The Philosophy of War and Exile

N. Gertz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137351227
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Arguing that the suffering of combatants is better understood through philosophy than psychology, as not trauma, but exile, this book investigates the experiences of torturers, UAV operators, cyberwarriors, and veterans to reveal not only the exile at the core of becoming a combatant, but the evasion from exile at the core of being a noncombatant.

Part I

Becoming Responsible

1

The Lust for War vs. The Lust for Judgment

What common morality is

How does one judge war? Though we often make judgments about particular wars – referring to them at times as “foolhardy,” “tragic,” “savage,” or “noble,” “justified,” “humanitarian” – we just as often claim that we cannot judge war generally, referencing such clichés as “all’s fair in love and war,” “war is hell,” “the fog of war,” or “war is a world of its own.” For some, this schism might merely indicate that we feel that it is possible to judge the decision to fight particular wars, while we feel that it is impossible to judge decisions made in the course of fighting wars. We might say that we can judge wars politically, but we cannot judge wars militarily, or to put it another way, that we can judge only what we know. For others, such as Michael Walzer and contemporary just war theorists, this schism might instead indicate the success of those involved with military decision-making in getting the rest of us to agree to the myth that one cannot judge war unless one has experience of it. Hence, for just war theory, one should not judge wars only politically or militarily, but also morally, and to claim otherwise is to let both them off the hook for taking responsibility for the crimes that take place in war, and to let us off the hook for holding them responsible for these crimes. In other words, judge lest ye be judged.

It might be argued that although just war theorists are correct that crimes of war cannot go unpunished, nevertheless, just as in civilian criminal trials, one should only be held accountable for one’s actions by a jury of one’s peers. Just war theorists do not deny this claim, however, they merely deny the implication that those of us outside of the military are not “peers” with those inside of the military in the crucially relevant sense required here to be on the “jury.” Because the judgments we are to make are moral, not political or strategic, the only experience required to judge, according to just war theorists, is the experience of being human rather than of having been privy to national security meetings or of having been engaged in combat situations. The basis of this claim by just war theorists, this claim that any human can make moral judgments about war, is what is known as “common morality.”¹

Whereas moral philosophers typically begin by trying to determine how one ought to live and then try to determine how one could live accordingly, just war theorists instead begin by asserting that there is one morality we all already live by, leaving the only work to be done that of determining what this morality entails with regards to war. Just war theorists are not moral philosophers, and are not interested in working out proofs of the existence of this common morality or of working out the specific content of this common morality, aside from suggesting that “human rights” is the “doctrine” that “seems ... best.”² Rather, just war theorists are interested in criticizing those who would contest the existence of common morality, challenging them to prove that it does not exist. Even though Walzer is willing to admit that common morality is a “critical assumption,”³ because his assumption is based on a simple formula – we share one world, we share the perceptual and intellectual tools for describing and judging this world, ergo we share a common morality – he challenges those who would challenge him:

Someone can always ask, “What is this morality of yours?” That is a more radical question, however, than the questioner may realize, for it excludes him not only from the comfortable world of moral agreement, but also from the wider world of agreement and disagreement, justification and criticism. The moral world of war is shared not because we arrive at the same conclusions as to whose fight is just and whose unjust, but because we acknowledge the same difficulties on the way to our conclusions, face the same problems, talk the same language. It’s not easy to opt out, and only the wicked and the simple make the attempt.⁴

It may be argued here that we do not “acknowledge the same difficulties,” “face the same problems,” or “talk the same language.” Even if we limit this claim to “the moral world of war,” it appears simply untrue that people watching the news, academics reading journal articles, politicians holding meetings, and young men and women standing outside military recruiting stations have anything in common with regards to what they acknowledge, face, or talk about. But, Walzer would reply, the key here is not what is acknowledged, faced, or talked about, but rather how any of these are done, for if we look beneath these superficial differences in status and situation we will discover deep commonalities in how we talk about and how we perceive the world. For George W. Bush, you were either “with us” or “with the terrorists,” but for Walzer, you are either “with common morality” or you are “with the wicked and the simple.”

It is now clear why Walzer would accuse those who do not judge why wars are fought and how wars are fought of being hypocritical and not living up their responsibilities. Walzer was making these accusations in the course of protesting the Vietnam War and in the shadow of the My Lai massacre, which makes the nature of these accusations even clearer. However, that we want to judge as criminal those who would commit atrocities, and that common morality would provide us with the grounds to make such judgments whether we were “there” or not, does not entail that common morality does exist and that it can serve to ground such judgments. There is certainly a need to curtail criminality and to prevent atrocities, but to risk doing so based on a false view of humanity and of morality – a risk that seems all the more likely when we consider how quickly these views tend to fall apart as soon as we leave our own societies, if not our own houses – is to risk not only making meaningless judgments, but to risk preventing ourselves from making judgments that would be meaningful.

There is another risk that exists here, however, that we should find even more disconcerting as it does not rest on the existence of common morality, but only on the existence of defenders of common morality. The development of the common morality perspective, as we have already seen, includes the development of a perspective of “us” versus “them.” These two perspectives seem to be deeply intertwined, as is often the case whenever one starts to make pronouncements about what “we” believe.⁵ To argue that political realism is correct, or at the very least the view that war could be judged only by those who have had a shared experience of war, is to risk being seen by defenders of common morality as “wrong,” not merely as a matter of disagreement, but as a matter of one’s humanity.

It would appear that the existence of common morality is not nearly as important as the existence of the threat that comes with questioning its existence, the threat of being seen as having “opt[ed] out” of the “comfortable world of moral agreement.” As is well-known, an emperor might have no clothes, but if enough people act as if they see clothes in order to fit in they will not be excluded from the “wider world of agreement and disagreement.” Yet, even this peer pressure can only go so far. The meaning that can be imputed to common morality by its common acceptance is always contingent upon the possibility of our having a revelatory experience (e.g., a child, immune to the perception of others, calling us out on the game we’re playing) that would liberate us from our other- and self-imposed illusions. This perhaps explains why both common morality and its advocates deny the possibility of war having at its core precisely such revelatory experiences, and instead accuse those who would claim to have found in war the meaninglessness of this common morality of being merely profiteers trying to get the rest of us to believe they are prophets.⁶ That the same accusation has been made in turn against just war theorists highlights, yet again, the need to investigate, rather than take for granted the “critical assumption” of common morality.⁷

Lastly, if it is indeed the case that the normative status of common morality rests more on the peer pressure imposed by its advocates than it does on its actual existence as the foundation of our beliefs – on a “common sense” that is rooted more in our wanting to be accepted as “common” than stigmatized as “uncommon” – then its “sanction,”⁸ to borrow John Stuart Mill’s terminology, does not appear to be what just war theorists would lead us to believe it should be. To return once more to moral philosophy, a moral theory can only motivate us to act in accordance with it, as Mill argues, through either an internal or an external sanction. In other words, we only ever act, including the act of obeying moral demands, to the extent that doing so provides us with pleasure or prevents us from feeling pain.⁹ The question of sanction then is whether the pleasure and pain arise from within – what we normally refer to as our “conscience” and its “sting” – or from without – what we normally refer to as “punishment” and the “force of law.” According to Mill, while an internal sanction is far more powerful than an external one, should an individual not feel the internal sanction of a moral demand that is not an argument against the demand, but against that individual, for which reason punishment can be justified given that the internal sanction should have been felt in the first place.¹⁰

Given that common morality is understood by just war theorists, as we have already seen, to be a set of moral demands intrinsic to our humanity, rather than rooted in an extrinsic moral theory, then its sanction must, by definition, be internal. Yet, if when we act in accordance with common morality we do so because of the aforementioned fear of being seen as inhuman, then its sanction must instead be external. This possibility raises the question of whether the disapprobation and various punishments in just war theory for those found to not be acting in accordance with common morality are required to fill the void for what is lacking in their consciences or are required to fill the void for what is lacking in our common morality. That just war theorists seem to be far more focused on determining punishments for combatants than on trusting combatants to be conscientious without the threat of such punishments further calls into question the status of common morality, and its role in not only just war theory, but in the suffering of combatants.

What common morality does

Now that we have seen the need to interrogate common morality and its supporters, we can begin this interrogation by focusing on how common morality is used by Walzer and contemporary just war theorists. To do this we must first look at common morality in a historical context. Early, or “classical,” just war thinkers such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas did not employ the phrase “common morality.” Instead, their arguments pertain to “natural law,” which was grounded upon the existence of God.¹¹ In much the same way that one today might argue that if there is a common morality it would most likely rule out of consideration going to war, so too critics from the time of Augustine and Aquinas up to the present have wondered how these thinkers could possibly believe that we should “turn the other cheek,” but also that it is sometimes just to fight wars.¹² In both cases what was referred to in order to overcome this criticism was such just war criteria as “legitimate authority” and “right intention.” Augustine, uniting these criteria, writes:

... in killing an enemy the soldier acts as an agent of the law. That is why he can easily fulfill his duty without lust. And the law itself, which was enacted for the protection of the people, cannot be accused of lust, since the legislator, assuming that he enacted it at God’s command, that is, in accordance with the mandates of eternal justice, was able to do so without any lust at all.¹³

However, whereas for Augustine and Aquinas this argument rested on having God as both this authority and as the judge of combatants’ intentions, for the secular just war theory we find today, common morality instead occupies the role of God, giving to humanity both the ability to authorize war legitimately and to see combatants’ souls. Or, returning to what I suggested earlier and to what remains to be investigated, the claim that common morality exists gives us the ability to claim to have such godlike abilities.

The question of legitimacy with regards to common morality and just war theory has already been well-investigated by such thinkers as A. J. Coates¹⁴ and Tarik Kochi,¹⁵ among others. The question of intentionality on the other hand has received far less attention, corresponding perhaps to the tendency of the critics of just war theory to focus more on ad bellum than in bello questions in general.¹⁶ It is certainly understandable that critics would be more concerned with judging the question of whether wars can be justified than whether acts in war can be justified insofar as to remove the possibility of the former would appear to eo ipso remove the possibility of the latter.¹⁷ However, this strategy falls into the trap of allowing just war theory to persevere as an argument about how to better “specify” various common morality “principles,”¹⁸ as it adopts rather than interrogates the Augustinian fear of a “lust” for war, the lust that is seen as both the source of aggressive war and as the reason for a theory of just war. Without investigating just war theory’s use of the right intention criterion, these critics are essentially open to being themselves criticized about their own intentions. In much the same way that just war theorists claim to be able to know the intentions of combatants, critics of just wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Becoming Responsible
• Part II  Being in Exile, Being as Exile
• Conclusion: Our Veterans, Ourselves
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index