Abstract
According to “epistemic-based contingent pacifism” a) there are virtually no wars which we know to be just, and b) it is morally impermissible to wage a war unless we know that the war is just. Thus it follows that there is no war which we are morally permitted to wage. The first claim (a) seems to follow from widespread disagreement among just war theorists over which wars, historically, have been just. I will argue, however, that a source of our inability to confidently distinguish just from unjust wars lies in how we evaluate “morally heterogeneous” wars—i.e., wars with just and unjust aims. Specifically, the practice of reaching a univocal evaluation of a morally heterogeneous war as a whole by aggregating the evaluations of that war’s just and unjust aims is wrongheaded, because it undermines the action-guiding character of jus ad bellum. We ought instead to adopt what I call the “disaggregate approach” to jus ad bellum, according to which we evaluate the various aims of a war individually, without aggregating them into an evaluation of the war as a whole. Adopting this approach will eliminate a source of our disagreement over which wars have been just, and will ipso fact eliminate a basis for epistemic-based contingent pacifism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Robert L. Holmes rejects consequentialist arguments in favor of killing innocents and claims that if the actions necessary for waging war cannot be justified, then the war itself cannot be justified (1989, p. 181). This combination commits him to conditional pacifism.
See Bazargan, Saba “Varieties of Contingent Pacifism”, forthcoming in “How We Fight”, Oxford University Press, eds. Helen Frowe & Gerald Lang
Jeff McMahan has recently argued that the restriction on killing cannot be as stringent as the proportionality-based contingent pacifist thinks it is, since it is (he argues) inconsistent with accepted standards of risk-imposition. But I argue in See Bazargan, Saba “Varieties of Contingent Pacifism”, forthcoming in “How We Fight”, Oxford University Press, eds. Helen Frowe & Gerald Lang that McMahan’s argument is unsound.
Jeff McMahan makes this point: “Even the acknowledged experts—the theorists of the just war—disagree among themselves about the justice of virtually every war” (McMahan, Killing in War, 2009, p. 120).
Larry May makes this point: “It may be that there are true just war experts out there—that is, people who have exemplary knowledge of the theory and the facts, but I do not know of any such people in the history of the just war tradition” (May 2011, p. 101).
For more on our inability to reliably determine which wars are unjust, with a special emphasis on the Second World War, see (Rodin, The Problem with Prevention, 2007).
I focus on this version of pacifism since it is more defensible than absolute or conditional pacifism, and since proportionality-based contingent pacifists have not offered a positive argument in favor of the more stringent version of the proportionality constraint presumed by their theory.
Jeff McMahan similarly writes that it unclear how the just and unjust elements or phases of a war “can be aggregated to yield an overall judgment of a war as a whole” (McMahan, Just Cause for War, 2005, p. 20).
It is also important not to confuse a just cause with a casus belli. The casus belli is the act which provides the just cause. For example, defense against a foreign invasion is a paradigmatic just cause for war, whereas the invasion itself is the war’s casus belli. For more on this distinction, see (Toner 2010, p. 92).
I’m borrowing this terminology from an earlier work [See Bazargan, Saba "The Permissibility of Aiding and Abetting Unjust Wars", Journal of Moral Philosophy, 8 (2011) 513–529]. All the aims I mention throughout this are ultimate aims unless stated otherwise.
Some just war theorists fold the necessity and proportionality conditions into the just cause criterion—they reject the view that the just cause criterion is merely a necessary condition for satisfying jus ad bellum. See, for example, (Steinhoff 2007, p. 25), and (O’Brien 1981, p. 81). This is not the position I take, though I believe that everything I say can be translated into the terms of those who treat the necessity and proportionality conditions as internal to the just cause criterion.
Not all averted evils will be weighed. Suppose that one of the evils averted by achieving the war’s just aims is a worldwide economic recession that the war prevents by stimulating economic activity. This does count in favor of the war. See: (Hurka, Proportionality in the Morality of War, 2005).
Clearly, we cannot dissolve the relevance problem and thereby salvage the aggregative approach by adopting non-maximizing versions of consequentialism, such as satisficing or progressive consequentialism. A permission to refrain from doing what makes things go best does not entail a permission to commit unproductive harms. For more on satisficing consequentialism, which requires only that we make things go sufficiently better (rather than best) see (Slote and Pettit 1984). For more on progressive consequentialism, which requires only that we make things better relative to the status quo ante, see (Jamieson and Elliot 2009).
It is possible, however, for there to be unjust wars that are nonetheless justified. See (McMahan, Just Cause for War, 2005). I’m putting aside such cases here, though the action-guiding constraint could be re-worded appropriately: “if a war is unjust (and if it isn’t justified) then we ought to cease pursuing that war’s aims.”
(Karsh, The Iran-Iraq War 1980–1988, 2002, p. 36)
(Karsh, p. 36)
(Karsh, p. 38)
Hurka writes in supports of McMahan’s early view in (Hurka, Liability and Just Cause, 2007, p. 19).
It should be noted that even if DA is correct, it can be appropriate to say that a war is just if all its ultimate aims are just—or that the war is unjust if all its aims are unjust. In this case we can make claims that look like ad bellum judgments when the war is morally homogenous. But these claims won’t be genuine ad bellum judgments of the war in toto, given DA. Rather, the claim that a morally homogenous wars is just or unjust, is merely an abbreviation of the judgment that each of the war’s aims is just or unjust.
References
Bazargan, Saba (2011). The Permissibility of Aiding and Abetting Unjust Wars. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 8 513–529.
Dreier, J. (1993). Structures of normative theories. The Monist, 76, 22–40.
Holmes, R. L. (1989). On war and morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hurka, T. (2007). Liability and just cause. Ethics & International Affairs, 21(2), 199–218.
Hurka, T. (2005). Proportionality in the morality of war. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 33, 34–66.
Jamieson, D., & Elliot, R. (2009). Progressive consequentialism. Philosophical Perspectives, 23, 241–251.
Johnson, J. T. (2001). Morality and contemporary warfare. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kagan, S. (1988). The additive fallacy. Ethics, 99(1), 5–31.
Karsh, E. (2002). The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988. UK: Osprey Publishing.
Keegan, J. (2001). War and our world (1st ed.). New York: Vintage.
Louise, J. (2004). Relativity of value and the consequentialist umbrella. Philosophical Quarterly, 54(217), 518–536.
May, L. (2011). Contingent pacifism and the moral risks of participating in war. Public Affairs Quarterly, 25(2), 95–112.
McMahan, J. (2005). Just cause for war. Ethics & International Affairs, 19, 1–21.
McMahan, J. (2009). Killing in war. USA: Oxford University Press.
McMahan, J., & McKim, R. (1993). The just war and the gulf war. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23(4), 501–541.
O’Brien, W. (1981). The conduct of just and limited war. New York: Praeger.
Portmore, D. W. (2007). Consequentializing moral theories. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88, 39–73.
Rodin, D. (2006). The ethics of asymmetric war. In R. Sorabji (Ed.), The ethics of war: Shared problems in different traditions (pp. 153–168). Aldershot Hants: Ashgate.
Rodin, D. (2007). The problem with prevention. In H. Shue & D. Rodin (Eds.), Preemption: Military action and moral justification (pp. 143–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slote, M., & Pettit, P. (1984). Satisficing consequentialism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 58, 139–163.
Steinhoff, U. (2007). On the ethics of war and terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Toner, C. (2010). The logical structure of just war theory. Journal of Ethics, 14(2), 81–102.
Acknowledgments
This paper was written with the support of funds from the Hellman Foundation. I would also like to thank Cecile Fabre for comments on an earlier draft.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bazargan, S. Morally Heterogeneous Wars. Philosophia 41, 959–975 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9477-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9477-7