Jeff McMahan has written a genuinely revolutionary book. He has uncovered a flaw in standard just-war theory. He further argues that soldiers in an unjust cause have, for the most part, no right at all to engage in violent action against soldiers in a just cause. Not only do they lack moral standing to engage in aggressive warfare; they cannot legitimately even engage in defensive war, in most circumstances. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10160/killing-in-war/
Killing in War
Previous post: Price Fixing in Ancient Rome
Next post: Making a Mockery Of The State
{ 31 comments }
Overall, a very good article. Soldiers need to take responsibility for whether they fight in a war or not. That’s why the US has conscientious objector status.
“George W. Bush administration lied repeatedly about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…â€
Come on! How many times are you guys going to drag out this lie? I read the English language versions of Iraqi newspapers before the war started and Hussein bragged in his own newspapers about his nuclear program. After the war, Iraqi scientists revealed that they were afraid to tell Hussein about their lack of progress toward nuclear weapons because they knew he would murder them. General Georges Sada, the Air Force general during much of Hussein’s rule, reveals what Hussein did with his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons shortly before the US invaded in his book “Saddam’s Secrets.â€
It’s interesting to me that the whole argument rests on the morality of intentionally killing civilians during a war. The West has decided that such acts are immoral, but it did so only recently, in the 16th century war for independence by the Dutch against the Spanish. Until then, in every war ever fought in history, killing civilians was perfectly legit. The Dutch decided against it and that attitude spread throughout the West. However, in most of the world the Western idea is considered stupid and a sign of weakness.
It is clear to me McMahan never sat in the jungles of Viet Nam. It was not about killing, it was about surviving by any means. You can debate morality all you want, but until you experience the act of war, you have no right passing judgement.
greg, with all due respect, those who served in Vietnam chose to do so. There were thousands of young men who chose either prison or emigration over taking part in a war where killing (whether to survive or otherwise) would most-likely be necessary. Arguments along the lines of “if you weren’t there…” are invalid; morality is not context-specific. If one believes killing is wrong, it’s wrong in all circumstances including “self-defense.” I know many of you will disagree with me, but I don’t see a way around it without resorting to moral relativism. If one truly believes that taking the life of another person is evil, then one must accept that it is better to die than kill. Dying is unavoidable and therefore has no moral value. One cannot choose not to die. The decision to kill, however, is an act of the will and is therefore subject to moral judgement.
This is drivel of the highest order. Who decides whether a war is “just” in the first place? George H. W. Bush? St. Thomas Aquinus? Ayatolah Khomeni? Jimmy Carter? The Pope? Osama Bin Laden? Adolf Hitler? The Emperor of Japan?
Walt D: Only individuals can decide if something is just/unjust. Myself, I don’t like delegating that decision to a 3rd party–I make it myself.
War has never been about being ‘just’ as much as about survival. When you find yourself in harms way, you fight or die. Nation-states train and equip their soldiers as cheaply as possible, put them in harms way and allows the participants on the groud settle things.
Organized war began with the origin of civilization, literally “the living in cities.” Cities develped from armed camps.
Those of the cities do not farm or mine raw materials, they take them. Wars served this purpose while also providing slaves to continue production.
When large scale slavery finally became unmanagable under Rome the power structure ramped up manorial serfdom which actually emerged earlier under the Greeks. When the Great Plague killed off the serfs, the power structure needed to pay for labor and contributed to the rise of capitalism and the nation-state.
Peace Pipe –
Killing is not always wrong. I will kill to survive. Of course the threat is “clear and present”. I won’t allow myself to be killed for the sake of another, directly or indirectly. I have the right to defend myself and my family from clear and present threats up to the point of killing the perpetrator. And I won’t feel bad in any way.
But, I won’t use my native Force offensively against other people in any way. I won’t steal, coerce, intimidate or harm anyone else or their property. And I expect the same in return. If that understanding is unilaterally breeched, then my abating the use of Force has been negated and whatever means necessary to restore the peaceful status quo will be used.
Your nonsense about allowing yourself to die has no moral quotient is alarming at the very least. Choosing to exist and Be and make something of this life that was given to me unasked for is the first and primary MORAL decision I have ever made. Every behavior I exhibit, every choice I make, every action I have ever taken is anchored around the moral decision to live. Talk about relativism. If you do not recognize yourself as alive and deserving to be so then every other decision you make is meaningless.
Peace pipe,
I understand where you are coming from, but we didn’t have much of a choice to serve or not to serve. Leaving homes and families was not even considered and prison is worse yet. So we served and followed the chain of command and never questioned orders and debated morality. Your suvival depends on the structure of the unit and the people next to you. I can safely say, at that moment there is no debate and until you are faced with that situation, there is no telling how you will react.
If you are really against war, stop attacking the men and women that serve, go after the leaders that send them to face death. I was againt any actions in Iraq and tried to make my opinions heard. But once we were committed, I support all of our troops.
But I find it funny that you can say we had a choice and we could have gone to prison or left the country. However, never once has anyone in the military told you that you have a choice to stay or leave. That is because moral or not, they respect your freedom and that is what they believe they are fighting for.
Peace Pipe,
“There were thousands of young men who chose either prison or emigration over taking part in a war where killing”
There was a 3rd choice, using the 2nd Amendment against those who came to draft you.
Greg, agreed.
People have many reasons for joining the military. Not everyone is going to be able to formulate some amazing in depth philosophical analysis beforehand. (I dislike the intellectual superiority put forth here… not everyone is cut out for, or trained for, the in depth philosophical thinking; especially consider that many people join when they are young.) So, it boils down to kill or be killed. Once you are on the ground you have to act accordingly. Philosophy is irrelevant.
Considering that government is an inherently immoral institution and that war is conflict between governments, any form of war is immoral, so to discuss the morality of going to war or of conducting it in a moral fashion is meaningless. Of course, immoral acts are not all equal, and certain types of war may be preferable to others.
One yardstick for measuring the relative immorality of war might stem from the reason governments engage in war-because the present state of peace is objectionable to a government, and by war, it seeks to create a “more perfect peace” (one that it prefers). A relatively just war would be one in which the peace that the initial aggressor desires (or in hindsight the resulting peace) removes coercive restraints on those affected (combatants not included).
By this standard, the 2003 invasion of Iraq could be justified (we have yet to see then final result) in that it removed from power a totalitarian dictator and put in place a relatively benign government over the people living in Iraq and hopefully upon their descendents. Only time will tell on that count.
I went to a Catholic School, and my religous studies teacher was famous for his discussions on morality (got him close to fired a couple of times). He drew an interesting distinction between “right” and “necessary”, and I think a similar distinction could be drawn here between “moral” and “legal”.
A government sanctioning an action affects its legality, but has no bearing on its morality. A *legal* war may, or may not, be unjust.
Another interesting feature of war is that it antagonizes third parties. A “Just” soldier moves into an area looking for an “unjust” soldier. A fire fight breaks out and an entire hamlet is destroyed. Seems to me, that the residents of the hamlet would be justified in repelling everybody, treating them all as invaders; however, the “just” soldier has a “just” job to do and therefore has the right to defend himself while doing that job.
War has a nasty habit of seeping into the lives of those that don’t want to be involved.
(This is where I start to agree with patrick)
I think these contradictions come about when we begin to ascribe morality to organizations. Organizations are groups of individuals. Some individuals are moral, some are not. Some choose well, some do not. An individual soldier may choose to act morally, or immorally; and the morality of the war is simply these moral and immoral actions in aggregate.
Keep a running tally of moral and immoral actions, count the score at the end, and the least moral army goes to jail; regardless of the actions of the individuals.
Many of the comments are frightening in revealing just how murderous even Mises.org readers may be. Greg tells us that we cannot judge those who murder innocent people unless we’re in their position. I’ve never robbed a bank. It’s possible that, in the course of robbing a bank, it might come about that the only way to avoid being shot by the SWAT team is to kill a few innocent people. Does this mean I have nothing to say about a bank robber who kills innocent people in order to survive? The point is that having put yourself in a situation where you can either kill or be killed doesn’t necessarily justify the killing you’ll undoubtedly engage in. If you know that you will kill when put into such a situation, then the decision to walk into that situation is itself a decision to kill innocent people.
Ah, but they don’t put themselves in the situation, they are put into it, right? That is, they are conscripted. First, that argument would apply only to conscripts, whereas the initial claim was made in relation to all soldiers. Second, conscription is not so binary. A person can go to prison, as was pointed out, or leave the country. No one claims that these are good things, or that the government has the right to do these things to people, just that that is the situation and morality sometimes requires a person to submit to punishment himself rather than punish innocent others.
In the most basic situation, consider a person instructed to kill an innocent person, and told that, if he refuses, he will be killed. We can understand if he kills, and we can sympathize, and we can agree, as you point out, that the guy making him do it is the one who is most in the wrong. That doesn’t make his decision moral, though.
Redshirt, meanwhile, seems to think that failing to engage in moral consideration of your actions exempts you from ever being accused of immorality. Remind me not to let you near my family.
Jeff Mcmahan’s argument seems without merit. He covers his biggest problem over by not criminalizing the soldiers fighting for an unjust cause. The real reason not to do so is that they are not guilty!.
Forget the extreme case of an obviously unjust war of conquest. The determination of justification is that of prudential judgment by competent authorities. The soldier is not a competent authority and his default moral responsibility is to follow legitimate orders with the assumption that the competent authority has made a prudent decision.
If the call to war is clearly unjust in the soldier’s judgment, then that soldier would be called to resist material cooperation. But that clarity is rarely realized. His default possition is to prosecute the war to the best of his abities.
James, are you telling us that the way the world ought to work is that people have a presumption that if someone tells them to kill someone else, they should listen? Including if the order is to leave your home, travel to another country, and kill random people?
Or do you just restrict this to cases where the order comes from a tax-eating parasite who has never contributed anything of worth to society?
Let’s apply Jeff Mcmahan’s reasoning to Japan in WWII. The attack on Pearl Harbor was unprovoked and killed civilians and therefore unjust. Libertarian philosophy tends to adhere to a non-aggression doctrine, but does not condemn violence in self-defense; however, a non violent resolution, if possible, would be preferable. Now comes the difficult part – proportional response. This says that if the enemy, say for instance, kills civilians by bombing military targets, that you have the right to do the same thing. If the enemy bombs civilian target, then you have the right to retaliate. Futhermore, in our example, the Japanese mistreated civilians and prisoners of war
-also unjust.
So, using this train of thought, what can we say about the bombing of Hiroshimi and Nagasaki, and the fire-storm
bombing of Tokyo. The fire bombing of Tokyo was unjust – it targeted civilians when the enemy had only killed
civilians in the context of bombing a naval base. On the other hand, Harry Truman’s decision to drop an atomic bomb
on military targets at Hiroshimi and Nagasaki could be considered, at a push, just, (justifiable) on the grounds
that the action of the Japanese soldiers was unjust, and that as commander in chief, he did not have the right
to expend the life, or even put a life at risk, of any soldier under his command. His action minimized the loss of
innocent US lives. However, dropping two atomic bombs on residential areas of Tokyo would have been unjust.
I think most Libertarians at this site would have a problem with this line of thought, from the following point
of view 1) Was this action the only action that could have been taken. 2) What about the Japanese babies that were
killed or children who suffered massive burns? Under what context could they be considered “aggressors”.
That is why I dislike the “just” and “unjust” arguments. It is too easy for corrupt governments to take unnessary
military action on the ground that their cause is “just” and the enemy cause is “unjust”. The same goverment coerces
the soldiers to perform “unjust” acts. (I recall a soldier who was court-marshalled after the battle of Panama
after refusing a direct order to fire a mortar shell at appartment where there were women and children).
My own philosophy is accurately summarized in Patrick’s respose to my earlier post.
Unjust wars cannot be fought justly, that’s a wonderful thesis. This comes dangerously close to a Rothbardian view of war which can be represented, I think, as follows: no government is legitimate, therefore no government program, including war, is legitimate. Any man fighting in a war is personally responsible for his actions, including the death of his victims. But according to McMahan, if any soldier ought to decide for himself whether a war in which he is asked to participate is just, then we have a volunteer military in the strongest sense of the word: no soldier will be punished for refusing to fight. The problem here is that no government will tolerate such freedom, so the similarities between McMahan’s view and Rothbard’s are striking.
I want to question the last point in the review, however: “Unjust combatants who feared punishment at the end of the war might be more reluctant to surrender, preferring to continue to fight with a low probability of victory than to surrender with a high probability of being punished.” If we are to de-collectivize war and picture it as a conflict of a gang of men on one side against another gang of men on the other side, which the author does not seem to be against, then the argument proves too much. In private law we do not say that punishing criminals is counter-productive, because it encourages them to try to run from the law or to adopt a “they’ll never take me alive” attitude. I don’t deny that this harmful effect occurs, only that it is outweighed by the benefit that potential criminals are deterred from doing wrong in the first place. I agree that “large scale Nuremberg Trial proceedings” are implausible, but perhaps some kind of threat of punishment may keep governments from starting wars, even if gives them an extra incentive not to surrender.
Paul Tibbets was a hero and a patriot.
When asked if he had any “second thoughts about the bomb,” Tibbets replied: “So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives. We won’t have to invade [Japan].”
By using the most horrific weapon ever invented, Tibbets saved more lives than he realized. Does anyone suppose it has been sheer luck that no government since has used this weapon? Have our enemies become suddenly moral?
Hardly. Every tinhorn dictator worth his salt wants this weapon, but none are mad enough to use it. Why?
Because they know two things all too well. First, the weapon insures a certain and horrible death; and, second, any first strike will guarantee a retaliatory strike and their own and their family’s and their countrymen’s annihilation by the same bomb.
So long as the United States has nuclear weapons and men like Tibbets have the resolve to use them without hesitation in response to an enemies first strike, there will be no nuclear war.
However, when that resolve weakens to the point that leaders of an enemy nation-state suspect they may survive a first-strike strategy, we all stand a good chance of being incinerated.
Here’s an idea: it is not the governments who will punish “their” soldiers for killing people; it is the soldiers and citizens and even generals who should get together after the war (better yet, before the war) and judge the government officials who ordered an unjust war.
So Sherman, let me see if I get you right. The reason why there have not been nuclear wars is that people have had a personal experience with nuclear blasts. They have seen with their own horrified eyes what a nuke does. This has taught them a valuable lesson: nukes are bad. Don’t use nukes. Good stuff, that.
Now first of all, must we personally experience every bad thing in life in order to be smart enough not to do it? I mean, must every person shoot himself in the foot in order to be careful with guns? Must every man drink drain opener to take the word “poison” on it seriously?
Secondly, if the idea is to strike fear into the hearts of tinhorn dictators, then it would be OK if Japan nuked New York. That would have sent the same kind of message, namely, again, that nukes are bad. Would that have been OK with you?
Third, who appointed the United States to threaten every country with nuclear annihilation? Would you have the same proud attitude of the state’s destructive power if you were not an American?
Finally, you claim that we must “have the resolve to use [nukes] without hesitation in response to an enemies first strike.” But Japan did not attack the US with nuclear weapons but with a conventional air attack. The US response was not to a first strike. Will you still call it heroic?
Dmitry:
You bring to mind the Greek Island of Kos (?) Their constitution dictated that if the island ever went to war, that the elders who declared war would take hemlock and would have the honor of being the first to die for their country. Needless to say, the island did not go to war for 400 years.
Jay Greathouse wrote “Those of the cities do not farm or mine raw materials, they take them”.
Originally, no. Originally, the cities were indeed “armed camps” – but of farmers and so on, who worked the fields around while staying inside protection. After that, of course, arrangements developed further.
“When large scale slavery finally became unmanagable under Rome the power structure ramped up manorial serfdom which actually emerged earlier under the Greeks”.
No, it didn’t. As I pointed out in a comment on another thread, it actually came together under the barbarian kingdoms that followed the Roman Empire. Serfdom only made more sense than slavery once there was a shortage of readily usable land and it wasn’t practical to use cash; at times the Greeks had the former condition, but only rarely the latter. The closest it came was probably in Sparta, though Athens once had debt bondage and no doubt others did too.
Greg wrote “If you are really against war, stop attacking the men and women that serve, go after the leaders that send them to face death”.
Actually, Michael Collins found it far more practical to do the former, by and large (although there were some high profile targets too).
One problem of war is ‘civilians’. A true civilian is someone who is in no way connected to the war effort. People on the farms to feed their soliders, working in armament factories to supply weapons and ammunition to their soldiers, working in clothing factories to clothe soliders, etc., aren’t ‘innocent civilians’ per se but instead are in a sense ‘non-combatant soldiers’ – they’re doing their bit for the war effort and in a sense have no right to be ‘left alone’. Honour in face of the enemy can be that of forewarning the non-combatants to vacate the factories in fifteen minutes as that’s when the bombing commences. Then again if such a warning is too dangerous to transmit and it allows the enemy time to bring out defensive weaponry to repel the bombers then tough luck. Similarly, there ought not to be exceptions for ‘women & children’ – a ten year old can pick up a gun or a grenade and can start fighting with the same vigour as an adult so why can’t soldiers eliminate the enemy if, unfortunately, it is comprise mostly of eight to fifteen year olds?
On the other hand, whilst I would concur that the atomic bombings of Japan during WW2 probably saved more lives than it took I wouldn’t call it ‘heroic’ or ‘patriotic’. I would probably say something along the lines of “so be it”.
However:
“The reason why there have not been nuclear wars is that people have had a personal experience with nuclear blasts. They have seen with their own horrified eyes what a nuke does.” – Dmitry Chernikov.
How is someone being stabbed to death, shot to death, killed in a rocket attack, burnt in napalm, etc., not horrific? The only effect an atomic blast would seriously differentiate from a convential blast is radiation poisoning. Many of suffering seen from the immediate aftermath of the atomic explosion were that of skin burns which would have been present in convential firebombing.
P.S. Does anyone know of the name of the ‘super bomb’ that was going to be dropped in Europe that techncially ‘convential’ but highly destructive? An archival footage showed it being dropped, it would dive into the ground before releasing a humungous blast that pratically liquefied everything in its blast radius.
Gil
Currently, the most powerful conventional bomb is the United States’s MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs-not the actual name, but it fits the acronym), which was first tested just before the Iraqi army surrendered in 2003, so it has never been used in actual war, except perhaps as a psychological weapon. I’m not familiar with the bomb in Europe, but it seems like a “bunker buster” type bomb-penetrating or breaking out of the ground reduces the severity of the blast, so you would want to minimize that if you were aiming to destroy surface targets.
Dmitry Chernikov
No, you “get†me wrong.
Bearing witness to horror does not necessarily mean experiencing it. School authorities used to (maybe still do) show horrific film of traffic accident fatalities in order to shock student drivers into learning the seriousness of their endeavor.
For your information, even Paul Tibbets had no precise idea of the destructive power of the bomb he carried. When asked if he had been apprised of the destructive power of the bomb, Tibbets replied: “From Dr Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it’s going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I’d never seen 1 lb of TNT blow up. I’d never heard of anybody who’d seen 100 lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.â€
Still, after the bomb was dropped, Tibbets realized its significance. When asked if the world had changed since the atom was split, Tibbets replied: “That’s right. It has changed.â€
Would the world have changed “if Japan nuked New York?†You bet it would have, with, no doubt, the same result. And no doubt Japan would have used the bomb if they had had it.
No one “appointed the United States to threaten every country with nuclear annihilation.†It is the policy of the US to use its nuclear weapons only in retaliation. The only countries it threatens are those who would make a first strike.
Yes, dropping the bomb was heroic. Tibbets said he’d do it again. So would I. One can hardly blame the US for violating a policy of “retaliation only” when such a policy did not exist at the time.
This goes back to my original point: it took the first use of the bomb for people to learn just how horrific it truly was. This lesson—that the world was forever changed—was not lost on Tibbets nor on the rest of the citizens of the nation that first used the bomb.
Sherman
Just to clarify-you seem to be articulating the strategy of “deterrence”, that is, of making the cost of aggression so high that essentially no one would be willing to engage in it. Nuclear weapons, being orders of magnitude more destructive than conventional ordnance, constitute an enormous addition to the potential cost of aggression. Correct?
And a quibble on heroism. Dropping the bomb itself was not heroic. Flying over heavily defended enemy territory at great hazard and personal risk-heroic. Opening the bomb-bay doors-not so much.
Yes, a policy of deterrence.
This is pablum — McMahan basically makes the case that all states have a presumptive right to exist, i.e. to be free of “unjust” war.
They do not. Fascist states, communist states, theocratic states, etc. have no right to exist; ergo, *any* attack on them, whether by persons within the territorial boundaries claimed by such states or by persons outside those boundaries, cannot be found to be morally wrong.
But ProfNickD, any violent attack on states inherently involves attacking people or resources people use, and so do many non-violent methods. It is quite possible for attacks on states to be immoral from their collateral damage, not their intended targets.
“Advantageously, the post is really the greatest on this valuable topic. I fit in together with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward for your incoming updates.”
thanks for all .
Comments on this entry are closed.