Is Just War Possible?

Christopher Finlay

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509526536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The idea that war is sometimes justified is deeply embedded in public consciousness. But it is only credible so long as we believe that the ethical standards of just war are in fact realizable in practice. In this engaging book, Christopher Finlay elucidates the assumptions underlying just war theory and defends them from a range of objections, arguing that it is a regrettable but necessary reflection of the moral realities of international politics. Using a range of historical and contemporary examples, he demonstrates the necessity of employing the theory on the basis of careful moral appraisal of real-life political landscapes and striking a balance between theoretical ideals and the practical realities of conflict. This book will be a crucial guide to the complexities of just war theory for all students and scholars of the ethics and political theory of war.

1
Ideas and Ideals of the Just War

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a ‘just war’ emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met …

Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize Speech (2009)

When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, Barack Obama’s speech raised some eyebrows. Rather than speaking purely of the need for peace, he spoke of war and how it might sometimes be ‘justified’. It had to meet certain conditions: it must be ‘waged as a last resort or in self-defense’; the ‘force used’ must be ‘proportional’ and civilians must be ‘spared from violence’ but, notably, only ‘whenever possible’ (Obama 2009). The speech alludes, then, to a practice of war that is limited in its occasions, its aims and its methods. But, even so, the award was for contributing to world peace (for ‘the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’). So why reference the idea of a ‘just war’ when accepting it?

I think the reason is likely to have been the fact that he did so as a new head of state – and not just of any state: Obama was a newly minted president of the United States of America. As such, he was aware that, even with the best will in the world, he wouldn’t be permitted in the coming years to avoid being implicated in bloodshed and the prosecution of war. (‘I am the commander-in-chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.’) Obama therefore had to accept the wisdom offered by Max Weber in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’: politicians may have deep and strong convictions, including a commitment to peace and a preference for non-violence; but their role as heads of state commits them equally to wielding the sword where needed. The ethics that might seem to arise directly from their deepest convictions must therefore find a way to live alongside the demands of political responsibility (Weber 2004 [1919]: 83–4). And the ethics of responsibility demand the resort to violence to defend the innocent, to maintain state security and to uphold order in the world. Given the possibility that these two demands are likely to conflict, what is a political leader to do?

Obama’s speech steers a well-travelled course between two extremes. On one side extends the path of so-called ‘realists’ who claim descent from Niccolò Machiavelli and his advice to the new prince: do ‘the right thing’ when you can, but recognize that politics requires doing wrong when you must (Machiavelli 1998: 61). Morals, on this view, have very limited scope in politics: effective political leadership demands that they be suspended in order to focus on doing what is necessary and effective. On the other side lies the path of what Jean Bethke Elshtain calls ‘the beautiful souls’ (following Hegel): those who would let the heavens fall rather than sully themselves by engaging in armed force (1982: 341–2).

Both views, in fact, agree that resorting to force is inherently wrong (even if Machiavellians counsel doing it anyway). But Obama’s speech references a third perspective, which holds that resorting to force in appropriate circumstances is not morally wrong. It doesn’t dirty the hands of the politician when it is constrained by rules that define both the proper occasions for its use and the moral limits that those engaging in it should observe. This, in a nutshell, is the ‘just war’ idea. It rejects the doctrine of raison d’état, according to which violence may be used when it is to the advantage of the state. But it also denies the idea that violence, and war especially, are unjustifiable. Following St Augustine, it holds that there are sometimes worse things than war and that peace should not be bought at the cost of at least some kinds of profound injustice (Rengger 2013: 47).

So Obama accepts an award for contributing to world peace but argues that peace demands a practice falling somewhere between pacifism and realism, one that borrows some wisdom from both. A truly principled commitment to peace, he implies, demands a willingness to resort to war when necessary as a means of securing it. The aim of this short book is to ask whether, in fact, the synthesis of realism and the commitment to peace is credible: is just war possible? Can the demands of moral principle and political responsibility be reconciled along the lines outlined by Obama? My view is that they can, but in order to persuade anyone of this, it is necessary to defend the possibility of a just war from a variety of doubts that might be expressed about it.

Before we do, let’s turn to a crucial, basic question: what does the just war idea consist of? What are its essential components?

1.1 Origins and sources

One way to answer these questions is to draw on the history of ideas and argue that just war theory is essentially a tradition. As such, its constituents are found in a canon of historical texts dating back to the classical Greeks and Romans (Johnson 1975, 1981).

Much of the terminology and intellectual equipment of current just war thinking can, in fact, be traced back to much older sources. ‘Wars,’ wrote the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero, ‘ought not to be undertaken except for this purpose, that we may live in peace, without injustice; and once victory has been secured, those who were not cruel or savage in warfare should be spared’ (quoted in Neff 2005: 13). His declaration encapsulates the two dimensions of just war theory that would be most fully developed in centuries to come, the idea of a jus ad bellum and that of a jus in bello.

The theory of the just war flourished at the hands of Christian theologians and lawyers in Europe from the period of late Roman antiquity right up to the early-modern era (Bellamy 2006; Brunstetter and O’Driscoll 2017; Johnson 1975). Theologians such as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas contributed to a theory according to which the seemingly pacifist tendencies in Christian doctrine could be reconciled with the responsibility of political rulers to defend the innocent and challenge injustice.

Medieval theorists generally thought of restraint in war (jus in bello) from the perspective of those who fought with just cause rather than as a matter that had a bearing on both sides in a just war. Their emphasis on acting out of love and a desire for justice, which together could justify killing those who perpetrated wrongs, meant that it was hard to see how those fighting against a just war could be justified in killing. It was therefore extremely important for the development of a characteristically modern theory when the Catholic philosopher and theologian Francisco de Vitoria introduced the idea of ‘simultaneous ostensible justice’ (Johnson 1975: 20). In his lectures on war at the University of Salamanca in the 1530s, he argued that war might be justified – in a limited sense – on both sides in some cases. Even if you had a truly just cause (objectively), your opponents might have a reasonable belief that they did too, albeit that it was based in ‘invincible error’ (Vitoria 1991 [1539]: 312–13, but cf. 306–7 [§20]). And if this was possible, then the reverse might be possible, too: it might turn out, in hindsight, that you were the ones with the error. If so, then it behoves all fighting even in ostensibly just wars to be modest and restrained rather than self-righteous and fanatical in the pursuit of their goals (Johnson 1975: 20).

With this highly influential move, Vitoria contributed to a current in modern thought in which the idea of a substantive jus ad bellum – a claim to have the moral right to wage war in the face of injustice – increasingly fell into the background. The early modern period saw the focus of inquiry shift increasingly onto the jus in bello and the possibility of upholding a form of international law that would be agnostic about which sides had just cause, applying equally to all. This idea culminated in the work of Enlightenment theorists, Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel, for whom a legitimate war came to be identified as one that followed an appropriate formal set of rules (guerre reglé or ‘regular war’).¹

As a result of these developments, the classic doctrine inherited from medieval just war theory declined after the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth, states would increasingly come to view the recourse to war as an option to be decided upon based on political expediency and the pursuit of the national interest (Walzer 1977: 63). But this more permissive view of war was in turn eclipsed with the revival of just war theory in the twentieth century.

1.2 Contemporary theories

When it was focused chiefly on the jus in bello, modern international law diverged from the just war idea in an important sense by pushing questions of jus ad bellum into the background. But as James Turner Johnson argues, international law is itself descended from the just war tradition, particularly through the seminal influence of Hugo Grotius’s early seventeenth-century ‘reframing’ of its ideas (Johnson 2013: 26).

By the mid-twentieth century, the increasingly elaborate legal codes of jus in bello would be counterbalanced by what was in effect a legal jus ad bellum, thus establishing a closer alignment between international law and a version of the just war idea. Building on foundations laid by the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, the Charter of the United Nations, which came into force in 1945, enshrines two principles that can be interpreted in a way that resonates with the just war tradition. First, it outlaws the use of warfare as a means of mutual threat for purposes of purely national self-interest (Article 2[4]). Second, it also identifies limited cases in which a resort to armed force may be justified. The UN Security Council has the authority to use military force in response to sufficiently serious threats to international peace and security (UN Charter, Ch. VII). And states faced with imminent threat may resort to war if necessary to protect themselves, pending action by the UN (Article 51 of the UN Charter).

Interpreted in this way, the UN Charter sets out a template for justified war whose most famous philosophical proponent is Michael Walzer. Walzer characterizes the view it expresses as that of the ‘legalist paradigm’. States interact with each other much like individuals in domestic society. Both are subject to rules prohibiting mutual aggression. And both have rights of self-defence when faced with wrongful threats and are permitted to use force – even lethal violence – if doing so is the only way to meet such threats. Thus far, the argument is based on analogy: as long as states internationally have enough significant features in common with individuals domestically, we might view them as being able to claim the right to similar sorts of action and to be able to offer similar reasons for doing so. An additional reason, however, for granting states the right to wage war in the face of aggression is that, ‘[i]n the absence of an universal state, men and women are protected and their interests represented only by their own governments’. With some significant exceptions, individuals therefore have a pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Ideas and Ideals of the Just War
• 2 The Just War Creed
• 3 ‘Just Cause’ and the Possibility of Jus ad Bellum
• 4 Fighting Just Wars: Balancing Ends and Means
• 5 Conclusion: Just Wars, Ideal and Non-Ideal
• References
• End User License Agreement