A defense of the traditional war convention

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 464-495

  Benbaji, Yitzhak ^a,b  

^a BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

^b Shalom Hartman Institute   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48749110816     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/533506     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (51)

1. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic, 1977), 61, 145.
2. See also his Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Following Jeff McMahan, whose work is my main focus in this article, I treat the theory developed in Just and Unjust Wars as the traditional just war doctrine or the traditional war convention.
3. Jeff McMahan, "Killing in War: A Reply to Walzer," Philosophia 34 (2006): 47-51, 51.
4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Crooke, 1651), 79.
5. I follow Judith Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 49-50.
6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 86.
7. See Jeff McMahan, "The Ethics of Killing in War," Ethics 114 (2004): 693-733;
8. cf. his "War and Self-Defense," Ethics and International Affairs 18 (2004): 75-80.
9. For an earlier statement, see his "Innocence, Self-Defense, and Killing in War," Journal of Political Philosophy 2 (1994): 193-221.
10. For related criticism, see David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002),
11. and David Mapel, "Coerced Moral Agents? Individual Responsibility for Military Service," Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 171-89.
12. In Yitzhak Benbaji, "Culpable Bystanders, Innocent Threats, and the Ethics of Self-Defense," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (2005): 623-40, I developed the theory of self-defense that I shall employ here.
13. In Yitzhak Benbaji, "The Responsibility of Soldiers and the Ethics of Killing in War," Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007): 558-73, I show that McMahan's justice-based conception of self-defense yields a nearly pacifistic ethics of killing in war.
14. Judith J. Thomson, "Self-Defense," Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991): 283-310.
15. Ibid., 287.
16. This is Jeff McMahan's formulation of his own position in his "Liability and Collective Identity: A Response to Walzer," Philosophia 34 (2006): 13-17, 13;
17. Walzer makes clear that the war convention is "morally plausible" (see, e.g., Just and Unjust Wars, 133).
18. This is one of main theses in Michael Walzer, "Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses," in his Arguing about War, 51-67,
19. and "Terrorism and Just War," Philosophia 34 (2006): 1-12.
20. McMahan, "Ethics of Killing in War," 697.
21. Ibid., 699.
22. Walzer, "Terrorism and Just War," 1.
23. Ibid.
24. McMahan, "Liability and Collective Identity," 13.
25. Walzer, "Terrorism and Just War," 1.
26. McMahan, "Liability and Collective Identity," 14.
27. This section draws on my "Responsibility of Soldiers."
28. A close analysis of Jeff McMahan's writings suggests that this would be the line of argument to which he would adhere. Compare his "Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker," Ethics 104 (1994): 252-90, 260,
29. to his "Ethics of Killing in War," 723.
30. For a further defense of this conceptual framework, see my "Culpable Bystanders, Innocent Threats, and the Ethics of Self-Defense," 615-21.
31. As an Ethics' editor remarked, one might readily agree that shifting harm onto someone who poses an innocent threat is no improvement in justice. We still might ask, however, why does that make it "unjust" to do that? After all, the shift might be neither just nor unjust. My answer: the harm inflicted on the attacker is unjust because it is a matter of brute bad luck. The inequality generated by this shift is, thus, unfair. This, of course, calls for elaboration, which is beyond the scope of this article.
32. Compare Russell Christopher, "Self-Defense and Defense of Others," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27 (1998): 123-41,
33. and "Self-Defense and Objectivity: A Reply to Judith Jarvis Thomson," Buffalo Criminal Law Review 1 (1998): 537ff.
34. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 37-38.
35. McMahan, "Ethics of Killing in War," 697.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Compare ibid., 724, and my discussion of the risk imposing driver case in "Responsibility of Soldiers," 564.
39. The debt of the argument in this section to David Lewis's analysis of convention in his Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) is deep. In particular, following Lewis I assume intimate relations between conventions, rules, and norms.
40. I am also indebted to George I. Mavrodes, "Convention and the Morality of War," in International Ethics, ed. C. Beitz, Marshall Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, and A. John Simmons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 75-89,
41. and to R. B. Brandt, "Utilitarianism and the Rules of War," Philosophy & Public Affairs 2 (1972): 145-65.
42. A version of the boxing match model, which I endorse, was developed by Thomas Hurka, "Liability and Just Cause," Ethics and International Affairs 21 (2007): 199-218.
43. Jeff McMahan envisages this model in his "On the Moral Equality of Combatants," Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (2006): 377-93, 381-84. My version of this model was developed independently of Hurka's and of McMahan's; it also significantly differs from theirs.
44. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974).
45. Lewis, Convention, 63.
46. Thomson, Realm of Rights, 178.
47. The phrase is Hedley Bull's. See his The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
48. In my "Elucidating the Supreme Emergency Exemption" (unpublished manuscript), I describe circumstances in which soldiers have no right to undertake the duty of obedience.
49. Both are offered by McMahan, "On the Moral Equality of Combatants," 382; McMahan takes them to be devastating.
50. In Yitzhak Benbaji, "The War Convention and the Moral Division of Labor," Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming), I defend the in bello/ad bellum distinction in detail.
51. Consider a rule that commands only partial immunization of civilians. Suppose that if it is commonly followed, it would produce the benefit that full immunization produces. Even then, the current, cruder convention is justified if the chances that the rule that commands partial immunization won't be commonly followed are sufficiently great. Indeed, the simplicity of the current convention seems to be an essential feature of its moral standing. Note further that there might be particular cases in which the interest of all soldiers is best served if the just war would be aimed at disabling the leader of the aggressive state that causes it. Yet, there can be no commonly followed rule that commands such a practice. For, most soldiers are likely to believe that the war they fight is just. Hence, generally, if rules of conduct in war would depend on the justice of the cause of the war, wars won't be fought in accordance with any rules. This general claim calls for a detailed argument, which I hope to provide elsewhere.