Collective War and Individualistic Ethics

Abstract

WAR EVER MORALLY JUSTIFIED? Any theory of a just war must, of course, define the conditions mandating war in terms of state behavior. But this is not enough, for it is morally obtuse to offer an answer to the question "When may we fight the enemy state?" without also focusing explicitly on the question "How can we kill all these (enemy) persons?" A clear indication of suppressing this latter question is adherence to a doctrine of "total war." Where the specter of an "enemy collective" has completely displaced attention to individual persons, then indeed justification appears to be required only for the state act of going to war without further (moral) regard for the means and the cost in human lives. The alternative to "total war" is a war ethic, which distinguishes between permitted and prohibited bloodshed. The fundamental distinction of the war ethic (or "war convention")' is between enemy soldiers and civilians. Its primary tenet is that, unlike the killing of soldiers in combat, killing enemy civilians is no better than ordinary murder. Thus the problem of justifying bloodshed in battle-which is the focus of this discussion-is significantly two-sided, for, on the terms defined, an account of the license for killing soldiers is worth having only if it does not, by the same token, allow the slaying of civilians. Some initial formulations of the war ethic in contemporary discourse dubiously employed the term "innocent" in defining the class of protected AUTHOR'S NOTE: An early draft of this essay was presented at the "Philosophy, Ethics and Public Affairs" seminar at the Princeton University Centerfor Human Values in early 1992. 1 wish to thank the various participantsfor their helpful comments and criticism. I am particularly thankful for comments by Harry Frankfurt, Amy Guttman, George Kateb, and Michael Walzer, as well as for editorial commentsfrom Political Theory.

Rights-based Justifications for Self-Defense

“…A piano cannot commit a rights violation, he suggests, because it is an object and not a moral agent. 29 Uwe Steinhoff similarly makes the point that an obligation to justify being a threat would not make sense because one cannot be obliged to do things which are beyond one's control. 30 So I can have no right that the falling body not kill me and, Zohar argues, if the person, as moral agent, is not about to violate my right not to be killed, then it is misleading to say that he is "about to kill me."…”

Can Wars Be Fought Justly? The Necessity Condition Put to the Test

“…Zohar's suggestion that the morality of war is a dual one, comprising both collectivist and individualist dimensions, sounds much more plausible. 28 But within such a morality, there is no reason why the necessity condition should apply only to defensive acts against the enemy collective, at the level of jus ad bellum , and not to defensive acts against enemy individuals, at the level of jus in bello .…”

The Morality of Assassination: A Response to Gross

“…To this, Gross might reply by saying, à la Zohar (1993), that the collectivist view does not deny the status of soldiers as individuals, but merely adds to it a collectivist perspective. But this reply would bring us back to square one, because if soldiers are seen also as individual human beings, how is it that the differences between them in terms of moral and material innocence make absolutely no moral difference when they are considered as objects for attack?…”