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War, Duties to Protect, and Military Abolitionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Cécile Fabre Open the ORCID record for Cécile Fabre [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Just war theorists who argue that war is morally justified under certain circumstances infer implicitly that establishing the military institutions needed to wage war is also morally justified. In this paper, I mount a case in favor of a standing military establishment: to the extent that going to war is a way to discharge duties to protect fellow citizens and distant strangers from grievous harms, we have a duty to set up the institutions that enable us to discharge that duty. I then respond to four objections drawn from Ned Dobos's recent book Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine.

Keywords

duty to protecthumanitarian interventionmilitary abolitionismmoral injurynational defensepacifismwars of aggression
Type
Book Symposium: Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 395 - 406
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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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Peter Balint and Ned Dobos for inviting me to take part in this symposium, and for their useful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks are also owed to the editorial team of Ethics & International Affairs for a number of very useful suggestions.

References

NOTES

1 Dobos, Ned, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Pattison, James, “Unarmed Bodyguards to the Rescue? The Ethics of Nonviolent Intervention,” in Gross, Michael L. and Meisels, Tamar, eds., Soft War: The Ethics of Unarmed Conflict (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

3 This is a rough summary of a large and sophisticated body of literature. See, e.g., Kolers, Avery, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, Margaret, A Political Theory of Territory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stilz, Anna, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, David, On Nationality, Oxford Political Theory series (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995)Google Scholar.

4 Fabre, Cécile, “Cosmopolitanism and Wars of Self-Defence,” in Fabre, Cécile and Lazar, Seth, eds., The Morality of Defensive War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 On war and associative duties, see Lazar, Seth, “Associative Duties and the Ethics of Killing in War,” Journal of Practical Ethics 1, no. 1 (2013), pp. 3–48Google Scholar. Elsewhere, I defend the view that we are sometimes under a duty to kill in defense of others and that the ethics of the defensive killing of others is a central component of the ethics of war. See, Fabre, Cécile, “Mandatory Rescue Killings,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 4 (2007), pp. 363–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fabre, Cécile, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cordelli, Chiara, “Prospective Duties and the Demands of Beneficence,” Ethics 128, no. 2 (2018), pp. 373–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Some people believe that the fact that we benefit from a wrongdoing, though have not caused it, also imposes reparative obligations on us. This is a controversial view, which I lack the space to explore here. Suffice it to say that reparative duties to pay for wrongful benefits can take a prospective form too. My defense of a SME extends to those cases.

8 More needs to be said—and more than I can do in this paper—on (a) what counts as reliable evidence in the context of foreign policy, (b) whether there is a duty to procure such evidence, and (c) if so, by what means. For what it is worth, I believe and argue elsewhere that there is a duty to carry out espionage activities, partly on the protective grounds I outline here. If this is correct, there is a prospective duty to set up intelligence agencies. See Cécile Fabre, Spying through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022). See also, for example, Ross W. Bellaby, The Ethics of Intelligence: A New Framework (London: Routledge, 2014); and David Omand and Mark Phythian, Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

9 Ned Dobos, “Is U.N. Security Council Authorisation for Armed Humanitarian Intervention Morally Necessary?,” Philosophia 38, no. 3 (2010), pp. 499–515; and Ned Dobos, Insurrection and Intervention: The Two Faces of Sovereignty (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 5. As Neta Crawford reminds us in her contribution to this symposium, “Democracy and the Preparation and Conduct of War,” there can be high democratic costs to having a SME above and beyond the risk of coups d’état. Moreover, as David Rodin points out in his contribution, “Justice between Wars,” Dobos's objections have far-reaching implications for peacetime military policy in general.

10 Dobos's fifth objection, which I do not discuss, points to the costs accruing from the encroachment of military norms on civilian societies, for which he proposes a civil defense system. His account is somewhat specific to the United States. While it is important in that context, it translates less well to others. (See also Cheyney Ryan, “Nation-States, Empires, Wars, Hostilities,” Ethics & International Affairs [Fall 2021], pp. 367–379). For a persuasive critique of the civil defense system, see Christopher J. Finlay, “Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War Machine: Unarmed Coups, Nonviolent Power, and Armed Resistance,” Ethics & International Affairs (Fall 2021), pp. 421–433.

11 Dobos, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, ch. 2.

12 Ibid., ch. 3.

13 Ibid., ch. 4.

14 For recent statistics on contributions to UN peacekeeping forces, see the United Nations Peacekeeping section of the UN's website at peacekeeping.un.org.

15 Dobos, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, ch. 5. On the dangers of overconfidence on the part of civilian and military leaders, see, in particular, Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

16 Needless to say, there is a hornet's nest of difficulties here. See, for example, Jonathan Parry, “Defensive Harm, Consent, and Intervention,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 45, no. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 356–96.