1 - Greg
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Re: Just War
The new natural lawyers take an odd position on just war. They think that all intentional killing is immoral--not just intentional killing of the innocent, but all intentional killing of humans. So they think that in warfare one should never intend to kill. Though they'd admit that many if not virtually all soldiers in war do intend to kill their opponents, they would say that this doesn't have to be so. It is possible to shoot an enemy solider, or bomb his base, without intending to kill him. This counterintuitive result is supposed to follow from their controversial action theory.[1]
[1] Tollefsen, Christopher "Is a Purely First Person Account of Human Action Defensible?" Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 9, 2006, pp. 441-460.
- iwpoe
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Re: Just War
I had a long post on this 75% typed up but I realized that I could get the point out quickly.
My objection to just war theory as I see it follows from meta-ethical/meta-political theory objections. The outline of the objection goes as follows:
1. The problems of war are either reducible to general ethical problems between the individual actors or to whatever (if any) general normative framework is appropriate to the interaction between states.
1.a. (corollary) War is not a special normative domain with rules unique to it not derivable from general ethical principles. (e.g. killing in war is just killing and is no special case)
2. If just war contravenes 1 it is a case of special pleading and normatively illegitimate.
3. 2 is the case.
∴ Just war theory is a case of special pleading and normatively illegitimate.
I am suspicious of the consequentialist tones in just war theory and to any extent it justifies actions that aren't legitimately existentially defensive which I suspect is most cases it's been applied.
I also toy around with rejecting the idea that there are normative rules for states as such: i.e. only individuals are proper normative agents and "state talk" can only ever be a shorthand. If this is so, you might be able to salvage the theory, but it's going to drastically rearrange the traditional way the theory is talked about.
Last edited by iwpoe (12/21/2016 11:20 am)
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: Just War
Well look at that. Just yesterday.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Greg
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Re: Just War
I think most just war theorists would be inclined to agree that war is not a special ethical domain, and just war theory is just general ethical/political theory applied. That point is sometimes lost in discussions of just war theory today (at least popular ones--it is commonly brought up, to be rejected for a more comprehensive form of non-violence, in lefty Catholic circles). People will occasionally suggest that just war theory is "obsolete" these days, because modern warfare is especially violent and the criteria for a just war are never met. I think there are reasons to be skeptical of that claim, but in any case, even if it's true, it doesn't show that just war theory is obsolete and ought to be rejected; it just shows that just war theory says that no wars today are just. There's this idea that the point of just war theory is to justify war, so if it can't justify war, it has failed.
That is to say: the question of whether it's true, and whether there are arguments for it, is left out of account. In my view, just war theory must reduce to to some general ethical theory, if it's to be defended. I cannot see why, otherwise, anyone should accept it.
(My sense, further, is that just war theory should be formulated so as to make claims about what individuals are permitted to do--whoever has the power in a state to go to or conduct war.)
- Greg
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Re: Just War
Needless to say, I'm not convinced by Vallicella's post. It's tendentious to characterize moral absolutism as the view that thousands of lives may be "sacrificed to an abstract principle." In theories that include moral absolutes, the reason for upholding a moral absolute is not the moral absolute itself. The
consequences of upholding the absolute are not being accepted for the sake of, or "sacrificed to," the moral absolute. If one is going to engage in that sort of rhetoric in hard cases, then one ought to be prepared to apply it to easier cases as well; everyone who isn't a consequentialist, that is, is sacrificing concrete human goods to abstract principles. Consequentialism is replete with problems, though.
I suppose I'll say that I also find it tendentious, albeit a bit less so, to speak of a singular "worldly wisdom" of non-absolutism.
- iwpoe
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Re: Just War
Greg wrote:
That is to say: the question of whether it's true, and whether there are arguments for it, is left out of account. In my view, just war theory must reduce to to some general ethical theory, if it's to be defended. I cannot see why, otherwise, anyone should accept it.
(My sense, further, is that just war theory should be formulated so as to make claims about what individuals are permitted to do--whoever has the power in a state to go to or conduct war.)
This might be because of my coming from a history first perspective, but I had always thought that Just War theory was generally treated as a special domain of thought with ethics as such bracketed from discussion. Has anyone ever attempted a through-going grounding of at least some version of JWT in a more general ethical framework?
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Greg
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Re: Just War
Has anyone ever attempted a through-going grounding of at least some version of JWT in a more general ethical framework?
The new natural lawyers think it's nothing other than principle of double effect. (Their whole ethical theory is, in fact, principle of double effect, understood in their own way.)
There are Thomists who think that state action is a special case in some respects: for instance, that there is a state monopoly on violence. Such principles are not invoked often, so war might be thought to be a "special case" in that respect. But that would make it, one might say, "materially" special rather than "formally" special. But it is no accident that even traditional JWT looks for all the world like PDE.