourse in the last sixty years have in reality abandoned the essence of the tradition, Michael Walzer, James Childress, and the American Catholic Bishops not the least.¹⁰ For Johnson, embracing the historically grounded just-war idea entails recognizing the primary status of deontological criteria of just cause, right intention, and legitimate authority, and recognizing the content of the criterion of legitimate authority as bestowing responsibility for making the judgments on the “duly authorized representative of a sovereign political entity.”¹¹ Again and again in Johnson’s work, divergence from the “historical just-war tradition” is treated as a significant problem for positions other than his own.¹²

This appeal to tradition is grounded in the beliefs that (1) war itself has a discernible moral form and (2) that this form is best discerned by looking to the consensus of custom (the jus gentium) which has arisen from human practice within history. I am willing to grant both of these claims. However, Johnson’s use of the just-war tradition constitutes something more than a respect for established custom and law. As William Werpehouski writes, in treating the tradition as he does, Johnson’s position “risks a kind of historical positivism.”¹³ Here “tradition” is used to foreclose upon contemporary development of and contribution to ongoing discourse about the morality of war.

This positivism is linked with a problematic view of the kind of content that the just-war tradition delivers. The problem is revealed by Johnson’s language. He speaks of the “just-war idea” as if the tradition has a thought about war, or rather a structure for thinking about war.¹⁴ Traditions do not have ideas. Individuals within traditions have ideas. Human traditions are always traditions of dialogue, debate, and re-imagining. Certainly, there must be a core of continuity in the debate. Participants must be in dialogue with earlier authorities in the tradition, but this is not an extremely strenuous requirement in the context of the just-war tradition. The loose community that has maintained just-war discourse across history is not a narrow one. It has crossed religious, class, national, and ideological boundaries. To respect this tradition requires that one allow the tradition to live.¹⁵

It would be well here for Johnson the advocate to hear from Johnson the historian. In his historical work, Johnson lays bare many of the diverse strands of thought that collided and coalesced to produce a classical waypoint in the tradition.¹⁶ As Johnson writes in this context:

If we would speak of the ‘just-war doctrine,’ we are immediately confronted by a bewildering multiplicity. We must ask, ‘Whose doctrine?’ and end up favoring one or the other lifted up out of the whole … By contrast with such approaches, thinking of the just-war tradition requires entering the circle of continuing development of that tradition, regarding each of its various historical contributors as coparticipants worthy to be heard and necessary to be taken seriously, but not as prophets to be followed blindly.¹⁷

In an earlier work, Johnson had chided those (Paul Ramsey included) who had absolutized the requirements of noncombatant immunity and projected this absolutism on the history of the tradition. To do such, he wrote, “is to make the same error of judgment often made about just-war thought as a whole; it is not a moral absolute, demarcating the limits of that which is ideally, inflexibly and eternally just, but a time bound and culture bound formulation of a moral floor upon human conduct in war.”¹⁸ By making the “just-war tradition” into the “just-war idea,” it seems that Johnson has come very close to the trap that he himself had set out to help others avoid.

Johnson’s essentializing tendencies might not be so problematic if Johnson were in fact simply restating classical just-war theses. But such is not the case. In the process of excoriating others for failing to embody “the just-war idea,” he has had to obscure the extent to which his own reading of the just-war tradition is uniquely modern (see also Introduction, 3.4). One example of Johnson’s own modernist tendencies can be seen in the fundamental distinction between “deontological” and “prudential” (or “consequentialist”) just-war criteria, which will be discussed further below.¹⁹ For Johnson, just cause, legitimate authority, and noncombatant immunity are deontological criteria. Last resort and proportionality are “prudential” or “consequentialist.” Here Johnson claims that the function of the consequentialist criteria “provide guidance as to when a particular use of force, already deemed justified by the primary criteria is wise or unwise.”²⁰ One could never find such a claim, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas. Not only does Thomas lack the terms deontological and consequentialist to begin with, but for Thomas it is not possible to speak of an act as “justified” yet “unwise.” It is not possible for an act to manifest both justice and imprudence. Why the breakdown of language at this point? It is because Johnson lives in a post-Kantian, post-Hegelian, post-Benthamite world where humans have learned certain advantages to shifting the terms of analysis. That Johnson has at points embraced these innovations does not in itself make his just-war thinking any less sound, but it does make it something different from a simply repetition of a “just-war idea” delivered to him from the past.

Johnson has also had to obscure the extent to which the criteria he wishes to downplay have ancient roots in the just-war tradition. At one point he claims that “prudential tests are relatively new to just-war thinking, dating back only to the last forty years.”²¹ This claim is a blatant overstatement, which is especially unfortunate against the backdrop of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 The limits of moral clarity: Against the PAI
• Part 2 An unbearable burden: Against the PAH
• Part 3 The imitation of Christ and the resort to violence
• Part 4 Prudence and just-war thinking
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index