Dilemma and the Just War. posted by Richard Seymour

A certain impossibilist has been fantasising about slaughtering me. Not for some cranial movie to be replayed mid-masturbation, (although who truly knows?), but to make a point about the ideology of the just war. I suggest you read the post yourself if you wish to digest its slightly convoluted point, because I don't see a way of excerpting it without curtailing the process of discovery involved.

Basically, Bill's point is a variation on the theme of "if you had to kill one child in order to prevent an axe-murderer from killing a hundred, would you do it?" If you're an extreme utilitarian, you might just accept the calculation at face value and waste the little guy. If you're an ethicist, you might say 'not in my name' (which, as a slogan, stinks of narcissism and Beautiful Soul politics). If you're a moral consequentialist (influenced, perhaps by Marx and Aristotle*), you might say that although the consequences of such an action appear to be the lesser evil, the motives and likely behaviour of the axe-murderer are so inscrutable that it is really difficult to make such a choice and anything you do is really a gamble, a risky strategy with forces beyond your control. You might ponder on the wisdom of taking he axe-murderer at his word, and imagine what a berk you'd look on the ITV News if you killed the kid and then the axe-murderer just did what he wanted anyway. Then again, if you explained that you couldn't bring yourself to kill the child even though in the event it ensured the deaths of a hundred others because you didn't believe the murderer, had no good reason to trust him and could not in all conscience put one child to death on such tenuous grounds, few would fail to understand.

Whichever way our consequentialist acted, it would be with an understanding of considerable peril and the inevitability of tragedy. Now, I've weighted the argument in a particular direction, but it is just as possible to have a perfect dilemma. That is, in the philosopher Lemmon's terms, you could have a 'Sartrean dilemma' in which you both ought and ought not do something, each way for perfectly good reasons - but for reasons that are incommensurable. There is no way of choosing between them because they embody different values. To return to the theme of war, one ought to support the Palestinian resistance because every people has the right to resist oppression; similarly, one ought to oppose it because its tactics disgust one or because it is being waged much of the time by fanatical reactionaries who would do something terrible with their freedom if they ever got it. Or again, Britain ought to intervene in Darfur because it is an ex-colonial power, owes the country a debt, and should not stand by while atrocities occur; similarly, it ought not intervene precisely because it is an ex-colonial power, because it still has distorting interests in Africa, because its involvement has rarely done much but intensify the crisis, because there are better ways etc.

And, of course, the ethicist's value-judgments have totally different origins to those of the utilitarian. That said, I think that the grounding for such disputes is sufficient to make a reasonable choice between them. For instance, both the ethicist and the utilitarian would wish to minimise pain and misery; they differ over the wisdom and virtue of the means. Now it becomes possible to reintroduce the theme our moral consequentialist was mulling over: can I really trust this particular agent? Does it matter? Is motive really all that central?

I think it is, and I offer just one example: Vietnam. If the apologists for that war are correct, then Vietnam was a blunder (either because a well-meaning US misunderstood the reality of support for the NLF, or because they didn't bomb hard enough for long enough). In that view, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were defending some good, or thought they were. US imperialism therefore remains an inviolate ideal, and the only reasonable objection to further military incursions is that it may be unwise, may not obtain the stated goals or may bring adverse consequences on those conducting the intervention. If those who objected to that war are correct, Vietnam was a carefully planned assault on civilians with the aim of suppressing a national liberation movement. Cynical American planners described with cold precision the ways in which this movement had to be defeated, and were willing to accept a vast human cost because the ideals trumpeted by politicians were of little interest to them. (The latter view is correct. The Pentagon Papers demonstrate that US planners: were perfectly aware of the NLF's popular base as a national liberation movement first and as a communist organisation second; planned the bombing of civilians as part of strategy; and orchestrated the war with zero concern for the values espoused by successive Presidents. Similarly, Mark Curtis reports that his long trawl through declassified British planning documents have yielded not a single mention of or reference to such values as human rights, freedom etc.)

The consequence of the latter view is that the war was without question an exercise in extreme superpower malevolence, and any future war should be treated with scepticism. The consequence of the former view is that the war may well have been mistaken, but given the legitimate concerns of the time it was entirely justifiable, and future wars should be generally supported. That is not all, however. Harry at Harry's Place and Norman Geras have both expressed the view that in relation to Iraq, US motives are not of primary importance. For Harry, what is important is the intention, however motivated, to create a functioning democracy in Iraq. For Norm, objections based on an assessment of America's 'real' motives "loses the specific in the general", privileging suspicions about American hegemony over the immediate fate of Iraqis. A moral consequentialism that is not utilitarian, however, would have to weigh such factors. Consequences cannot be divorced from motives, and moral consequentialism, unlike utilitarianism, acknowledges that consequences extend farther into the future than our intelligence will allow us to calculate. All judgements about the justice of a war based on a view of consequences have to be leavened by an understanding of the actors involved and of alternatives. It would consider the possibility (discussed by Bill) of radically altering the conditions in which such choices have to be made.

Moral consequentialism exhorts us to choose between different modes of life as well as different choices within each mode. That is why I think Bill is wrong to consider himself an ethicist against 'just war'. He is a revolutionary against the system that can produce such awful concepts as the 'just war' and ought to be willing to get his hands bloody - so long as it is for a good cause.

*See Richard Miller's analysis of the relationship between Aristotelian ethics and Marxism. "Marx and Aristotle: A Kind of Consequentialism", in Alex Callinicos (ed), Marxist Theory, 1989, pp. 175-210.