This book is rich moral philosophy about war. The author extensively addresses practical, ethical concerns about how nations can develop confidence in rules / habits to address and resolve conflict with a minimum of mass killing.
Rodin is from New Zealand, is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford and is on the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He is conversant with all present argument in Just War Theory and Revisionist Just War Theory. He writes, teaches, consults (even on occasion for some military organizations), and even proposes elements of regulations and laws which can improve upon the inconsistent and hypocritical ethical reasonings that nations presently employ. He has regularly lectured officers in the UK military on ethics issues, and has given lectures in US and other western military settings.
Rodin says that most moral, legal, and political / rhetorical justifications offered to justify wars use the notion of national defense. Arguments for ‘national defense’ often state or imply that it is analogous to personal self-defense. This awkward but well-researched book demonstrates that this very old and widely employed analogy is fatally flawed. Rodin shows that for the world to develop conflict resolution methods that do not sink into the unpredictable and costly horrors of war, we should move to other ways of thinking about how to justify military action.
The book has two main sections. The first investigates our understanding of the ‘right’ of personal self-defense. The second half investigates whether what we know about the ‘right’ of personal self-defense applies to moral and practical decisions about ‘national defense’. His extensive investigation comes to say that equating national defense with self defense has ethically / legally practical flaws we cannot correct.
In the part on personal self-defense, Rodin outlines clear moral norms about which which most people / cultures can agree. In working from this locus of ‘clear moral norms,’ he often distinguishes between ‘central cases’ - where rights and duties are clear, and ‘marginal cases’ - where important principles clash and moral dilemmas arise. He admits that his is a western perspective, and thus can’t be expected to represent all cultures. Working from here, he first defines what a ‘right’ is, and seeks where it overlaps or is identical with a power, or a liberty, or an immunity. Then he shows these ‘rights’ to be related to ‘duties,’ and especially one’s duty to not be an unjust aggressor.
Rodin now outlines the limits that society puts on self-defense. Importantly, he notes that in personal self-defense, the ‘right’ that a victim has to fight back can only be directed toward a specific ‘unjust’ aggressor. Further, both law and morality recognize three conditions of limitation to be considered in judging a response: (1) Is it necessary, i.e., without this response, will the victim suffer further harm? (2) Is the danger imminent; must the aggression (however it is defined) be repelled immediately? (3) Is the response proportionate? For example, is it wrong to shoot someone who threw an egg at you? Interestingly, he points out that in British society, it is usually wrong to kill someone who is taking your property, but in the US system it often is okay.
Since this is a book about war, the key question about personal self-defense centers on when a victim has the ‘right to kill’ an unjust aggressor. Rodin says it is impossible to exhaustively list the exclusive criteria that give someone a ‘license to kill,’ and avoids any absolutist position against killing; sometimes people can and must kill. The question is: when is it justified (and sometimes when is it ‘excused’, though not ‘justified’)? The stakes are high. A human life is lost, and the killer is profoundly changed.
This last factor, of the effects on the ‘justified’ killer, is substantial and important. Rodin does bring this up, though he doesn’t dwell on it, perhaps not enough. Rodin believes it to be important that as individuals and nations we adhere to basic norms of justice; moral agency is possible, and not everything is predetermined by outside forces that act upon us or by ‘human nature.’ He treats seriously ‘the realm of moral personality’ (p. 95), in its application to individuals and nations. Though he does not reject out of hand all consequentialist arguments (e.g., ‘lesser evil’ arguments) for how we should judge self-defense and national defense, he always returns his focus to actors (individuals/nations) who have both duties to be fulfilled and rights to be defined and limited. Rodin posits this as the way forward in international affairs. He states that consequentialist arguments, for example the argument that an armed conflict should be avoided, to save lives, even though one group might have to submit to injustices, often fail. As the author of this review, I have examined his reasoning and examples on this issue. I remain unconvinced that he has given consequentialism its due. In decisions about war and peace, the lives of masses of young and relatively manipulable soldiers are at stake. The consequences, the sheer numbers of deaths and the extent of the suffering, should always have a primary, powerful voice in all corridors of power where decisions about wars are made. The powerful make the decisions, and the pawns may be slaughtered. In democracies, these consequentialist arguments must be presented to the entire society, to the general public, in the clearest and most digestible way, on the most available stage, where every citizen sees and hears it.
The second half of the book is about national ‘self-defense’. Here, sometimes awkwardly, Rodin mixes moral/legal issues of what is ‘just’ with practical questions about where, and by whom, this will be judged. At present, ‘national defense’ is the strongest and most accepted justification for military action, world-wide. It is conceived of as a ‘right’ that nations possess, and this ‘right’ is often claimed in the UN.
Rodin gives full credit to the importance of the UN. He does not dwell on its limitations, but instead recognizes it as our most widely accepted international forum for resolution of international conflict (among its many other functions). National self-defense is recognized in the charter to be such a strong justification as to not need UN authorization. The years since WWII have seen enormous development in international treaty law, and arguments and justifications for military action now often include defense against economic aggression, protection of citizens abroad, and pre-emptive or preventive attacks. The rhetoric addressed to international and domestic audiences have addressed the same factors discussed in legitimizing use of violence in personal self-defense: necessity, imminence of threat, and proportionality of the response. Thus, nations argue for the ‘right’ of ‘self-defense,’ and even sometimes have achieved an internationally accepted legitimacy for this claim; e.g., the claim of ‘national self-defense’ provides solid moral ground for justifying military action by nations facing the threat of being turned into colonies, or parts of an empire. Further, small neighbors of great powers may believably employ this justification.
Yet, Rodin looks further to show how poorly this has gone - having nations base their moral reasonings in ‘self-defense’ ; the arguments have rung hollow, or fallen on deaf ears. Rodin examines what a nation is, in distinction to what a person is, in order to see where the self-defense analogy holds up and where it doesn’t. He constantly references (though sometimes discards, or leaves in limbo) the arguments of Locke (e.g., that we may kill the thief, since we don’t want to fall under his unscrupulous power), and of Hobbes (e.g., that the moral authority of the thrust to ‘security’ must reign uppermost in justifying what the state does.) Usefully, he investigates what it is that the state may be be ‘defending’, whether it is (1) the collective lives of the nation’s citizens (a limited claim, except in cases of genocide); (2) the sovereignty of the nation’s government to make decisions within national borders (a protean, complex concept, difficult to evaluate, especially with nations who treat their own inhabitants poorly; (3) the value that inhabitants of a nation place upon their common life, the community, the culture, and the order (even non-democratic and oppressive order) that any specific nation has, even temporarily, established within its boundaries. (Rodin shows the limitations of this reasoning by (a) pointing out the overwhelming discontinuities, now and historically, between cultures and national borders, some of which even result in civil wars where the ‘defense of national borders’ argument is inapplicable, and (b) noting that it is not worthwhile to preserve all cultural / political communities, e.g., some are themselves aggressive and interventionist.)
Philosophers who study the morality of war make a strong distinction between the moral reasoning about committing a nation to war (jus ad bellum) and the morals of how to conduct war (jus in bello). Both questions are addressed here, but Rodin is mainly investigating how we should judge decisions about declaring war (jus ad bellum). The moral reasoning in these two fields of ethical decision making are separable, but linked. He does spend time on the ‘jus in bello’ section, noting how the behavior of nations (in deciding to go to war) and the behavior of soldiers (in deciding how to act in war) are linked.
Many powerful institutions, from government to church, have supported the idea that individual soldiers are excused for whatever they do during war, but this paradigm, which excuses the individual soldier for fighting on the unjust side of a war, has become evermore threadbare. It originated in the medieval chivalric code, wherein the warriors regulated themselves, and two foes on a battlefield could hold themselves up to be great and noble men. Further, warriors could consider themselves legally, and morally, justified, or at least excused, for how they behaved in war by simply saying, “I was following orders,” a position supported by powerful ethical figures of earlier times, from Augustine (died AD 430) to Aquinas (died 1274). Governments and philosophers claimed absolute authority, granted by god, to conduct war. Even if what their country was doing was wrong, soldiers were absolved of guilt. Change has come, and is coming, but slowly.
Part of the corrosion in the moral authority of the sovereign state to declare war arises with legitimized dissent in the ranks. In the last 500 years, e.g., with the writing of Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic moral philosopher who advised the Spanish royalty about the conquest of the Americas, and even sometimes effectively advocated for indigenous rights, explicit principles and practices that were right and wrong about how to conduct war began to be articulated. Soon after Vitoria, the Dutch philosopher Grotius developed Protestant reasoning in the same field. Throughout the 20th century, the rules have been negotiated, codified, and elaborated such as with the League of Nations, Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and a great deal of treaty law. The US Dept. of Defense has even recently published its Law of War Manual - 1,204 pages. Thus neither soldiers nor citizens are as ill-informed or manipulable as they once were, and citizens of nations that have legitimate democratic norms and a free press are less likely to grant broad, unquestioning authority to a government that intends to speak with one voice. Yet soldiers and citizens are driven forward in confusing, contradictory ways; there is a dilemma that clouds peaceful international relations: politicians may perceive that they have been elected to serve the interests of their constituents, and may even support aggressive military actions, those that do damage in another country for example, by rationalizing that they are helping their own citizens/voters. These politicians may even do this when a majority of their own constituents oppose such action. The main problem is that these politicians clearly do not perceive themselves as having official responsibility for any element of the well-being of foreigners, or the interests of other nations. Given the constant drumbeat of nationalist sentiment that they must toe the line to, it is hard to conceive of how matters could be otherwise.
(Another factor of common belief that is changing: though some nations still maintain elaborate, well-funded propaganda campaigns to celebrate every soldier as a ‘hero’ who ‘served’, others are more sanguine. Both the ancient and recent history of many societies lends to the common wisdom that, in a thoughtful and wise society, the role of soldiers in general, in all parts of the society, must be constantly and thoroughly critiqued. Any professional military person who posits herself/himself to be promoted to step out of her/his soldier role to gain political power should be watched with an eagle eye. CS)
Second, since few governments ostensibly claim divine authority now, those leaders who want to conduct war must do so through some legitimized authority, sometimes with the trappings of democracy, other times directed by clearly dictatorial regimes such as China or Saudi Arabia. Yet, according to Rodin, if these authorities are completely sovereign, and do not have to answer to any higher authority, there is no presently sufficient rule of law - countries simply attack other countries as they will, with no one country more “in the right” than the other. Rodin rejects that this Hobbesian sort of end-state of international relations is acceptable.
Rodin concludes that if we depend on the structure in which the sovereign authority of individual nations is to be depended on to reduce the frequency of wars, or ameliorate their damage, we will continue to be unsuccessful. However, there is a way forward. We now have 75 years of experience in which individual nations make their case, and are called out, in very imperfect international forums such as the UN Security Council or the World Court. This has been a good start; we have much experience with real cases, involving issues such as pre-emption, defense of borders, humanitarian intervention, the age-old struggle for resources, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. International forums were involved in the oversight of the end of colonialism in the late 40s and 50s, and now most nations would be ashamed to militarily conquer a foreign land in order to dominate their resources; even though multi-national corporations gained control of Iraq’s oil after 2003, the US suffered damage to its reputation for its aggressiveness in that war.
Rodin’s main arguments against an over-dependence on calling on the necessity of ‘national self-defense’ to justify military action are these: (1) history and context often clouds the contrast as to which of the opponents is the unjust aggressor and which is the innocent victim; (2) when the entire relationship between two nations is deeply influenced by mutual mistrust, ungoverned competition instead of collaboration, and preparation for conflict, both will be concerned with balance of power / comparative strength. Any move by one party to alter the balance may be perceived by the other as evidence of the single decisive moment of unlawful aggression that triggers a war. Opposing nations that have fallen into this pattern often stupidly engage in rounds of brinksmanship that can stumble into catastrophe; (3) a justification based on ‘national self-defense’ is completely inapplicable in some situations where the international community at times considers a foreign military intervention to be justifiable, e.g., where there is a humanitarian crisis or a campaign of genocide. In these cases, accepting a military intervention flies in the face of the sort of rigid respect for national sovereignty that ‘national self-defense’ calls upon us to honor; (4) finally, Rodin has provided many examples of where the idea of ‘national self-defense’ has come to be twisted so badly out of shape as to be unrecognizably warped and vague - anticipatory attacks, interventions in foreign internal/civil wars, and reprisals (though this idea, as deserved punishment, interests him.) [This book was written in 2002; I would be interested in Rodin’s comments now on the adequacy/applicability of the moral justification of using ‘national self-defense’ to legitimize assassinations. CS]
Rodin has now provided extensive moral reasoning and practical evidence to support his thesis that progress in reducing wars and their effects cannot be made either by exclusively depending on the concept of ‘national defense’, nor within a world where national governments retain absolute sovereignty. A future he outlines as effective, practical, and doable involves individual nations surrendering a minimal slice of their sovereignty, over the judgment of both the legality of going to war and the ethics of the conduct of war. He fully recognizes the flaws of (1) the UN, (2) other international institutions in which power is shared among nations, and (3) the web of bilateral and multilateral treaties, all of which emit, in one fashion or another, regulations and judgements (often with concrete, though limited impact) about the behavior of nations in the military sphere. Rodin doesn’t fool himself into thinking that any of the international institutions, e.g., the UN, is truly impartial, but states with clarity that UN-authorized wars are perceived to have far more legitimacy, world-wide, than other wars.
Rodin posits that only in a model in which nations explicitly surrender a limited though crucial slice of their sovereignty to a ‘universal punisher’ will we advance in creating legitimate international law of war. He comments that, in an broad range of societal institutions, “justice is often defined in opposition to the partisan,” and that it is, “always (my italics, CS) unjust for a participant in a dispute to administer or determine justice.” (p. 176) Otherwise, authority will always be deeply doubted, and considered illegitimate, often for decades or centuries. Punishment will smell of revenge. (In reference to how most cultures perceive the relationship between justice and impartiality, Rodin carves out one special case, wherein many cultures recognize an authority that parents have over children - although the parents are clearly interested parties in intra-familiar disputes, they retain legitimate authority to enforce punishments. Rodin comments that, in the present poorly-organized arrangement of international law, certain nations, with the power to exercise hegemony over others, often arrogate this power to themselves.)
Rodin would not walk blindly into universal government. He recognizes the dangers, and cites Kant’s objections. Yet, he points to the further maturing of international bodies, such at the World Court or the UN, as the functional route that can best lead to reduction of the chaotic horrors of war. He considers this in one way to be a simple extension of Hobbesian contract theory. Just as Hobbes conceives that individuals have surrendered liberty (to be aggressive) to the sovereign so that the sovereign will impose order amongst contending individuals, Rodin proposes that nations must surrender limited liberties, or rights, to an impartial authority. He considers this to be a ‘law enforcement’ model of judging and managing international conflict. He does not expect the world to be able to construct this model quickly, but concludes with pointing out that if we are going to continue to pursue a moral course, internationally, we must openly recognize that as we fight, we must not assume we are right, or just.
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