Terrorism and Just War - Michael Walzer

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen I'm Peter kadar director of the Institute for Advanced Study and it's my pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon to this lecture today our speaker speaker is Michael Ward Sir Michael is one of America's foremost political thinkers his work addresses a wide range of topics in political theory and moral philosophy including political obligation just an unjust war nationalism and ethnicity economic justice and the welfare state after 27 years as a professor in the school of social science he will retire on the 1st of July and become professor emeritus Michael obtained his first bachelor's is first degree from Brandeis in 1956 in his PhD from Harvard in 1961 he is an assistant professor at Princeton University from 1962 to 1966 when he joined the Harvard faculty he was professor of government at Harvard from 1968 to 1980 when he came to the Institute as professor in the School of Social Science and he was named UPS foundation professor later Michael has served as co-editor of the political journal dissent since 1975 as a contributing editor of the New Republic instance since 1977 and as a member of the board of governors of the Hebrew University since 1974 amongst very many other roles today professor Walsh's title is terrorism and just war thank you I knew I was getting close to retirement when a magazine started coming in the mail called Renaissance for New Jersey's mature adults there are indeed days these days when I feel like a mature adult this place the Institute for Advanced Study has been a wonderful place in which to mature and I want to begin today by expressing my enormous gratitude for the years here to all the people who make the Institute's wonders possible my faculty colleagues the director in the administration the endlessly helpful staff in all its parts the trustees and the friends I hope to hang around for a few more years as an emeritus professor looking forward to those occasional days when I feel like an immature adult in in recent years terrorism is the subject than which I am most often asked to lecture both here at home and in Europe I first gave a version of an early version of this lecture in Spain after the Madrid bombings and I've been rewriting it ever since and occasionally working bits of it into other lectures if some of you have heard those bits I apologize for that this is the final version it will appear soon in a collection of my essays I want to ask first why terrorism is wrong which may seem like an easy question though it's often answered badly and then I will consider the choice of terror as a political strategy out of all the possible strategies and finally I will worry briefly about some of the problems involved in waging the war on terrorism which is mostly and this will be one of my points not war terrorism is the random killing of innocent people in the hope of creating pervasive fear the fear can serve different political purposes one of which so I will argue should figure in our moral understanding of the phenomenon but it's easy to imagine a terrorist organization as it might be portrayed by Franz Kafka say that has no purpose at all randomness and innocence are the crucial elements in the definition the critique of this kind of killing hangs especially on the idea of innocence which is borrowed from Just War Theory innocence functions in the theory as a term of art it describes the group of non-combatants civilians men and women who are not materially engaged in the war effort these people are innocent whatever their government and country are doing and whether or not they are in favor of what is being done the opposite of innocent is not guilty but engaged disengaged civilians are innocent without regard to their personal morality or politics but why are all civilians immune from attack while soldiers are collectively at risk according to the rules of use in Bello justice in combat once the fighting has begun it's entirely legitimate to kill soldiers at random as they come within range and yet a lot of soldiers are not actual combatants they serve behind the lines they are involved in transportation the provision of food the storing of supplies they work in offices they rarely carry weapons and no soldiers are always combatants they rest and play eat and sleep read newspapers write letters some of them are in the army by choice but some of them are there unwillingly if they'd been given a choice they'd be doing something else how can they all be subject to attack simply because they bear the name and wear the uniform of a soldier why isn't innocence as a term of art why doesn't innocence as a term of art describe some of them some of the time on the other hand if soldiers are rightly subject to attack all of them all the time if they are collectively at risk then why can't civilians as a class also be legitimate targets these civilians are members of a political community by a clear majority let's say they elected a government that is waging an unjust war and so they share responsibility for immoral possibly criminal acts why aren't the terrorists right when they say that membership and responsibility make civilians collectively vulnerable to attack I'm going to take that question seriously despite my skepticism about the seriousness of many of the people who asked it the answer has to do with the meaning of membership in an army and in civilian society the army is an organized discipline trained and highly purposeful collective and all its members contribute to the achievement of its ends even soldiers who don't carry weapons have been taught how to use them and they are tightly connected by way of the services they provide to the actual users it doesn't matter whether they are volunteers or conscripts their individual moral preferences are not at issue they have been mobilized for a singular purpose and what they do advances that purpose for its sake they are isolated from the general public housed in camps and bases all their needs provided for by the state in time of war they posed a unified threat the Society of civilians is not at all like that civilians have many different purposes they have been trained in many different pursuits and professions they participate in a highly differentiated set of organization and associations whose internal discipline compared to that of an army is commonly very loose they don't live in barracks but in their own houses and apartments they don't live with other soldiers but with parents spouses and children they are not all of an age but include the very old and the very young they are not provided for by the government but provide for themselves and one another as citizens they have different views on public issues many of them take no part at all in political life and again some of them are children even Olivia Maas cannot transform this group of people into anything like an organized military collective but they are a collective of another kind they are together with their sons and daughters in the army of people whether they're people hood is ethnic or national and character or wholly political constituted only by their citizenship doesn't matter they identify themselves as French short Irish or Bulgarians they commonly share a language in a history and in some prosaic sense of the term they share a destiny that is their individual futures are closely linked and this linkage is especially tight when their country is at war implicit in the theory of just war is a theory of just peace whatever happens to these two armies whichever one wins or loses whatever the nature of the battles or the extent of the casualties the people's on both sides must be accommodated at the end the central principle of yoson Bello that civilians cannot be targeted or deliberately killed means that they will be present at the conclusion this is the deepest meaning of noncombatant immunity it doesn't only protect individual non-combatants it also protects the group to which they belong just as the destruction of the group cannot be a legitimate purpose of war so it cannot be a legitimate practice in war civilians are immune from attack as ordinary men and women disengaged from the business of warfare they are also immune as members of a human community that is not a military organization terrorists attack both these immunities they devalue not only the individuals they kill but also the group to which the individuals belong they signal a political intention to destroy or remove or radically subordinate these people individually and this people collectively that's the long term purpose of the fear they inspire hence while all terrorists are murderers all murderers are not terrorists most murderers intend to kill specific people terrorists kill at random within a specific group of people the message they deliver is directed at the group we don't want you here we will not accept you or make our peace with you as fellow citizens or partners in any political project you are not candidates for equality or even coexistence this is most obviously the message of nationalist terror aimed at a rival nation and of religious terror aimed at infidels or heretics state terror is also most often focused on a collective that is thought to be oppositional or potentially so sometimes an ethnic group sometimes a socio-economic class the Tatars the Kurds the Culex the urban middle class anyone with a college education and so on but sometimes state agencies use random killing disappearances arrests and torture to terrorize the whole population of their country now it's not Massacre or removal that is being signaled but tyranny that is radical subordination in fact tyranny and terror are always closely connected tyrants ruled by terror as Aristotle first pointed out and when terrorists out of power seize power they are likely to rule in the same way intimidation not deliberation is their modus operandi but isn't terror sometimes a more modest strategy aimed only at changing the policy of a government the innocent people targeted are the people this government is supposed to protect and the message is that they will be at risk until the government surrenders or withdraws or concede some set of demands once that happens the killing will stop so the terrorists say and the innocent people those of them who are still alive won't be forced to abandon their homes or submit to a tyrannical regime consider the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 this was surely an act of terrorism innocent men and women were killed in order to spread fear across a nation and force the surrender of its government and this action went along with a demand for unconditional surrender which is one of the forms that tyranny takes in war time in the end the United States did not insist on unconditional surrender and the occupation of Japan was not a permanent subordination of the Japanese people to American power but this only means that the message terrorists send is not always acted out later on there can't be any doubt the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki implied at the moment the bombs were dropped a radical devaluation of these lives and a generalized threat to the Japanese people sometimes perhaps terrorists do have limited purposes I don't I don't want to rule that out by definition it's not a conceptual truth that people who act for limited ends can't be terrorists I only mean to suggest what terrorism commonly signifies in the political world and most importantly what it signifies to the men and women who are threatened by it for it is certainly true that whenever violence is random directed against innocent men and women its victims have good reason to be skeptical about claims that the terrorists have a limited agenda from the perspective of its victims which is morally very important terror is a totalizing practice random murder implies universal vulnerability and the implication is often realized in practice Stalinist terror to take an obvious example was not designed to win the class struggle in the countryside by threatening the Culex it was designed to get rid of the cool acts Algerian terrorists probably intended what they achieved the removal of Europeans from Algerian soil they had a lot of help it has to be said from the Europeans Palestinian terrorists have been remarkably honest about their intentions they don't claim to have limited purposes though the claim is sometimes made on their behalf perhaps Basque terrorists would settle for a state of their own they don't intend the destruction of Spain but they may well intend the ethnic and ideological cleansing of the Basque Country it seems best to take seriously the signal that terrorists send of course most terrorists don't want to be identified and judged by the signal they send but rather by the goals they announce not the destruction removal or radical subordination of a nation or a religious community or a social class but victory in a just war national liberation or the triumph of their own religion and why shouldn't we identify them first of all by reference to their stated ends rather than to the means they employ I've often heard it said that a war against terrorism makes no sense since terror is an instrument not a full-scale politics like say communism or Islamic radicalism but surely one of the most important reasons for opposing communism and Islamic radicalism is that these ideologies have served and do serve in the real world to inspire and justify terrorism the instruments one chooses are often morally defining as in the case of the members of murder incorporated say or the Mafia whose long-term goal making a lot of money is shared with many other people and entirely acceptable in our society no doubt the goals of criminal gangs fail to justify the means they choose but what is equally important the goals do not serve to identify the actors members of the mafia may think of themselves as businessmen but we rightly call them gangsters similarly men and women who bomb urban residential areas or organized massacres or make people disappear or blow themselves up in crowded cafes may think of themselves as political or religious militants or as public officials and civil servants but we rightly call them terrorists and we oppose them or we should oppose them because they are terrorists if we name terrorists by their actions rather than they're supposed goals we are then free to support the goals if we think them just and even actively to pursue them in non terrorist ways we can retrospectively support the u.s. war effort against Japan even while we oppose the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we can work for Algerian independence even while we oppose FLN terrorism we can call for Palestinian statehood while condemning the groups that target Israeli civilians a decent politics often requires a two-front campaign against oppression or occupation but also simultaneously against murder I don't believe the Terrorism can ever be justified but I also I also am uncomfortable defending an absolute ban do justice even if the heavens fall has never seemed to me a plausible moral position in rare and narrowly circumscribed cases it may be possible not to justify but to find excuses for terrorism and I suppose we can all imagine horrific examples I can imagine myself making excuses in the hypothetical case of a terrorist campaign by Jewish militants against German civilians in the 1940s if attacks on civilians had been likely to stop the mass murder of the Jews in fact they would have been highly unlikely to do that the argument from extremity might work in truly extreme circumstances but we have to be very careful here for terrorism as I've been insisting threatens mass murder even when it doesn't reach that far in fact I don't know of any actual terrorist campaign that can be excused in this way despite the common claim of desperation the standard excuses that terrorism is the weapon of the weak used only as a last resort in response to looming catastrophe the standard excuses don't work when what is looming is something less than catastrophe and when there are in fact alternative strategies for dealing with it actual terrorists threaten mass murder in order to oppose or better with the pretence of opposing something less and most often they have the totalizing intentions that their actions signal so this is the wrong of terrorism the murder of the innocent and the creation of a devalued collective a group of men and women who have been deprived of the right to life or alternatively the right to live where they are living they have been denied what may well be the most important of the four freedoms proclaimed by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943 freedom from fear it is the extension of violence or the threat of violence from individuals to groups that is the specific feature of terrorism men and women are targeted because of their ethnic religious or class membership because they are Japanese as at Hiroshima or Protestants in Northern Ireland or Muslims in Gujarat or cool acts in the Ukraine or Jews and Israel or Shiites or Sunnis in Iraq today it is who you are not what you are doing that makes you vulnerable identity is liability and that's a connection that we are morally bound to resist now terror is a strategy that has to be chosen from a wide range of possible strategies it's always a choice for many years I've been insisting that when we think about terrorism we have to imagine a group of people sitting round a table arguing about what ought to be done we don't have minutes of those meetings but we have descriptions of them and we know that they have taken place in all the cases of terrorist activity we also know that some people around the table have argued against the choice of terror and in favor of different forms of struggle mass demonstrations marches strikes civil disobedience or the use of force only against soldiers and policemen terrorism is the choice of some members of the IRA the FLN or the PLO it is not the general will of Irish Catholics or Algerians or Palestinians the American use of the atomic bomb was an executive decision leading figures in the US government and army opposed it including General Eisenhower and Admiral Leahy political culture may have something to do with these choices but it is not determinative just as Asian values as a marquise an has insisted don't mandate opposition to human rights so Irish or Algerian or Palestinian or American values don't explain the acceptance of a terrorist policy at a particular moment in time this is a decision supported by some opposed by others it seems to me an obvious point that the people around the table who say no are the people we should support and this is an important as well as an obvious point because those are often the first people that the terrorists kill the arguments around the table are probably more often strategic than moral but I don't believe that the people sitting there are realists who simply seize political opportunities are driven by necessity that's a that's a standard view in political science and perhaps in in politics generally the terrorists do what they think they have to do and further moral argument is superfluous there is a kind of hard-nosed realism here which seems to me uh turley unrealistic I want to suggest that the arguments about necessity and last resort and all the other strategic arguments made around the table are a facade behind which militants and officials act out their deepest moral and political convictions so consider a case close to the hare Ashima case close in time the British decision to bomb German cities in World War two in the early 1940s British politicians and Generals sitting around a table or around several tables a debated strategic bombing policy should the goal of the RAF be to kill as many German civilians as possible so as to terrorize the enemy and shut down the economy or should the pilots aim only at military targets the debate was conducted so far as I can tell from memoirs and histories entirely in the language of strategy the principle of non combatant immunity was never mentioned I'm working only from secondary sources but I used this example in a in an Institute lecture some years ago and Freeman Dyson was kind enough to say that he thought I was right about how this decision was was made the questions that were asked were what were the probabilities of hitting military targets given the navigational and aiming devices then available what losses would the Air Force suffer if it flew by day so as to aim more precisely what were the likely effects of bombing urban residential area is on civilian morale and then on the production and delivery of military supplies and above all was there anything else to do outside the government a few people raised moral questions about bombing policy inside it was as if there was a ban on moral talk there's no one here but us realists but if you look at the years after the war it turns out that the people who favored bombing residential areas in 1943 were later on advisors and office holders in Tory governments where they continue to defend tough and realistic decision-making and the people who opposed it were on the Left working for labor governments or for the campaign for nuclear disarmament and often making the moral arguments that they didn't make during the war surely their strategic arguments in the 1940s were driven in part at least by their repressed political moral convictions not only by their views on the necessity of killing civilians but also by their views on the rightness or wrongness of doing that so when terrorists tell us that they had no choice there was nothing else to do terror was their last resort we have to remind ourselves that there were people around the table arguing against each of those propositions and we also have to recognize that these strategic considerations are not the sole and possibly not the most important factor shaping the argument the overall politics and morality the worldview of the participants is also a factor in the case of contemporary terrorists they are in fact answering questions like these do you acknowledge the human value of your enemies are you prepared for a compromise settlement can you imagine a future state in which you share power but do not rule this is what is actually its sake around the table and we can see the wrong of terrorism reiterated in the negative answers that come from its advocates now once the decision is made and the terrorists are doing their work how should we fight against them I'm going to assume the value of doing that and I'm not going to consider here efforts to do something else undercover of the war against terrorism there isn't any worthy political cause that can't be exploited for unworthy and unrelated purposes but my subject here is the cause not the exploitation I'm also not going to try to describe the necessary political response to terror I take it for granted that a political response is necessary but fighting for now in scare quotes fighting is also necessary the first answer to the question about how to fight is simple in principle though often difficult in practice not terroristic Lee that means without targeting innocent men and women that principle derives again from the theory of just war though the war against terrorism is closer as we will see to police work than to actual combat and so there is a second answer to the question about how to fight within the constraints of constitutional democracy many politicians today insist that it is impossible to live with either of these limits they sit around the table and argue for prison camps like Guantanamo or the use of harsh interrogation methods like waterboarding we should be the people at the table who say no I will focus now on what that means with regard to innocent and at-risk civilians it's necessary to insist at the outset the people the terrorists claim to represent are not themselves complicit in the terror whatever their emotional connection or disconnection and we know that they are often strongly connected they are not Material supporters they fit my description of the civilian collective the terrorists do have material support but their supporters are particular men and women not the people generally at the end of the war against terrorism as at the end of any other war the people generally have to be accommodated the terrorists collectivise the guilt of the other side insisting that every single person is implicated in the wrongful policies of the government the anti-terrorist must collective eyes in the opposite way insisting on the innocence of the people generally like the police they have to look for the particular individuals who are planning providing materials support for or actually carrying out terrorist operations it is a political and moral mistake then to engage in collective punishments destroying the family home where a suicide bomber lived for example as the Israelis have done on the assumption that the families supported the bomber or could have prevented the bombing that might sometimes be true that is sometimes true but it is often untrue in domestic society the police are not allowed to act like that demolishing the homes of Mafia relatives say because they live off the family business nor should armies or special forces be allowed to do that if a particular relative is complicit in the crime then the anti-terrorists have to find some way to apprehend and punish that person collective punishment treats people as enemies who may be as different from one another in their politics say as were the people in the cafe or on the bus the the suicide bomber attacked the terrorists hold that there's no such thing as collateral or as the dictionary says secondary damage all damage for them is primary and they want to do with much damage as they can the more deaths the more fear so anti terrorists have to distinguish themselves by insisting on the category of collateral damage and by doing as little of it as they can the rules of use in Bello apply soldiers must aim only at military targets and they must minimize the harm they do to civilians I don't believe the doctrine of double effect as it is usually understood adequately describes what is required here it isn't enough that the first effect the damage to military targets is intended and the second one the harm to civilians is unintended that's not a justification the two effects require two intentions first that the harm that the damage be done and second that the harm be avoided what justice demands is that the army take positive measures accept risks to its own soldiers in order to avoid harm to civilians the same requirement holds for anti terrorists holds more strongly I think insofar as it is mostly police rather than soldiers who are at work in this war and we impose much higher standards of care for civilians on the police than we do on armies in combat this need for care also governs the practice that has come to be called targeted killing it's the Israelis who made this practice famous but I'm going to look at an American example I suspect there are many American examples first though a general word the killing of the political leaders of the enemy state is ruled out by Just War theory as it is by international law because of the assumption that the war will end and should end with a peace agreement negotiated with those same leaders who are taken to be representative figures but this argument applies only to political leaders the heads of the civilian collective it doesn't apply to army officers who are part of the military collective the vulnerability of military leaders is clear if a couple of British commanders in World War two had crossed German lines in North Africa had made their way to Army Headquarters and had killed a colonel a brilliant tactician let's say who was planning but was not going to be engaged in the next tank attack that would have been a targeted killing but surely not a wrongful assassination now consider the case of the five al-qaeda militants traveling in a van in the Yemeni desert who were killed by a Hellfire missile in November 2002 what what should we make of that well imagine first that the same attack had taken place in Afghanistan there it would have been an act of war and assuming that the people killed were correctly identified we would not have thought the attack wrong or even problematic it is part of the awfulness of war that people actively engaged on the other side can legitimately be killed without warning sometimes it's possible to offer them a chance to surrender but often in night raids ambushes and air attacks it isn't possible now imagine that the same Hellfire attack on the same people in the same van had taken place not in Afghanistan but on a street in Philadelphia it would not be an act of and it would not be legitimate we would be horrified the attack would be a political crime and we would look for the officials responsible in Philadelphia the suspected terrorists would have to be arrested arraigned provided with lawyers and brought to trial they could not be killed unless they were convicted and many Americans opposed the capital punishment would say not even then now Yemen is somewhere between Afghanistan and Philadelphia it isn't the war zone but it also isn't a zone of peace and this description will fit many not all but many of the battlefields of the war against terrorism in large sections of Yemen the government's writ doesn't run there are no police who could make the arrests in fact 14 soldiers had already been killed in attempts to capture the al-qaeda militants the Yemeni desert is a lawless land and lawlessness provides a refuge for the political criminals called terrorists the best way to deal with the refuge would be to help the Yemeni government extends its authority over the whole of its territory but that's a long process and the urgencies of the war against terrorism may require more immediate action when that is true if it is true it doesn't seem morally wrong to target al-qaeda militants directly for capture if that's possible but also for death Yemen in this regard is closer to Afghanistan than to Philadelphia but there are two moral political limits on policies of this sort and the limits are important because governments once they learn to kill are likely to kill too much and too often the first limit is implied by the word targeted we have to be assured as we can be without judge or jury that the people we are aiming at are really al Qaeda militants or more generally that they are engaged in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks targets have to be identified and the work of identification must be careful and precise the second limit is equally important we have to be assured as we can be that we are able to hit the targeted person without killing innocent people in his or her vicinity and here I think we have to adopt standards that are closer to Philadelphia than to Afghanistan in a war zone collateral damage cannot be avoided it can only be minimized the hard question in war is what degree of risk we are willing to accept for our own soldiers in order to reduce the risks we impose on enemy civilians but when the police are chasing criminals in a zone of peace we rightly give them no latitude for collateral damage in the strongest sense they must intend not to injure civilians even if that makes their operation more difficult and even if the criminals get away now that seems to me roughly the right rule for people planning targeted killings like the police they are not actually engaged in a battle they plan their attack in advance and they can call it off if they discover say that their target is holding a child on his lap as in Albert Camus's play which is just about these questions the just assassins or that their target has moved into a crowd or a sitting in an apartment that isn't empty as it was expected to be they can't avoid imposing some degree of risk on innocent people and the risks will certainly be greater than those imposed by police in a city at peace but we must insist on a strenuous effort to minimize risks the American attack in the Yemeni desert probably met this standard only the five were killed some of Israel's targeted killings have clearly met this standard some almost certainly have not a car on a busy street is not a permissible target no more than a single table in a crowded cafe would be if terrorists use other people as shields then anti terrorists have to do the best they can to find their way around the shields just as we would want the police to do when killing takes precedence over targeting the anti-terrorist look too much like the terrorists and the moral distinction that justifies their war is called into question the same thing happens in domestic society when the line between police and criminals is blurred by the brutality or corruption of the police but it is important to say it's important to stress that when that happens we defend the line as best we can by criticizing and reforming the police we do not join the criminals and similarly whatever goes wrong in the war against terrorism doesn't affect the wrongness of terror in fact it confirms the wrongness what we learn is that we have to condemn the murder of innocent people wherever it occurs this condemnation works best it seems to me if we start from Just War theory with its recognition of noncombatant immunity but as the last part of this lecture should have made clear we can't stop with just war theory we need to maneuver between our conception of combat and our conception of police work between international conflict and domestic crime between the zone of war and the zone of peace yoson Bello represents an tation of morality to the circumstances of combat to the heat of battle we may need further adaptations to the circumstances of Terror but we can still be guided even in these new circumstances by our fundamental understanding of when fighting and killing are just and when they are unjust thank so we have ten or fifteen minutes for questions and arguments yes yes Nazi examples are always especially difficult because they invite us to make the kinds of exceptions that we know we wouldn't make in any other in any other case but I I think I would resist even in this case there have to if if that assassination is possible there have to be other opportunities yes it is the yes the is the is the attack that I described in how would the attack that I described in Yemen be viewed by Yemeni civilians and would it be in their eyes at like a terrorist attack causing pervasive fear in among the civilian population first of all I believe that in this case the Yemeni government actually gave its agreement to the American attack as I said they had tried themselves to capture these people and had failed and I think that the targeted killing is exactly the opposite of a terrorist attack because you are you are you are choosing the individuals that you are attacking because of what they have done and not because of who they are and people who have not done those things should not be terrorized by an attack of this sort Eric you right okay the the question is what I would make of the the standard justification that was made by by Truman and actually more eloquently by Churchill for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki namely that by killing these these people these 100,000 or 200,000 people we were saving possibly millions who would have died in an invasion and I and and Eric also asks whether I think utilitarian arguments of this sort need to be attended to in in cases in cases like this and I I i guess i do since since i I do believe in a version of utilitarianism which I've called the utilitarianism of extremity which is the argument do justice is which in which means that I reject the maxim do justice even if the heavens fall and I propose as an alternative do justice until the heavens are about to fall and then do what you have to do to stop the heavens from falling and that and that is a utilitarian calculation but there the circumstances at the in 1945 do not seem to me to come close enough to a utility to an extent to an extreme situation the war was was one had we been prepared for a negotiated settlement had we been prepared for something short of unconditional surrender it is quite likely that millions of people would not have had to die in an invasion and and the the calculation well we're going to kill a hundred thousand we're going to kill two hundred thousand by the way with unknown genetic consequences in order to save maybe a million who might die in invasion if an invasion is necessary that those kinds of calculations I think we just can't we can't make they are godlike and they I I would I would I would save one hundred and fifty thousand and then look for ways of saving the million but save the hundred and fifty thousand first yes well there is something in human nature that leads us to make such rules and then there is probably also something in human nature that leads us to violate them but no political leader can send young men and women into war without assuring them that the cause is just and so there have to be criteria for making that argument and once the argument is made all of us especially in democracies can join it and we have many examples of arguments about whether a war was just or unjust which went on while the war was being conducted and which which helped to end it oh yes in Bello you're talking about yes well there are there are many many examples of of officers who put their own soldiers at risk in order to save civilians no but that's not what what does it matter I mean what what I'm trying to get at is the judgments that we have to make about military about military conduct it's like it's you could ask your same question about democracy when has there ever been a real democracy you can ask your same question about friendship how many friends really behave in crises situations the way friends are supposed to behave according to our theory of friendship we need a moral understanding of the world precisely so that we can recognize when our standards are being violated yes yes the it is it possible to have a war that is just on both sides and just just war a substantial part of Just War Theory zhing is a feat is comes out of Catholic moral theology and the possibility of award just on both sides has been what was recognized by the by the theologians it's also possible to imagine a war unjust on both sides yes well this is active it the question is what is the relationship between yo saad bellum the justice of the war itself and yoson Bello the wave wars the justice of the conduct of the war and this is a hotly debated issue among contemporary moral philosophers and the position that I have defended and will defend is is under sustained attack which I am resisting justly I very strongly that the the judgments we make of the war itself and of the conduct of the war are independent of one another a just war can be fought unjustly and or a just war might might include many unjust acts the war against the Nazis was surely a a just war the firebombing of Dresden was unjust and unjust Wars can be fought justly we are we are told by military historians that rumbles army in North Africa fought according to the rules of international law and of Just War theory even if other Nazi armies did not so that might be an example of an unjust war that was at least for a time fought justly I think these are independent judgments and this has large ramifications which I won't try to go into now which relate to the the treatment of soldiers our soldiers fighting in an unjust war criminals or should we treat them like as the moral equals we do treat soldiers in combat as moral equals even though one side maybe just than the other unjust and all soldiers when captured are entitled to benevolent quarantine for the duration without regard to the justice of their struggle and that has that is related to the autonomy of yours in Bello and ad bellum but these are complicated questions yes in those circumstances are the military justified right i I'm not that's going to depend on the judgment we make of the of the rebellion or the national liberation struggle or or whatever it is quite possible that we would want to say that attacks around there must have been people in France who wanted to say that attacks by the FLN on French soldiers in Algeria were wrong but not terrorists we shouldn't allow a word like terrorism to exhaust our vocabulary of moral criticism there are a lot of other things that can be done wrong fully in political and military life terrorism I think I want I would I want to insist terrorism is the killing of innocent people of civilians attacks on on police or on soldiers may or may not may be right or wrong but they are not terrorists yes right right I should I did you hear it it's a question about it's a question that comes out of most clearly out of the Lebanon War or last last summer if militants or or soldiers for that matter fight from civilian cover if they if they hide among civilians or use civilians as shields or fire their rockets from in front of apartment buildings or school yards what is the justification there are two issues here there is the issue of there's the issue first of responsibility who is putting these civilians at risk and it seems clear to me that the soldiers or the militants who hide among them or behind them or who fire from their midst are putting them at risk and they bare the primary responsibility for harm that comes to this civilian population an army trying to respond to these attacks is going to have to make proportionality judgments if a if a rocket is being fired from a schoolyard and it has been found and and can be targeted by a missile there has to be some effort to find out if the school is full of kids and if it is then you make a proportionality argument which is standard in military in military decision making although impossible to to specify are the number of civilians at risk here disproportionate to the value of taking out this one rocket and if there are a lot of children in the school then clearly it is disproportionate and you can't respond and sometimes you can and these kinds of judgments are in fact made in in wartime especially in modern wartime because most soldiers most officers now recognize the importance of winning what we call in Vietnam the hearts and minds of the population which you don't do if you kill indiscriminately so the tactic of using human of using civilian shields is can be in some circumstances a very effective tactic but it is a principle of Just War theory that it cannot be morally impossible to defend yourself so at some point the proportionality arguments get overwhelmed by the requirements of collective self-defense stop I think we have to stop

Channel: Institute for Advanced Study

Views: 12,437

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Id: yZEprmCb5Pk

Length: 65min 51sec (3951 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2016