The Ethics of War
9.forelesning
Summary/Walzer on
intervention
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Legalist paradigm: Political communities (states) as
self-determining => principle of non-intervention
(prima facie rule)
Exceptions (revisions of legalist paradigm):
Secession
Counter-intervention
Humanitarian intervention
How should we interpret ”humanitarian” as a just
cause?
Violations of basic human rights (Luban)? Or as
”acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind”
(Walzer), such as enslavement and massacre?
Genocide as a case for
humanitarian intervention
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Srebrenica 11.7.1995: 8000 men and
boys massacred
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Rwanda 1994: aprox. one million
people massacred in 100 days
Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(1948)
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Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that
genocide, whether committed in time
of peace or in time of war, is a crime
under international law which they
undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article 2
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In the present Convention, genocide means any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article 3
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The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to
commit genocide;
(d ) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
The responsibility of the
bystander (AJV)
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Agents, victims and bystanders (actions are
”tryadic” not ”dyadic”)
Bystanders are persons possessing a
potential to halt the agent’s ongoing actions
Typology of bystanders:
Passive bystanders
Bystanders by assignment (e.g. UN
observers)
Acting and not acting
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”Not acting is still acting, letting things be done by
someone else, sometimes to the point of
criminality.” (P. Ricoeur)
Inaction as action if one decides not to act
(intentional)
Responsibility for omissions: the obligation to help
Complicity
Signal responsibility: sending a message
How far does bystander responsibility extend?
Doing and allowing (Arendt: ”to act is to initiate.” But
does this not undermine the point above?)
Three lessons
1)
2)
3)
Bystanders legitimize killing and are
morally complicit
Deeds follow words
Failure to act harms the bystander too
– shames humanity
Iraq: A case for humanitarian
intervention? (Mellow)
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Assumptions:
No WMDs in Iraq
UN inspectors
Intentional deception by Bush/Blair
(Powell point)
Illegal war of aggression
Just war framework (again!)
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Just cause
Legitimate authority
Right intention
Last resort
Proportionality
Reasonable hope of success
Open declaration
Just cause
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Sufficient just cause (suff. to override
presumption against force)
Humanitarian injustice as just cause
Presumption of self-determination as
basic good (and therefore) (prima
facie) collective right
Individual human rights and individual
human suffering
Some critical points
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The doctrine of self-help and a
domestic analogy
Can forcible democratisation succeed?
Is forcible democratisation justified
without consent?
Consider the analogy…
A group of attackers are torturing and killing a
nearby family. You are part of an armed
group (hunting buddies, say), who happen
to pass the scene. You have no way to stop
the attacks other than using your guns, so
you prepare to shoot. The family yells at you
to stop, since they are dedicated pacifists
and have chosen to suffer and die.
Are you wrong to shoot?
Mellow: surely not!
Do you agree?
Right intention
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Mixed
motives/humanitarian
pretext for:
Oil?
Culpable ignorance
about WMDs?
Establish hegemony in
Middle-East?
Finish daddy’s
business?
Right intention: problems
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Whose intention? The President? The
administration? Legislative bodies?
How do we identify a group’s intention?
Right intention or absence of bad
intentions?
Mere presence of intention or also
motivational force? Threshold?
Counterfactual? (Necessary or sufficient or
both?)
Mellow: Exclude right
intention!
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The inclusion of right intention in the
JAB-criteria mixes two levels of moral
judgement: jugdement of action and
judgement of character…
Acts are right and wrong independent
of the agent’s mental states…
One can do the right thing for the
wrong reasons, and vice versa.
True, but…
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Can actions be morally right or wrong
independent of the agent’s mental
states?
Yes and no…
Subjective versus objective ”ought”
But permissibility is not about the
objective ”ought” !!!
Last resort
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UN inspectors could have continued
But that is only relevant if WMDs were
cause
For the humanitarian cause, perhaps
war was the only way?
Legitimate authority
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According to IL, resort to war was
illegal (Not sanctioned by SC)
But immoral?
Is legitimate authority substantial or
merely formal requirement?
Can just cause and legitimate authority
be separated? (Buchanan)
Legitimate authority in Iraq?
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Moral case/domestic analogy.
Legitimate authority is substantial, not
formal, criterion
Risk of undermining law does not
render act immoral per se
Deception? Only a problem if intention
is important?
Proportionality
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Relevant good and bad effects
Good: Pertains to the just cause
Bad: Possibility of civil war or
destabilisation of the region
How to weight incomparable effects?
Thought experiments? (Imagine that..)
Counterfactual: ”doing nothing” (cf.
AJV)
Counterfactual proportionality
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Conflates proportionality with last resort?
’Do nothing’ is always one of the ’last resort’
alternatives.. (Walzer, p. 81)
Counterfactual proportionality allows us to
dismiss the bad effects as irrelevant! (305)
Demonstrated by: ”allows us to calculate
upfront.” Dismisses actual consequences.
But perhaps there is no other way?
Pre-emptive war
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Defensive war
Sufficient threat:
Manifest intent to injure
Active preparation which makes the intent a
positive danger
A general situation in which waiting or
choosing other options gravely magnifies
the risk
Always a moral risk! Particular assessment
necessary.
Preventive war
(1)
Some state of affairs X (US dominance)
preserves some important value V
(”Freedom and democracy”) and is
therefore worth defending at some cost;
To fight early, before X begins to unravel,
greatly reduces the cost of the defence of V,
while waiting does not avoid war (unless
one gives up V) but only results in fighting
on a larger scale at worse odds.
(David Luban. ”Preventive War”)
(2)
The Bush Doctrine
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”Making the world safe for democracy”.
Any nation harboring terrorists is a
threat to peace and liable to attack.
Too risky?
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Walzer: Preventive war may be
counter-productive (destabilising)
Luban: Too risky, makes war ordinary
Also: violates the rights of those who
have not yet done anything to forfeit
them
Buchanan:
1)
2)
3)
Alternative reading is possible: Preventive
war can be read as preventive self-defence
justification against those wrongfully
imposing a dire risk (cf. The National
Security Strategy)
Risk is not fixed, it depends on the
institutional framework
(given (1); Not true that those who pose
dire threat have not done anything (wrong)
to forfeit rights
The quest for a new institutional
framework (Buchanan)
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Just War Norm (JWN) = legalist paradigm
Preventive war and forcible democratisation
challenges JWN (with regard to just cause)
Buchanan: No question of choice between more or
less permissive norms, but a question of replacing
JWN with new institutions.
Legitimate authority (Understood as proper
insitutional framework) is a substantial, not just
formal, criterion.
The validity of a norm can depend on institutional
context. Just cause requires legitimate authority!
The limits of just war theory
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(1)
(2)
The validity of use-of-force norms can depend upon
institutional context
Validity of JWN is contingent upon the absence of
satisfactory institutional framework and on the costs
of risk reduction
We ought to create new institutions which allows us
a more permissive norm depending on whether a
new norm would be
morally better and
the feasibility and costs of creating new institutions