Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

In Response

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.97.2.0250

2161-6302

Nigel Biggar,

Health and Conflict Studies

First of all, let me record my gratitude to colleagues for their having taken the time and trouble to read and comment on my book. Their attention honors it, and their comments serve to test and develop it—sometimes confirming, sometimes correcting, and sometimes identifying further work that remains to be done.Charles Mathewes observes that all three wars that I analyze in detail—Britain's against Germany in 1914– 18, NATO's against Serbia in Kosovo in 1999, and the U.S.-led coalition's against Iraq in 2003—I reckon justified. This might well fuel skeptics' suspicion that just war reasoning is little more than the elaborate ethical rationalization of Realpolitik. In case that is so, let me point out that I do mention in passing two instances of belligerency that fall foul of “just war” criteria—the Spanish conquistadors' invasion of the Americas and the British bombardment of Canton in 1841 (2013, 161). I also imply a lack of justification for war-waging by the opponents of each of my justified belligerencies—Germany's against Britain, Serbia's against NATO, and Iraq's against the coalition. I would happily swell the ranks of unjust warriors with the Irish nationalists who staged the Easter Rising against the British in 1916. And, lest it seem that the Anglo-Saxons are always righteous in my eyes, let me add to the bombardment of Canton the British invasion of Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom in 1879. That my list of unjustified wars is not longer yet is attributable simply to the limits of my historical knowledge.Both Mathewes and Cian O'Driscoll find In Defence of War weak in its admission of the tragedy and moral ambiguity of war. Mathewes suggests that its account of just war is unbalanced in the predominance of its “legal-ethical algorithmic” dimension over its appreciation of war's tragic and downright sinful aspects. Lisa Cahill leans in the same direction. I am sure that readers can find passages where I admit, even lament, the often tragic and sometimes sinful character of war. But if I have not made it clear enough, let me do so now: often the just warrior bears a measure of responsibility for the unjust warrior's wrongdoing, and sometimes military killing is so driven by hatred that it shakes off all restraint and becomes simply murderous. I do not doubt this for a moment. Nevertheless, it is true that that is not where the center of gravity of my thinking lies. Rather, it lies in how, despite tragedy and sin, the waging of war can nevertheless be justified—how it can be right for fellow sinners to wage it, how it can be motivated by love, how it can avoid intending the deaths of the enemy. So I acknowledge the imbalance. There is a reason for it, however, and I believe it to be a good one. When thinking and writing about war, I usually imagine myself in the shoes of those who bear the responsibility of making political and military decisions, and of doing so under the unrelenting pressure of time. These are they who cannot allow themselves to wallow in the mess and drift in the fog. These are they who have to cut through the complexity and the ambiguity with a decisive (and fateful) yes or no. These are they who have to pull the trigger, or not. I think it salutary for academic ethicists to stand in those shoes, and I think that Christian ethicists have a pastoral responsibility to do so. So I am not inclined to apologize for my book's bias toward ethical analysis and the crafting of decisive judgments, although I do accept that more overt lamentation of the tragedy and sin that attend war might have been rhetorically prudent.Both O'Driscoll and Mathewes would have had me ponder more than I did the moral and spiritual decay that the experience of combat causes and the correlative need for confession and penance, whether religious or secular. I do not doubt the problem or the need or their importance, and they are indeed among the several things that I could have considered, but did not. On reflection, I can muster three reasons why I did not consider them: first, because others with greater empirical authority than I have already written about them;1 second, because the moral and spiritual decay of combat soldiers is neither universal nor inevitable; and third, because the fact of them makes no difference to the possibility of the moral justification of war. This last reason issues from my general assumption that the world happens to be such that, tragically, we can be obliged to do things that cause terrible damage, which we should lament, and that an endeavor can still be morally justified while containing moments of wrongdoing, of which we should repent. It also occurs to me to add that, if combat soldiers sometimes need to repent of the sins of bloodlust and ruthlessness, those who refuse war sometimes need to repent of the sins of indifference and wishful thinking. Moral and spiritual decay need not always wear a uniform; sometimes they appear in mufti.O'Driscoll thinks that I distill complex historical experience into a series of stark moral dilemmas (e.g., Rwanda or Srebrenica), thereby occluding questions about such things as whether the West should have devoted more support to the 1993 Arusha Accords, or whether Europe should have engaged more extensively with nonviolent leaders of Kosovar resistance to Serbian domination such as Ibrahim Rugova. I agree: it is quite possible that there are things that we should have done, which we failed to do; that we therefore bear some responsibility for putting ourselves in the position of having to decide between war and not-war; and that we ought to let our consciences torment us over whether we could have done more to avoid it. Hindsight, of course, is a fine thing, affording us a quasi-Olympian clarity that is simply not available down in the fog-bound valleys of real-time human action. It also plays both ways: it is arguable, for example, that, had the West been more robust in its military support for the Syrian rebels in 2011–12, it could have prevented the rise of jihadism among them, the consequent fracturing of the opposition, and the current ascendancy of the murderous Assad regime. Besides, only in a daydream of wishful thinking does conscientious speculation about what might have been relieve us of the burden of responsibility for making a decision about what actually is, here and now.Cian O'Driscoll is absolutely right to point out that callousness is a dangerous virtue. I argue and I continue to believe that callousness is sometimes a virtue. The surgeon needs it when cutting into living flesh (especially where anesthetics are unavailable), the parent needs it when punishing the child, the manager needs it when making a colleague redundant—and the general needs it when ordering his own troops (maybe some of them his personal friends) to fight to the last man. Since it belongs to ordinary life that it is sometimes right that we should do things that have painful, even destructive, side effects, we all need a certain callousness—a certain thickened skin—to do them. Stefan Zweig was right: sometimes compassion and pity are vices.2 Sometimes a bleeding heart is a harmful self-indulgence. Having said that, a callous lack of compassion can also be a vice, of course, issuing in a dehumanized view of the enemy and in consequent atrocity. An important job of work remains to be done, therefore, in scrutinizing cases of compassion and callousness for clues about what makes them virtuous or vicious, and in working out how military personnel can be trained to exercise the right kinds and eschew the wrong kinds.In my book I hold that a vital part of making the case that war may be waged by Christians involves arguing that it can be motivated, and therefore qualified, by love—including love for the unjust enemy. Lisa Cahill demurs. She claims that compassionate care and love of enemies, not violence and killing, are works of love “properly speaking”; that war is “not fully compatible” with the intention of love; that the Christian gospel's vision is “nonviolent”; that the empirical evidence I adduce in chapter 2 demonstrates that war “not atypically” disposes to hatred and war crimes; and that to describe war as “loving” is to obscure its moral ambiguity, encourage wholehearted endorsement, and divert us from the need for constraints and the difficulty of maintaining them. One might infer from this that Cahill is a Christian pacifist, eschewing violence always and everywhere. Apparently not, for she admits that using violent force can “very rarely” follow from loving threatened neighbors.This is all very thought-provoking, even puzzling. It is clear that Cahill considers herself to be arguing against me. But how, exactly? Is it that she thinks that Christian love cannot qualify the use of violent force? No, because she claims that violence is not a work of love “properly speaking” and that they are not “fully compatible,” implying that violence is an improper work of love and that they are somewhat compatible. What sense should we make of this? The most promising candidate is that there is a prima facie oddness about an act of love that causes temporary pain or harm to the object of love—as, for example, when a parent punishes a child. In ordinary cases the appearance of oddness fades, once the benevolent intention becomes clear. When punishment involves the infliction of permanent or lethal harm, however, the oddness remains as an irreducible sign of lamentable tragedy. This I fully accept, but I observe two things: first, that it serves to confirm rather than deny my argument that Christian love can qualify the waging of war; and second, that it does not sit easily with the characterization of the Christian gospel as “nonviolent.” Nevertheless, I agree with Cahill that to describe war as “loving” simply and without qualification is to endow it with a dangerous lack of moral ambiguity, and if I have done that, I resolve not to do it again. I think it fair to point out, however, that I argue that it is precisely Christian love for the enemy as fellow sinner, whose life may not be taken malevolently or disproportionately, that generates moral constraints upon the use of violence. It does not—indeed, given its nature, it cannot—hand just warriors a carte blanche.Still, there is a crucial practical question, which both Cahill and O'Driscoll raise, about how psychologically possible it is for combat soldiers to withhold themselves from hatred. This is crucial, since, if it is not possible, then Christian love cannot actually qualify the use of violence. Cahill reports that the chapter where I address this question “actually proves that not atypically war tends to form dispositions to hatred and war crimes.” O'Driscoll is less cautious, claiming that I cite testimony indicating that soldiers “are frequently prone to animus in battle.” Neither report is accurate, my readers having seen what they wanted rather than what was there. The phrase “not atypical” is a curious one, meaning, I suppose, “not exactly typical, but not very far from it.” In contrast “frequently” has the merit of being unequivocal. In fact, all that I say and show is that rage can overtake soldiers in combat under certain circumstances, that it is not always unwarranted, that it is not normal, that it can be contained, that its prevalence depends on the quality of military leadership and discipline, and that combat soldiers in several wars have been horrified to find a prevalence of hatred among civilians that was entirely missing among their comrades. My recent rereading of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia has added further empirical backing to these claims.3While Cahill finds my account of intention and double effect rather better than some others, Scott Davis certainly does not: he finds it “seriously flawed.” He objects to my stipulation that an unintended evil effect (e.g., the death of the enemy) of a deliberate action should be accepted with appropriate reluctance, although he concedes that it would be appropriate to “regret” it. The distinction between reluctance and regret seems to me a very fine one, and I struggle to see what hangs on it. But let me put that aside, for the heart of Davis's objection is that to claim, as I do, that soldiers should not intend to harm the enemy but should instead accept that harm with reluctance, is to say that they do not intend the lethal means that they choose and are therefore not responsible for its evil effect. Our quarrel here turns on different meanings of “to intend.” By it I mean “to want.” I prefer this meaning, in order to make clear what is wrong with intending an evil effect, namely, the corrupting identification of the agent, via his will, with evil. I also distinguish intending from choosing, since one can choose what one does not want, and according to the principle of double effect, one may choose what one should not want. Therefore, when I say that a soldier should not intend the death of his enemy, I am not saying that he should not choose it or that he is not responsible or accountable for his choice. He is accountable, but he can give a justifying account, if, among other things, he can say that he did not want the evil effect he chose to bring about, and if he can substantiate his not wanting by evidence of reluctance. And here it becomes clear to me why I prefer reluctance to regret: reluctance requires the soldier to prefer disabling his enemy to killing him, if that is practicable, and it withholds him from killing his enemy, once disabled.Lisa Cahill also objects to my characterization of just war as a form of punishment. This is because she thinks that it implies that vengeful retaliation is a sufficient purpose, and that it shifts the focus from the good to be protected to the grievance suffered, thus loosening the reins on anger and resentment. Instead, she prefers to think of justified war in terms of defense of the common good. I do not entirely disagree. Just war is certainly defensive of public goods, but it is defensive of them against wrongful harm, and the defense that it offers is hostile and coercive toward the perpetrators of that harm. In this sense, it seems to me that just war is irreducibly punitive—and indeed, retaliatory and retributive. Nevertheless, I do take care, I think, to distinguish punishment, retaliation, and retribution, on the one hand, from retributivism and vengeance, on the other, and to say that just punishment can never be retributivist in the sense of seeking the suffering or destruction of the wrongdoer per se or vengeful in the sense of seeking them excessively. Suffering and destruction should never be ends in themselves but only tragically necessary means to defend public goods, stop and deter wrongdoing, and reform wrongdoers. To talk about defense without talking about punishment is to shield oneself from the unpleasant fact that in this case justified defense requires that wrongdoers be coerced, violently.If Lisa Cahill doubts that In Defence of War is Christian enough (since the gospel is “nonviolent”), Nahed Artoul Zehr is inclined to think it too Christian. She rightly discerns that I intend to address a broad readership, but she is therefore puzzled by my explicit self-identification with a particular, religious tradition and by my making theological claims. How can Christian ideas guide the ethical decision making of non-Christians? Moreover, this confessional stance she deems “exceptionally uncomfortable” in a post-9/11 environment, where the United States and other Western countries have been accused of adopting a crusading mentality. My explanation is basically this: I do not believe in the possibility of secular language. That is to say, I do not believe that there is a set of terms that is neutral between rival worldviews, which members of a plural society should adopt when communicating with each other about public affairs. Nor do I believe that religious worldviews are irrational per se and that public discourse must be nonreligious in order to be rational. There is no view from nowhere; there are only diverse confessions (be they Christian, Muslim, Aristotelian, Hobbesian, utilitarian, Kantian, or whatever). How, then, can we communicate, perchance agree? By setting out candidly and clearly what we think and why, by inviting others to do the same, by engaging in the give-and-take of conversation, by identifying points of agreement, by reasoning together about points of disagreement, and by learning from one another.4 I do not doubt that non-Christian readers will find in my book premises, arguments, and conclusions with which they disagree. But I am equally confident that many of them will find much that they can own. After all, the common world that we inhabit does rein in the divergence of our construals. What is more, different traditions are seldom absolutely strange to one another: certain strands of Christianity and Islam incorporate Aristotle, for example, and both Locke and Kant are more theological than atheist moral philosophers usually care to remember. As for the crusading tendencies of the West, they no more furnish Muslims (and others) with a good reason to stop their ears against the wisdom in Christian tradition than Salafist tendencies in the Muslim world provide Westerners with a good reason to stop their ears against the wisdom in Islamic tradition.Notwithstanding all that, Zehr has identified a rhetorical limitation of In Defence of War. In trying to address both my fellow Christian ethicists and others in the same book, I have risked testing the patience of the latter, who might have no interest in Christian ethics, or find religious terms baffling, or even nurture a certain hostility toward them. Indeed, commenting on an early draft, Charles Mathewes did suggest that, in order to keep nonreligious readers on board, I should not open the book with the chapter on Christian pacifism. I fully appreciated the wisdom of his advice and mulled it over, but in the end I decided that logic had to take precedence over rhetoric. At the same time, however, I made a point of informing readers in the introduction that each chapter is self-contained enough that they can afford to skip any that holds no interest for them. Nevertheless, I hoped that some nonreligious readers would be sufficiently intellectually liberal (that is, open and generous) to expose themselves to strange material, in case they might learn something important. Moreover, it seemed to me that public communication and community would be enhanced, if more nonreligious citizens came to realize that religious ethics are not all about arbitrary divine commands to do nasty things.Like Zehr, James Turner Johnson wonders if my affirmation of natural law is not too tied to Christian tradition. If its content is Christian, then how can it be natural or universal, and why should non-Christians be guided by it? More generally, he inquires after the sources of “the higher norms” and the nature of their relationship to positive law and just war thinking. He suggests, I think, that positive international law is a more valuable achievement than I admit, and he observes the difficulty in reaching agreement over common principles of “humanity.” On the other hand, appearing to push in the opposite direction, he questions my skepticism about the prospects for global government in the light of ethical diversity, pointing out that my appeal to a universal natural law surely implies the possibility of consensus.Johnson has put his finger on an important and opaque tension in my thinking, and he is quite right to ask for further explanation. Let me launch some lines of response here. First of all, to claim that a Christian is bound to believe that a natural law exists is certainly not to claim that only Christians have such a belief, nor yet to make a claim about how distinctively Christian is its content. Different traditions will offer their own readings of that content, but those readings need not be completely or strongly opposed. I have recently been struck, for example, by the strong similarities between Confucian and neo-Confucian thinking about just belligerency, on the one hand, and the Christian “just war” tradition, on the other, notwithstanding the fact that Chinese and Latin Western civilizations developed almost completely independently of each other until the modern period. Nevertheless, it is true that not all disagreements will prove resolvable. Christian Thomists, for example, will not be able to endorse Hobbesians' reduction of the natural law to the drive to avoid pain and death—but then nor will Aristotelians or Kantians.What are the sources of natural law? Most immediately, there is positive international law itself, insofar as it expresses transcultural recognition of what is really valuable and right. (So, yes, I agree: positive law is a valuable achievement, which deserves respect.) However, since it is the fruit of international agreement, positive law's recognition of natural law will always be hampered by national interests, some of them narrow and ignoble. So, for example, even if natural law does oblige the international community to intervene in the sovereign affairs of a state to stop the next holocaust, Putin's Russia and the Communist Party's China will never acknowledge that obligation in a treaty, first of all, because their humanitarian impulses are not so strong and, second, because their primary, nationalist concern is to limit the power of the United States and its Western allies. (The persistence of conflicting national interests is also the main reason for my skepticism about the prospects of global government.) Therefore, while positive law is a source of knowledge about natural law, it is not the only one. Next in proximity lies the informal expression of international consensus in customary law. But this, too, cannot be the last word; for while consensus is a surer guide to universal law, it has no monopoly of access and majorities have been known to get it wrong. So beyond consensus—or rather, before it—lie the consciences and the wisdom of individuals, be they prophets or ethicists or rulers.For that reason, it is possible that Tony Blair and George Bush (and their supporters) actually discerned the requirements of natural law regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq better than most people, international lawyers, and statesmen now think. That is effectively what I argue in the final chapter of my book, where I conclude that the 2003 invasion was justified. Rosemary Kellison finds this judgment “surprisingly simple,” even “sweeping,” in the light of the deep moral ambiguities that my analysis displays; she thinks that war is too complex a phenomenon to be susceptible of “a blanket judgment”; she suggests that my “desire to declare the entire Iraq war ‘justified’” might have prevented nuanced evaluation; and she considers me too generous in giving benefit of doubt (to Blair and Bush) and too inclined to draw “the unobvious conclusion.” She also offers a number of more particular criticisms: that the presence of vice is not irrelevant to the evaluation of right intention; that the lack of collective will to contain Iraq by economic sanctions might be attributable to doubts about the level of threat posed by the regime; that the coalition's failure to overcome the naive optimism responsible (I say) for the inadequacy of its post bellum planning is itself symptomatic of wrong intention; that I should have provided a more detailed analysis of harm to civilians; and that my argument earlier on in the book that the killing of the innocent can be justified by an objective obligation to surrender their lives, if applied to civilians, implies that any number of casualties is morally acceptable, provided they were not intended and that the civilians were obliged to give up their lives.There are two reasons why I push my argument to a conclusive, overall judgment: first, the main purpose of the chapter is to use the case of Iraq to work out how the various criteria of just war can be thought together and applied coherently; and second, I do not think that academics should afford themselves a luxury of indecision that is denied to decision makers. I agree, of course, that war is a complex phenomenon, and I believe that the invasion of Iraq was more morally complex than most. But a complex phenomenon deserves a coherent judgment that is complex, not a complex judgment that is incoherent.Whether I am overeager to exonerate Messrs. Blair and Bush, and whether that distorts my reasoning, others must judge for themselves. While I hold no particular brief for Mr. Bush, I confess to being (still) an admirer of Mr. Blair. Nevertheless, I believe that, when writing the chapter on the 2003 invasion, I was prepared to conclude that it had indeed been a culpable error. Indeed, in my very first publication on the matter (in March 2003), I was more skeptical than supportive. If I give benefit of doubt, I do so partly to counterbalance what has seemed to me the extreme lack of charity on the part of many of the invasion's critics; partly because of what I perceive to be the (often yawning) gap between the critics' reasoning and their conclusions; and partly because one needs good reasons to withhold benefit of doubt, and in this case I have not found them. If I draw unobvious conclusions, of course, it is because they are not unobvious to me.Whether their perverseness should be more obvious to me can only be established by getting down into the short grass and showing the serial wrongheadedness of particular judgments. So let me briefly respond to each of Kellison's criticisms that I have listed. First, I do not argue that the presence of vice is irrelevant to the evaluation of intention, only that a well-intentioned action can be vitiated in part without being vitiated basically or entirely. Thus, if the inadequate planning for post bellum reconstruction can be lain at the feet of sheer indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people, then a claim to intend the establishment of a just peace would be untenable. If, however, the inadequacy is attributable instead to a culpable naïveté about the means of political renewal, then that could still be compatible with a genuine intention of the end. That it was in fact so is established by the evidence I presented that a concern for the Iraqi people was one of the leading motives in both Washington and London and by the fact that the coalition spent considerable resources of blood and treasure over six years in trying to correct the dismal effects of poor ante bellum planning.Kellison is quite correct that the lack of collective international will to contain Iraq by economic sanctions could have been caused by (reasonable) doubts about the need to bother. Whether or not it was so caused depends upon the empirical data. My reading of the data suggests that that was not the reason—that before the invasion the French, German, and Russian intelligence agencies all thought that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was intent on developing nuclear ones, and that the United Nations was gravely concerned about the matter.On the matter of civilian casualties, I think it fair to report that I do spend several pages discussing the various rival figures, pointing out that the primary agents of most of the killings were not coalition troops, but admitting that the coalition bears indirect responsibility in that it failed to establish post bellum law and order (311–14). Nevertheless, Kellison is astute in noticing that my thinking about the general justification of killing the innocent implies the extensive permissibility of civilian casualties. I am not happy with that implication, but I see no way to avoid it. I do not think that it makes sense to say that individuals have a natural and unconditional right not to be killed. They do have a right not to be killed intentionally, which forbids that they be targeted. But it does not prevent them becoming “collateral damage” in the course of assaults on military targets. I imagine that most readers of this article will agree with me that the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 was justified—in spite of the fact that it involved the deaths of thirty-five thousand French civilians.5 Let us suppose that it had cost twofold or tenfold. Would that in itself have removed its justification? I cannot see why.I am aware that the idea of justifying the killing of civilians on the ground that they have a duty to surrender their lives seems appallingly presumptuous, and I handle it gingerly. Nevertheless I am also aware of one case in which an innocent civilian has endorsed the (tragic) justice of his own killing. During the Normandy invasion a civilian, trapped by Allied bombing in the cellar of a house in Caen, made a point of scratching on the wall as he suffocated to death, “I will never see this liberation for which I have waited for so long, but I know that through my death others will be set free. Long live France! Long live the Allies!”6 If his judgment was right, then what was true of him was true of tens of thousands of others.In oblique rebuke, Kellison asserts that the role of an ethicist of war should be that of a “strong” critic, speaking truth to power, since, lacking the relevant political power, she is ideally positioned to criticize the use of it. O'Driscoll gestures in the same direction when he observes that just war theorists are necessarily part of “the war machine” that they are trying to constrain and wonders how close one can come to the flame of power without getting burned. I agree, of course, that those with political power should be made accountable and therefore open to criticism. I also agree that our rulers deserve fierce censure if they misuse their power for private rather than public purposes. I agree that academics, lacking (much) political power, are unlikely to have their reasoning distorted by the temptations it brings. And I agree that just warriors who never meet a war they do not like, especially one waged by their own people, are suspect. That said, I believe that we should speak all manner of truths to all manner of people—to jingoistic civilians, to simplistic journalists, and to ideologically trammeled academics, as well as to irresponsible public servants. And I believe that our criticism only acquires the moral right to be severe when it has first learned to be sympathetic and charitable and to withhold itself from the easy pleasures of caricature and stereotyping. I do know what O'Driscoll means when he speaks of “the war machine”: institutions do acquire a momentum of their own, sometimes perverse, which is hard to stop. And yet where he sees a machine, I see faces—the faces of friends in public office, who are more morally reflective and sensitive than the average citizen, humbler, less sanctimonious, and who have shouldered responsibilities and taken risks that academics like me have chosen careers to avoid. Our remoteness from the exercise of political power is not just an advantage; it is also a temptation—a temptation to relish too much the self-flattering role of righteous prophet, to indulge in wishful thinking, to daydream among the “what ifs,” and never to grasp the necessary nettle.