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Are States under a Prospective Duty to Create and Maintain Militaries?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Ned Dobos Open the ORCID record for Ned Dobos [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization.

Keywords

military abolitiondemilitarizationmilitarismprospective dutiesdefense spendinggun ownershipaggression
Type
Book Symposium: Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 407 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 Cordelli, Chiara, “Prospective Duties and the Demands of Beneficence,” Ethics 128, no. 2 (January 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Fabre, Cécile, “War, Duties to Protect, and Military Abolitionism,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 (Fall 2021), pp. 395–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 “Global Military Expenditure Sees Largest Annual Increase in a Decade—Says SIPRI—Reaching $1917 Billion in 2019,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, April 27, 2020; and Kaamil Ahmed, “Ending World Hunger by 2030 Would Cost $330bn, Study Finds,” Guardian, October 13, 2020.

4 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 50–51.

5 Ildefonso Orellana Bueso, quoted in Kirk Bowman, “The Public Battles over Militarisation and Democracy in Honduras, 1954–1963,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33, no. 3 (August 2001), p. 556.

6 Sumner, William Graham, War and Other Essays, ed. Keller, Albert Galloway (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1919), pp. 39–40Google Scholar.

7 There, I argue that accidental civilian casualties are an ineliminable feature of modern war. In his contribution to this symposium, Tony Coady goes further, suggesting that deliberate acts of civilian victimization are highly likely whenever we go to war, given what he calls the “asymmetry myth.” Coady, C. A. J., “War Crimes and the Asymmetry Myth,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 (Fall 2021), pp. 381–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ryan, Cheyney, “Nation-States, Empires, Wars, Hostilities,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 (Fall 2021), pp. 367–379CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ryan, Cheyney, The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009)Google Scholar.

10 Bowman, Kirk, Militarization, Democracy, and Development: The Perils of Praetorianism in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

11 Erich Weede, quoted in ibid., p. 37.

12 Coyne, Christopher J. and Hall, Abigail, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 171.

14 Crawford, Neta, “Democracy and the Preparation and Conduct of War,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 (Fall 2021), pp. 353–365CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 Nili, Shmuel, “Integrity: Personal and Political,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 2 (2018), pp. 428–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Ned Dobos, “Punishing Non-Conscientious Disobedience: Is the Military a Rogue Employer?,” Philosophical Forum 46, no. 1 (2015), pp. 105–19.

18 It is tempting to suppose that nonviolent resistance, and the preparations for it, have no anti-democratic effects to speak of. But as Christopher Finlay makes clear in his contribution to the symposium, this is questionable. (Christopher J. Finlay, “Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War-Machine: Unarmed Coups, Nonviolent Power, and Armed Resistance,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 [Fall 2021], pp. 421–433). It might well depend on the kind of nonviolence involved: whether genuine nonviolent power or simply unarmed force.

19 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” International Security 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 7–44, at p. 8.

20 Taylor B. Seybolt, Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 270.

21 Steven Pinker, “The Decline of War and Conceptions of Human Nature,” International Studies Review 15, no. 3 (2013), pp. 400–405, at p. 400.

22 Kalevi Holsti, Kalevi Holsti: Major Texts on War, the State, Peace, and International Order (Cham, Denmark: Springer International Publishing, 2016), p. 44.

23 Human Security Research Group, Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation and Contestation (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013).

24 Ronald F. Inglehart, Bi Puranen, and Christian Welzel, “Declining Willingness to Fight for One's Country: The Individual-Level Basis for the Long Peace,” Journal of Peace Research 52, no. 4 (July 2015), pp. 418–34.

25 Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Plume, 2012).

26 Holsti, Major Texts on War, pp. 48–50.

27 Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO's War against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September–October 1999), pp. 2–8, at p. 3.

28 Noam Chomsky, “A Review of NATO's War over Kosovo,” Z Magazine (April–May 2001).

29 David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and David Rodin, “The Myth of National Self-Defence,” in Cécile Fabre and Seth Lazar, eds., The Morality of Defensive War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Holsti, Major Texts on War, p. 60.

31 Seth Lazar, “National Defence, Self-Defence, and the Problem of Political Aggression,” in Fabre and Lazar, Morality of Defensive War.

32 If there are alternative institutions that can defend us against grave threats—such as the “postmilitary” civilian-based defense systems discussed by Christopher Finlay and David Rodin in their contributions to this symposium—this further weakens the argument for a prospective duty to militarize. This is so regardless of whether the nonviolent alternatives are morally superior to the military (Finlay is skeptical), and regardless of whether we think states are under an ethical obligation to invest in these nonviolent alternatives (if they are, this has potentially radical implications for our ethical assessments of war more generally, as Rodin demonstrates). But for present purposes this is by the by (Finlay, “Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War Machine”; and David Rodin, “Justice between Wars,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 3 [Fall 2021], pp. 435–442). My point is simply this: If you can save the drowning children you encounter either by taking swimming lessons or by investing in a portable flotation device, then there is no reason to insist that your prospective duty is specifically to learn to swim. By the same token, if a state can defend vulnerable people either with military force or by civil subversion, this undermines the argument that it has a prospective duty specifically to militarize.

33 Willie McNabb, quoted in Max Benwell and Kari Paul, “What About the 30–50 Feral Hogs? Man's Defense of Assault Weapons Goes Viral,” Guardian, August 5, 2019.

34 Bernard Brodie, quoted in John Mueller, The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 19.

35 Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Feral Hogs Attack and Kill a Woman in Texas,” New York Times, November 26, 2019.

36 “Prohibiting Large-Capacity Magazines: A Constitutional Way to Save Lives,” Everytown Law, January 30, 2020.