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Journal of Military Ethics

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Response
Michael Walzer

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2007

To cite this Article: Walzer, Michael (2007) 'Response', Journal of Military Ethics,
6:2, 168 - 171
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/15027570701436858
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15027570701436858

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 Journal of Military Ethics,
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Vol. 6, No. 2, 168
171, 2007

DEBATE

Response
MICHAEL WALZER

I am grateful to all the contributors to this issue of the Journal of Military

Ethics; I have learned a lot from reading their essays. This gets harder to do as
one gets older, but the generosity of these writers and the gracefulness of their
criticism make the learning easy. I have some disagreements, naturally, but I
am not sure how important they are. There are a few cases where I am
genuinely uncertain whether I should acknowledge deep philosophical
differences or deny that anything at all is at stake
we are simply speaking
in different philosophical idioms. If the latter is the case, then what we might
have, but can’t quite hear in our own words, is deep philosophical agreement.
I will look at a few cases of this sort, and a few others, but I won’t try to
respond to all the arguments presented here. I won’t respond at all to Cian
O’Driscoll, since our agreement is plain to see; I will only express my
appreciation for his strong defense of just war as a critical doctrine and for his
insistence on the value of political engagement (but see Barrie Paskins’s essay
for another view).
As for the deep agreements or disagreements, consider first Martin Cook’s
invocation of Brian Orend’s illuminating account of decision-making in
supreme emergencies. Orend makes a major contribution, as Cook says, by
sketching the criteria that should guide decision-makers in these very difficult
cases, and so he helps set limits on the decisions they can rightly make. But his
effort to avoid the paradox that I describe
when ‘the right thing to do is the
wrong thing to do’
seems to me only to confirm the paradox, in slightly
different (less provocative?) language. He suggests that the wrong thing to do
is, from a moral standpoint, simply and eternally wrong; if we do it, our
reasons must be prudential, not moral. I don’t disagree with that; those
prudential reasons constitute what I called ‘the utilitarianism of extremity.’
But the paradox remains, given the fact that political leaders are morally
bound to act prudently (because they are acting for others)
and so they may
be morally bound to do what it is morally wrong to do. Against many of my
philosophical critics, Orend and (I think) Cook hold that what political
leaders do in such cases may actually be wrong, even if they ought to do it.
And this is a deep agreement.
The case may be similar (or maybe not) with Jeff McMahan’s argument
that ‘the moral equality of soldiers’ does in fact hold on the battlefield, but
that the reasons for this are merely pragmatic, not moral. For McMahan’s
pragmatic reasons look to me very much like moral reasons
at least, they
are relevant to the moral judgments we make of soldiers in the field. He says,
1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/07/020168
4 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/15027570701436858
 Response 169
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for example, that moral equality is ‘a concession to human fallibility and

moral infirmity.’ Well, yes; I prefer a different way of talking, but I might
agree to that
and only add that such concessions are morally required. If we
imagine citizens and soldiers discussing their rights and obligations, trying to
figure out how they ought to behave on a battlefield, we have to imagine them
with all their infirmities and not as embodiments of a pure moral will. And
then they will, I think, claim exactly the concessions that McMahan concedes.
Note that we don’t make similar concessions in the case of criminals and
police officers in domestic society: these two groups are not moral equals, for
good moral and pragmatic reasons. So there must be something in the
circumstances of war that, so to speak, attracts our infirmities. It is precisely
that ‘something’ (which I tried to describe in Just and Unjust Wars) that
makes war abhorrent: it has to do with the coercive and collectivizing
conditions under which young men and women ‘decide’ to join an army.
Given those conditions, given what war is and what states at war are like,
soldiers caught up in this or that military establishment are in fact moral
equals and are likely to recognize each other’s equality. So McMahan’s
concession, which is his own recognition of that equality, may indicate
another deep agreement, disguised by the distinction (which doesn’t make a
practical difference) between moral and pragmatic reasons. Or, alternatively,
it indicates a deep difference, in that I believe that rights and obligations
adhere to actual persons with their infirmities and don’t need to be conceded
to them.
McMahan also argues that maintaining the moral inequality of just and
unjust soldiers, even if we do so only in principle and not in practice, will have
two salutary effects, both of which I consider unlikely. First, it will press us to
design institutions and practices that would open the way for the recognition
and enforcement of that inequality. I hope that my own account of ‘the crime
of war’ will press us to avoid war altogether if we possibly can, but I doubt
that we can find a way of fighting that overcomes the need for ‘pragmatic’
concessions to human infirmity. The UN tried to do something like that in
the case of Korea in 1950: it called the attack from the North a crime and its
own response a ‘police action’
as if to domesticate this military conflict. But
the police action was fought as a war, and it is known in all the history books
as ‘the Korean War.’ And we judged the conduct of the two sides by the
conventional standards of just war theory.
The second salutary effect of a principled recognition of moral inequality,
McMahan writes, would be to make it more difficult for political leaders to
fight unjust wars
because some of the young men and women they try to
enlist or conscript would refuse to fight. Maybe so; that already happens,
sometimes, even though the moral equality of soldiers is, as McMahan says,
widely accepted. But I suspect that the usual outcome would be different from
what he anticipates. Here we have, perhaps, a deep disagreement about
human psychology. I think his arguments would make it more likely that
soldiers (ordinary soldiers with their infirmities) will convince themselves that
they are fighting justly, precisely in order to reap the psychic benefits of doing
that. They will want to see themselves as the morally superior figures in the
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story. One of his examples frightens me, since it extends his argument from
principle to practice: he claims that just soldiers, who find themselves in a
tough spot, can kill their prisoners, while unjust soldiers cannot do that. But
surely this is the kind of decision that we don’t want, shouldn’t want, soldiers
to make on the basis of their own sense of their own righteousness. Denying
them the right to do that is another morally necessary ‘concession’ to our
moral infirmity.
The distinction that McMahan introduces within the category of ‘comba-
tants’ is intended to restrict what (some) soldiers can rightly do on the
battlefield. I don’t think that Asa Kasher’s distinctions serve the same
purpose; I am not sure they serve any immediate or practical purpose. He
marks out fourteen types of involvement in terrorism, for example, and
the list seems entirely plausible. But I don’t see how our knowledge of the
fourteen types could possibly serve to regulate the conduct of anti-terrorist
forces. He insists that the ‘distinctions can be reflected in practical methods of
counter-terrorism’ but offers no examples. To me, the list seems more
appropriate to the courtroom than to police work or military activity in the
field.
But Kasher’s argument about the importance of ‘respecting the human
dignity of persons in military uniform’ (which, he says, standard just war
theory doesn’t do) is clearly intended to allow greater latitude to soldiers in
combat, whenever civilians are at risk. Kasher and I agree on the central
importance of this question: how much risk must soldiers bear in order to
reduce the risk they impose on enemy civilians? But the conversation he
describes between the state and one of its soldiers makes the question too
simple
for it seems that the soldier must accept a very great risk or none at
all. My own conversations with soldiers and former soldiers suggest that
many of them are willing to accept some risk, and that seems right, even if we
cannot easily say how much. Does it matter if the soldier is fighting justly or
unjustly? Perhaps McMahan would say that it does. Is there a difference if the
soldier is a volunteer or a conscript? Perhaps Kasher would say that there is.
But I am inclined to the view that the soldier’s responsibility derives from the
weapon in his hands; it doesn’t matter how it got there or whether it is serving
a righteous cause. I agree strongly with Kasher, however, that the first
responsibility for civilian deaths in the circumstances he imagines lies with the
terrorists who use civilians as shields. This use of civilians certainly reduces
the risks that soldiers are bound to accept
but not to zero.
I was especially pleased to read Barrie Paskins’s essay and to find myself
criticized for my ‘non-statist’ position; most of my critics have made exactly
the opposite charge. I think that Paskins gets me right, and I find his
arguments both provoking and, in part, persuasive. His essay points toward
what might be called ‘articles of reconciliation’ between realism and just war
theory, and I hope that I will have occasion in the future to explore what form
those articles might take.
Here I will respond only to one point, where Paskins directly asks for a
response
on the treatment of prisoners of war and of captured (suspected)
terrorists. It seems to be the position of the US government (at this moment,
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but I hope not forever) that the latter group is entitled neither to the
‘benevolent quarantine’ owed to PoWs nor to the protections owed to
accused criminals. Captured (suspected) terrorists seem to have no rights
whatsoever, which is not a morally acceptable human condition. But I would
be willing to listen to realist arguments about which status, prisoner of war or
accused criminal, is preferable. Or perhaps we need to invent a new status,
with its own standard protections.
On the interrogation of prisoners, I would strongly endorse the position of
the Gardiner Report, as Paskins describes it. There are hypothetical cases,
and perhaps actual cases, in which the ‘rough treatment’ of a prisoner might
save many lives, but I would not try to draft a rule to accommodate those
cases
for the very good prudential and moral reasons that Paskins provides.
Another deep agreement.
Jean Elshtain and I have identical views on the crime of terrorism and the
need to oppose it with moral firmness, sustained political commitment, and
police or military force. We seem to disagree about exactly when a terrorist
regime can be militarily attacked and overthrown. But neither of us would
support an attack to end the ordinary brutality of an authoritarian state that
was just like all the other authoritarian states. And both of us favor a strong
military response to mass murder and ethnic cleansing. So the range of our
disagreement is narrow. I concede that just as a preemptive response to
aggression is justified, so would a preemptive response to massacre be
justified. But that assumes that we know a massacre is being planned and
organized, and that it will begin very soon. Against more distant and
speculative threats, where our knowledge is less certain, I am inclined to think
that we can respond only with political and economic pressure and then with
force short of war. We can, of course, work politically to ‘change’ regimes
likely to act murderously long before the murders begin
indeed, at any time.
But war is and should be, as Elshtain agrees, very hard to justify.