Class 13.1: The Ethics of War
Today is the final session in our brief tour through some of the places where we can look in political philosophy for ideas about how to manage conflicts that are ongoing. We find these ideas in political philosophy because that is where philosophers have paid most attention to these problems because they seem large-scale and unavoidable. But as we have seen, many times similar issues arise at different levels of scale.
Our reading for today is from Jeff McMahan, whose work on the ethics of war in many ways asks us to think about similarities between different scales of conflicts - between the ethics of self-defense as it applies to individuals, and how it applies in the context of war. Our topic for today is the idea from the ethics of war known as the “moral equality of the combatants”.
An Ethics of War?
You might be surprised that there is such a thing as an ethics of war. War, you might think, is what happens when ethics breaks down, and that there are no moral constraints on how to fight a war short of winning. After all, every war involves killing people, and killing people is normally morally wrong.
But it turns out that most people who have reflected on this question historically have come around to the conclusion that war is not a morality-free zone, but instead simply a space in which different principles apply, for explicable reasons. If another country unjustly invades in pursuit of your natural resources or to carry off your population as slaves or to commit atrocities against you and your co-citizens, fighting back is surely at least as justified as fighting back against an attacker on the street. So at least if you are on the just side of a war, war is not a zone free of morality, but rather a space in which some kinds of killings, like other kinds of defensive killings, are justified, rather than wrong.
But that doesn’t mean that anything goes, because self-defense doesn’t ordinarily justify just anything. What you do in defense of yourself needs to be proportional to what you are protecting. So you can’t just destroy the lives of innocent civilians for no reason, and you can’t torture enemy soldiers, and you can’t commit genocide, in order to win a war. All of these are war crimes. So there is an ethics of war.
Thinking about the ethics of war is interesting for us in this class, because it is a special case of thinking about how to manage an existing conflict. This special case only applies to the case of war, of course, and not all conflicts involve war. But one of the important views about the ethics of war that we will discuss says that there are special “rules of engagement” that apply to both sides of a war. This is a much more general question that applies in many other forms of conflict - whether there are special “rules of engagement”, and if so, what they are.
Orthodox Just War Theory
For hundreds of years there has been a pretty well-developed understanding of the ethics of war - a collection of principles that we can collectively call “orthodox just war theory”. One of the central principles of orthodox just war theory is that different moral principles apply to leaders than to common soldiers. Leaders are accountable for the decision of whether to go to war. And while some wars are good wars - just defenses against unjust aggression - other wars are bad wars - acts of unjust aggression. The question of whether to go to war is called by the Latin phrase (because these ideas were developed when people still wrote in Latin) “jus ad bellum”, which means the morality of starting wars. The rules of jus ad bellum apply to leaders. They include principles like “only fight in defense”.
In contrast, according to orthodox just war theory there is another set of rules that apply to soldiers. These are rules about how to conduct a war, rather than whether to go to war in the first place. These rules are called “just in bello”, or the morality of conduct within a war.
According to the orthodox view, these two sets of rules are so different that the very same rules apply to the soldiers on both sides of the war, no matter whether they are on the just side of the war or not. The morality of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have nothing to do with one another, according to this orthodox view. In the last few decades, these orthodox ideas have been challenged by revisionists about the ethics of war. The leading revisionist is the author of our reading for today, Jeff McMahan.
Jeff McMahan
The author of today’s reading is Jeff McMahan, a moral philosopher who currently teaches at Oxford University and is one of the leading scholars in the world on the ethics of harm. McMahan’s work has systematically questioned assumptions that have been fundamental to the orthodox view about the ethics of war for hundreds of years. In our reading for today, he challenges one such assumption: the assumption that soldiers fighting on each side of a war are in an important sense “moral equals”, regardless of whether the war is just or unjust.
The Moral Equality of the Combatants
The thesis called the “moral equality of the combatants” says that the very same rules apply to soldiers on both sides of the war. Neither one is allowed to do more or less than the other side in order to prosecute the war, and soldiers on neither side are morally protected more or less than those on the other side against what the other side might do to them. It’s as if war is a high-stakes game with unusual rules but fairness requires the same rules for both sides.
McMahan argues that this assumption is false. Soldiers fighting on the unjust side of a war are no different, McMahan claims, than any other unjust attacker. It is permissible to defend yourself against an unjust attack, but it’s not permissible to defend yourself against being defended against because you attacked unjustly.
