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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2017
My friend Steven Wagner, a philosopher I very much admire, recently wrote me that he finds ‘Just War Theory’ in its present form wholly untenable. With his permission, I shall quote part of what he wrote:
Here's what I meant about just war theory (JWT) and ontology. The formulations of JWT effectively identify three distinct objects: a population, a nation, and the high-level decisionmakers in the government. Therefore, even if JWT is invoked in the cause of peace, it surrenders the larger battle by buying into an authoritarian political ontology. So it's an irremediably spoiled tool for justice.
1 Steve Wagner will remind me, I know, that he only requires that the agency which is the ‘source of the beliefs’ concerning the justice of war (the Epistemic Bureau?) be ‘no more interested than is the population in general’. While I would agree that an agency which decides on war shouldn't do so because it stands to gain from a war ‘more so than the run of the people’, I do not think that apart from the case of material gain, there is any general rule as how ‘interested” deciders are allowed to be. Moreover, I do not agree that that epistemic justification requires an agency separate from the government—unless that ‘agency’ be simply civil society as a whole.
2 In contrast to this epistemological approach, traditional Just War Theory begins by requiring that the war be declared by a rightful authority. To interpret this, would require the whole of political philosophy! And even then, wars which are not declared by an ‘authority’ (e.g., wars which start with spontaneous popular resistance) are not even envisaged, as Wagner pointed out in his letter to me.
3 This kind of argument is called an ‘anti-Utilitarian argument’ by moral philosophers.
4 Authentic footage taken by ‘embedded reporters’ of the ‘coalition forces’ using napalm bombs is included in Michael Moore's ‘Fahrenheit 911’.
5 This was Secretary of State Colin Powell's estimate on February 4, 2001, when in the course of press remarks with Foreign Secretary of Egypt Amre Moussa he reported that ‘We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions—the fact that the sanctions exist—not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked.’ Three years later, on March 22, 2004, CNN carried the following story: ‘WASHINGTON (CNN) The United Nations’ top two weapons experts said Sunday that the invasion of Iraq a year ago was not justified by the evidence in hand at the time. ‘I think it's clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought forward was rapidly falling apart’, Hans Blix, who oversaw the agency's investigation into whether Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, said on CNN's ‘Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.’ Blix described the evidence Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 as ‘shaky’, and said he related his opinion to U.S. officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
‘I think they chose to ignore us’, Blix said. In the same story, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is quoted as speaking to CNN from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, saying: ‘Well, Wolf [Blitzer], I think I'd like to, for a moment, say that, to me, what's important from Iraq is what we learn from Iraq. We learned from Iraq that an inspection takes time, that we should be patient, that an inspection can, in fact, work.’
6 Of course, Firth spoke of war in general, since this was the time of the Vietnam war, but I have substituted ‘preemptive war and regime change’ since that is the application I am making of his (more general) principle.
7 [The Miami Herald, March 3, 2004]: ‘WASHINGTON—The Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda—one of the administration's central arguments for a preemptive war—appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Hussein's links with al-Qaeda, and several key parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly doubtful.
Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Hussein's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings.’
8 This is the version I heard from Firth, rather than the more specific version I gave above. (Cf. the previous note.)
9 However, I often hear this sceptical objection from people who, in other contexts, claim to have an amazing amount of political ‘knowledge’!
10 For an overview of the role of fallibilism in my philosophy, see Ben-Menahem, Yemima's Hilary Putnam (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar here, especially the chapter by Yemima Ben-Benahem herself (‘Putnam on Skepticism’) and the chapter by Alex Mueller and Arthur Fine (‘Realism, Beyond Miracles’).
11 However, Barry Stroud has defended Cartesian scepticism (or at least held out the possibility that it is correct) in The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. I criticize Stroud's defence in —Skepticism, Stroud and the Contextuality of Knowledge’, in Philosophical Explorations 4, No. 1 (2001), 2–16.Google Scholar
12 Taking Rights Seriously (Duckworth and Harvard, 1977), 153.Google Scholar
13 See Floyd, Juliet's ‘Heautonomy and the Critique of Sound Judgment: Kant on Reflective Judgment and Systematicity’, in Kant's Aesthetics, Herman Parret (ed.) (Walter de Gruyter,) 1998Google Scholar, for an excellent discussion of this aspect of Kant's thinking.
14 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, ##39–40.Google Scholar
15 In his Lectures on History, Hegel argued—plausibly, I think—that the willingness of citizens to give their lives for the defence of the nation's territory is one of the preconditions for the existence of the modern nation state.
16 See the statements by Colin Powell, Hans Blix, and Mohamed ElBaradei cited in note 5.
17 Galbraith, Peter W., ‘How to Get Out of Iraq’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 51, No. 8, (05 13, 2004).Google Scholar