WALZER CHAPTER 4:
“LAW AND ORDER IN
INTERNATIONAL
SOCIETY”
What, if anything, morally justifies war?
What is the relation between international law
and the morality of war?
Questions About Jus Ad Bellum
• (1) What makes war a ‘crime.’ What is the wrongness/injustice
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done?
(2) What gives the attacked entity the moral right of response?
(3) What is the right unit of concern in a war? Who is suffering
from the injustice when one country invades another? The
state? The individual?
(4) What is ‘aggression.’ Are there any grey areas with
aggression?
(5) If a state is oppressive or not politically legitimate should it
have the same rights as legitimate states to respond to
aggression?
(6) Why does Walzer think it is morally right and required to
respond, even in cases where you are likely to lose?
Aggression
• Walzer offers a rights-based view of the crime of war.
• “Aggression is the name we give to the crime of war.” (p.
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51) By its nature, it violates rights because liberty and
security require peace.
“The wrong the aggressor commits is to force men and
women to risk their lives for the sake of their rights.” It
forces people to choose between their rights or their lives.
--Fighting is “the morally preferred response” to
aggression.
What are some options to this view that fighting is the
morally preferred response?
Why would it be morally preferred? What exceptions
might exist?
What is aggression?
• Walzer: Every violation of the territorial integrity or
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political sovereignty of a state is aggression. [Is it easy to
determine when this occurs?]
Aggression “opens the gates of hell.”
It also does not depend on resistance. Czechoslovakia did
not resist the German invasion while Poland did but
Czechoslovakia was also aggressed upon.
Aggression is “morally as well as physically coercive.”
What does this mean.
Walzer points out that the aggressor does not want
resistance so he will claim he is a “lover of peace.”
But it challenges “rights that are worth dying for.” (p. 53)
What are these rights?
The Rights of Political Communities
• The rights are (1) territorial integrity and (2) political
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sovereignty. These are collective rights but derive from
the rights of individuals.
People are “morally entitled to choose their form of
government” according to Walzer.
So why wouldn’t this make intervention to bring about a
democracy a legitimate form of aggression?
What is a political community? For Walzer, membership
in such a community is a fundamental feature of being
human.
The rights are either natural or artificial but the political
community acquires the right to defend the person though
consent of its members.
“The Common Life”
• How do individual rights give rise to the state’s right to
respond to an act of aggression? Why is a state’s
aggression an attack on individual rights?
• “Over a long period of time, shared experiences and
cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a
common life. ‘Contract’ is a metaphor for a process of
association and mutuality, the ongoing character of which
the state claims to protect against external
encroachment.”
• What about the pluralism of communities?
Right to sovereignty
• How can an oppressive state have a right to sovereignty if
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this right is derived from a citizen’s right to control his or
her own political destiny?
Walzer says “most states do stand guard over the
community of their citizens, at least to some degree: that
is why we assume the justice of their defensive wars.”
Territorial integrity and political sovereignty “can be
defended” in exactly the same way as life and liberty.
Does this apply to oppressive regimes?
Are all responses to aggression justified, even if there is
no social contract in the standard sense between the
government and its people?
What does the case of Alsace Lorraine
show?
• In 1870 Germany and France claimed these provinces.
• Walzer’s idea is that the land should follow the people’s
will rather than the ancient title. The common life is the
ultimate decider
• The 2 provinces were annexed by Germany and there
was always a question whether the French should try to
get them back.
• Sidgwick: Once people acquire a certain identity/common
life then the “moral effect of the unjust transfer must be
obliterated.”
• Boundaries/territory for Walzer circumscribe a habitable
world.
The Legalist Paradigm/Domestic Analogy
• States possess rights like individuals. The idea of
aggression is analogical reasoning.
• International society is like domestic society in that men
and women “live at peace within it…negotiating and
bargaining with neighbors…”
• But it is not like domestic society because a crime against
peace can bring the whole structure down. When a bad
actor (country) threatens the structure, they have to be
stopped. (Otherwise it’s like catching a murderer and then
letting him go.)
• Two presumptions follow (1) The presumption in favor of
military response once it has begun and (2) Resistance is
law enforcement.
Theory of aggression
• (1) There exists an intl society of independent states
• (2) This intl society has a law that establishes the rights of
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its members (territorial integrity and political sovereignty)
(3) Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one
state against the political sovereignty or territorial integrity
of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act.
(4) Aggression justifies 2 types of violent response (2) self
defense and (3) aid from the intl community
(5) Nothing but aggression can justify war.
(6) Once aggressive state is defeated, it can be punished.
Appeasement
• What is appeasement? Is it true that Finland was right to
fight, even though they could not win?