In this new book, Larry May develops and defends what he claims is a special and new outlook on war: "contingent" pacifism. Pacifists hold that all war is unjustified. Contingent pacifists do not; they agree that it is at least possible for war to be justified. But they also think that very few wars are just and, in particular, that probably no current war or war in the recent past was, nor will any foreseeable future wars be, just. In these latter claims, they seem to disagree with what I shall lamely call "most people." To us it seems obvious that our participation in some wars is justified, presumably a good many more than contingent pacifists think.--Jan Narveson (2015) reviewing Contingent Pacifism: Revisiting Just War Theory @NDPR
Narveson's review of May's book has been bugging me since it first appeared a year and a half ago.* Because I am not an expert on these matters, I hesitated to write about it. But the irritation has not left, so I'll to try to articulate the source of my annoyance, while remaining agnostic on the merits of May's position. This agnosticism is, in part, due to the fact that I still have not gotten around to reading the book. But it is primarily due to the fact that what I object to, in part, is that it seems that in his review Narveson never gets around to grappling with May's position.
It is a peculiar fact that Narveson turns himself into a spokesperson for most people. We are not told the source of his authority or his epistemic access to their thoughts. We do learn that he thinks his words are representative of most people's views (thoughts, opinions, beliefs--do we know how to really characterize most people's sensibilities toward just war theory?---) because he uses first person plural (us); we may, in fact, understand him as identifying with most people. (We ignore the possibility that they may ask him, who asked you to speak on our behalf?) He never tells us who is included in most people, but from contextual cues one gets the sense that for Narveson most people are (North) Americans that are not Jihadists. Given that Americans make up a small minority of the world's population at a given time (and from the vantage point of (to quote Narveson (see below): "several millennia") it is simply false that Narveson speaks for most people simpliciter. In fact, he ignores the perspectives of the vast majority of human beings to have lived.
Now, I do not mean to suggest that all philosophers have to turn themselves into public gadflies challenging their people's commitments; quite a few respectable philosophers have turned themselves into spokespeople for common sense for a long time. But common sense has two advantages not available to Narveson: (i) one can be committed to common sense while recognizing that few other people embrace it consciously; because (ii) common sense is a philosopher's construct. While there is an interesting, complex relationship between common sense and what most people think, (iii) common sense is not a person or a people, and so cannot be held accountable (in the same way as people can). To be sure, I am not here arguing against philosophers turning themselves into spokespeople of others by being in their service (say as Dotson does [recall]; see also here on public philosophy). Of course, because philosophy is not a democratic contest, it is possible that Narveson and (forgive the locution) his people are right. So, let me turn to Narveson's central challenge to May:
The fundamental [problem] is this: all of us, I would hope, are "against war." What I mean by that is that we all think that war is a bad thing; we would prefer a world in which what we call "war" doesn't happen -- that international and internal political disagreements are never resolved by force of arms. Unfortunately, to say that is pretty unhelpful in almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied for several millennia.
More to the point is what, I should think, most of us mean: that in every war, somebody started it, and that that party shouldn't have. That somebody, we think, was/is an aggressor: he is trying to extract some political benefit by the use of lethal force against harmless people, and it is morally wrong to do that. So all wars are wrong in the sense that they happen only because somebody is committing wrongful, unjust actions. This, however, implies nothing in the way of pacifisms. For we also think that if A is attacked, and is innocent, then A has the right to defend himself. What is to be justified is not starting a war, but deciding to use military force to defend those who are attacked by the aggressive party. Is May disputing that? He makes many well-enough-taken points about the dangers of implementing this principle, but he doesn't seem to be fundamentally disputing it, as the out-and-out pacifist would.
Let's agree that this bifurcation is prima facie simplistic. Sometimes it is difficult to say who or what is "being aggressive." But suppose, as most of us surely think, that often it is decidable.
Let's grant, for the sake of argument, that (a) what really matters morally is who started the war and is, thereby, the aggressor;** and that (b) there are facts of the matter that may well determine who started it. But for (b) to work in practice we need an impartial, resourceful outsider/tribunal to establish them. In order to establish (b) we can't rely on our press because they may be well be influenced by nationalism or the government or commercial considerations (not to mention production of so-called fake news]; we also can't rely on our own government, which (when it is the hegemonic power) may well be an interested party (leaving aside the possibility that the government is controlled by commercial or military or foreign interest). I have no idea if most of us would agree that it is best not to be a judge in your own case, but considerations of (well) fairness suggest it. So, in moments of crisis it is by no means obvious that there is mechanism that can decide the matter impartially and fairly in real time (at limited cost, etc.). I am no fan of 'surely,' but surely if we are going to be resolutely realist about the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied then we should not ignore the non-trivial obstacles to the implementation of certain principles.
As an aside, when I was a student, in the early days after the cold war ended, I was, I guess, a liberal interventionist; I believed that wars sanctioned by the UN and in accord with international law were justified, especially if they promoted humanitarian ends. American might would secure an international legal order. I had not yet fully grasped that (i) all wars tend to generate enormous amount of human suffering of innocent (and not so innocent) bystanders; (ii) that unique American hegemony entailed that all its wars of choice would also serve partial, primarily American commercial interests; (iii) that establishing an international liberal order on the basis of overwhelming force entails, in practice, open-ended (airstrike) warfare around the globe. (Leaving aside that the this warfare is accompanied by a rhetoric in which those that oppose us are savage, barbaric, etc. [recall my criticism of McMahan]) Given the existence of open-ended warfare, I have grown more realistic and, thereby, a growing sympathy for moral positions that prevent intellectuals like me from becoming spokespeople for the slaughter of innocents (as collateral damage because they were born in unsavory regimes or find themselves in a civil war we, well some of us, at least, are fueling).
Rather than confronting the shaky epistemic foundations of his own position, Narveson decides that the really important (big")"moral question here is are "we...supposed to let the bad guys win? -- on the ground that the innocent may never be sacrificed?" (He then adds a few more rhetorically charged examples.) Again, Narveson is rather quick in deploying the first person plural, but let's leave that aside. Let's think about how to answer this question; if we take the vantage point of "almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied" the answer is plainly, often yes. If the vantage point is theodicy, then the answer may well be, plainly, no (although God's ways may be opaque to us). Of course, morality may well in particular cases suggest answers that are neither the former nor the latter. For example, one can grant others the (let's stipulate) legitimate right to self-defense and still recognize that this will entail their defeat. (This happened in several cases he discusses.) Even the invidualized morality of Narveson and his people does not impose on us an open-ended demand to sacrifice ourselves (prosperity, lives, etc.) to defend innocents and their human rights.**
That is, one may well be non-pacifist about other people's right(s) to self-defense and incline toward pacifism when one is asked about the morality of the interventions by a military hegemon. (This is not May's contingent pacificism, but it is not far removed from his spirit.) Of course, in practice the distinction is not clear-cut; NATO, for example finesses the point by treating an attack on one as an attack on all. Moreover, and more important, there may well be a-moral justifications for intervention. Throughout his piece Narveson pretends that if one inclines toward pacifist views one is thereby ipse facto willing to condemn other people's military actions (including "defending legitimate interests").
But a pacifist may well allow that morality is just one dimension from which to evaluate behavior. On the surface, Narveson agrees. He writes that "Among humane and reasonable people, all military activity is strictly subordinate to the political ends being pursued." Indeed, and the pacificist may well come to recognize that some political ends infringe on her morality. She may well decide that short of Stoic withdrawal, in our fallen world, our empire is politically preferable than the alternatives.
Strikingly enough, this position is unavailable to Narveson because he continues the sentence just quoted with "those ends must be in terms of human lives and liberties being defended and promoted -- not only ours but also those of the citizens of other states, or other civilians involved or significantly affected by the war in question." To simplify: purported morality here becomes the only (legitimate?) political end. Not surprisingly, in practice, this particular morality offers liberal democracies a permanent-moral-get-out-of-jail-card. I don't often speak from the perspective of "almost all versions of the world we humans have, socially speaking, occupied for several millennia," and I have no special fondness for Carl Schmitt, but from that perspective this position is only recognizable as a species of uncritical ideology.
*Larry May was a senior colleague when I was a post-doc at Washingtin University, St. Louis, in 2003-2005.
**I am not so sure about (a) not because it is simplistic but because it applies the morality relevant to a childrens's playground to militarized conflict. But I am aware that modern philosophers are fond of applying personal morality to the morality, if any, of war, and this is not the place for a critique of that.
I haven't read anything but your blog post. Still, Narveson would be on safe ground if he asserted that "most people" on both sides support (their side of) most wars, at least initially. In practice, and, IIRC in theory as well, this is the standard conclusion of most practitioners of "just war theory".
Having followed the same kind of path as you, from liberal interventionism to contingent pacifism, I find it mystifying that this position is so strongly and widely held. But it is.
Posted by: John Quiggin | 04/27/2017 at 01:01 AM