223 - Walzer, Michael

Summary

At several points in his writings Rawls indicates a debt to the political theorist Michael Walzer (b. 1935). Most noteworthy in this regard is the fact that Rawls’s defense of just war theory in LP (95) does not depart in any significant respect from that of Walzer in his now classic work Just and Unjust Wars (2006). Rawls largely agrees with Walzer regarding issues in jus ad bellum (i.e. the justice of war), wherein a just cause to ight requires either that one be ighting in self-defense or in defense of the rights of aggrieved others, as well as issues in jus in bello (i.e. justice in war), wherein the rights of noncombatants should be respected.

Throughout his career, even when opposing the war in Vietnam, Rawls was like Walzer in seeing the refusal to participate in all war under all conditions as an “otherworldly” view that was integrally connected to sectarian doctrine. Such a view no more challenges the right to self-defense than a defense of celibacy challenges the right to get married (TJ 335).

Rawls also relies on Walzer in defense of the claim that a state has a right to defend its borders and to limit immigration (although the details of such limitation are not specified by Rawls) on the assumption that unless a definite agent is given responsibility of maintaining an asset, the asset tends to deteriorate (LP 39). Rawls even follows Walzer rather closely in the latter’s controversial defense of a “supreme emergency exemption.” Here Rawls claims (LP 98–99) that when civilization itself is threatened (as when the Allies were on the verge of defeat early in World War II before the Battle of Stalingrad) then jus in bello constraints could be violated for the sake of justice.