Prudence and morality for a political community's trustees confronting war

A note on ethics and war and just war theory.  In class, we have been talking our way through Walzer's chapter on realism and his deservedly famous discussion of the Melian dialogue.  The positions that can be disambiguated from that discussion as statements of realism are:

• Amoral realism.  The view that morality has no role in war.  It is expressed by the Athenian generals when they say (paraphrase), because we have power, we will do what we will and you will do what you must.  And because morality has no role in war, there is no ground to speak on moral grounds of limits on war.
• Amoral realism, 'an argument upon your safety' from Thucidydes.  This prudential argument says, too, that morality does not have a place in the discussion, because it is simply about your safety.  You must do whatever you must do to secure your safety.  Put in this bare bones fashion, it is still an argument of pure prudence, although it rapidly shades over into the moral argument formalized by Hobbes:
• Moral realism, 'an argument upon your safety' but by a 'necessity of nature', from Hobbes.  The move that converts Thucidydes into a moral argument, by linking it to the moral claim that in the state of nature, you are entitled, morally entitled, to whatever you deem prudent for your safety, including war.  Again no limits on war.

All that - plus some more - appears in Walzer, chapter 1.  But I want to add something else, something that converts and amplifies the 'argument upon your safety' from a purely prudential argument into a moral one.  It is that when the subject of all this is not a person, but a community, then obligations to see to the safety of that community become more than merely prudential.  They become a moral requirement that entails prudential forms of action.  The leaders of the community are, in effect, trustees and fiduciaries entrusted with the safety of the community.  What they do as matters of prudence are also, and in the first place, acts of morality on behalf of the community for whom they act. 

An individual, that is, might choose to take greater risks for himself or herself than he or she would feel entitled to have the community take.  It is a familiar position for a fiduciary - you are obliged to act more prudently than you would for yourself alone, and in so doing you fulfil a moral duty to others that, with respect to yourself alone, would be merely prudential.

I have described this as "amplifying" the prudential 'argument upon your safety' because the trustee, as fiduciary, must be more cautious and more prudent because of moral obligations to the community.  It amplifies in some circumstances the possibility of conflict, including preemptive and preventive war.

(For a real life example of this, see Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency, a book premised in large part on the proposition that any US administration, keenly aware of its role as trustee of the safety of the American people, will believe it not just prudent but moral to do whatever it takes to ensure public safety.  Many people argue that this prudence is misplaced and excessive, and risks other kinds of things, such as damage to the long term constitutional order.  Goldsmith's observation is that it is not merely a sense of prudence - protecting ourselves - but morality - the president has the moral obligation to do whatever can prudently be done to keep the American people safe.  In that sense, the moral obligation of a trustee serves as an amplifier of prudential action.  See my TLS review of it, downloadable at SSRN, here.)

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(PS.  Philip Bobbitt (I don't think he'd mind me identifying him), in an illuminating conversation (as they always are) with me today noted that this sentiment, the idea that what is prudence for an individual becomes a genuinely moral obligation for the ruler - and amplifies it -  is part of Machiavelli's thought in The Prince.  But it is not Machiavelli as caricatured, but part of his republican thought.  Philip has a new short biography on Machiavellli and The Prince for a general audience coming out soon.  Also, Philip's magnificent Terror and Consent will appear from Knopf on April 1 - don't miss it! 

I should add, too, that this was a conversation with my daughter Renee, who has been studying Western intellectual traditions in her 9th grade Sidwell history class.  Renee has the good fortune to have an outstanding teacher - scholar in her own right - who has the class reading Machiavelli, et al., in original selections.  Renee remarked how much she loves listening to Philip talk about ideas, he is very clear, she says.  Philip is remarkably patient in explaining these things, and Renee took away an important idea about Hegel today to use in her Marx paper.)

Jeff McMahan on morality and the law of war

Jeff McMahan, Rutgers-Philosophy, has a new paper up over at University of Pennsylvania titled The Morality of War and the Law of War - h/t Larry Solum. It is a very fine paper, and I strongly recommend it to those considering Walzer and just war theory generally. I don't think I agree with all of it, but it is an excellent paper.

One point made close to the beginning serves as an excellent springboard into discussion of what Walzer calls the "moral equivalence of soldiers." It is the idea that if you shoot at them, they can shoot at you, and vice-versa - that which defines participation in the "game" of war, so to speak. But, as McMahan says, it is actually quite wrong as a moral principle. When it comes to policework, for example, what we might otherwise think of as jus ad bellum - the reason you undertake violence - makes all the difference in the world. Criminals have no equivalence to shoot back at police. Why should it be different in war? Shouldn't the cause for which you fight matter to whether you are entitled to use violence at all?

It is a problem with very practical ramifications, for example, as countries that contribute troops to international peacekeeping and peacemaking of various kinds look at the rules of war and wonder why their soldiers should be liable to getting shot at under the ordinary rules of war.

My own sense of this very good question? First, the problem is a central one in ethics of war. I discussed it once a long time ago in a very different setting, trying to describe the moral and legal differences between being a soldier and a policeman, back in the 1990s, in a review of Nicholas Shakespeare's The Dancer Upstairs (very fine film, by the way). (This was in an AJIL conference, I'll try to post it to SSRN as a pdf one of these days.)

One traditional answer is that in time of war, law is silent - and even if that is not completely true, it is enough to silence law on this particular point.

A second traditional answer in the law of war comes from a certain form of moral relativism - who is to say who is right and who is wrong under jus ad bellum? Lacking some overarching moral or political or legal authority, no one is entitled to judge. This leads to a certain form of neutrality as moral relativism - something I discuss toward the end of this academic article, and a little bit in this Wall Street Journal book review of the Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, here. My experience of staff of the ICRC over the years is that some of its people, individually, do have a strong sense of genuine moral relativism. In discussions with them about Iraq or Afghanistan, or pretty much any other war except, perhaps, Bosnia, the attitude among many staff seems to be a shrug, anyone with a position on war is by definition partisan and partial, and we at the ICRC have the superior moral position of neutrality. (The two articles above sharply attack the idea that neutrality is the higher virtue; I describe as necessary but always residual, and criticize those who always want the ICRC but never Churchill.)

As an organization, however, I would describe the ICRC's attitude as not precisely relativism with respect to jus ad bellum, but a quite sensible attitude of suspension of public disbelief as to questions of jus ad bellum in the service of another value, that represented by the humanitarian imperatives of jus in bello. This is thus a third answer to the question. But the morality and moral psychology of this suspension of (public) disbelief stand in need of much more theoretical work, and one of these days I hope to organize a Telos symposium that would take up the theory of neutrality from multiple standpoints.

Fourth is Walzer's own answer to this question - one of his answers, anyway - which is that war is a form of tyranny and coercion. War coerces the non-aggressing side to do things and act in ways it would not otherwise do, both in respect of civilians, its own people, and people on the other side. And one of the forms of coercion is the participation in war of many people who are coerced in the sense that they cannot be said to be responsible for the actions which they are required to carry out. We set limits in the laws of war on what those actions might be, but in general we do not hold them responsible for the policies of superiors because we see them in some fashion as coerced.

This does not set aside the "moral equivalence" concept that goes with the game of war, above. But, note, one of the peculiarities of Walzer's moral equivalence of soldiers is that this "game" idea of war of war is drawn from what the moral conditions of fighting would be if it somehow were uncoerced. How would freely consenting, freely participating combatants fight if it were a consented to game? As moral equivalents.

Why is this latter idea important in Walzer's overall moral theory of war? I think it can be made out best as this. Walzer's primary value is the preservation of liberty through rights, in which resistance to aggression is not just a right but, all other things equal, a moral obligation on behalf of a political community. (He says, flatly, all things equal, it is always okay to fight to resist aggression - not merely that one is entitled to do so. This is a very long way from the "from heaven" view of Catholic just war theory, in which overall good and evil must be taken into account.) War coerces; war is tyranny. But a fundamental purpose of the idea of morality in war is not merely to oppose aggression, but to do so in a way that best preserves rights and liberties. And one way to do that is to structure the acceptable rules of fighting as those which would be consented to by free participants - and they would accept the moral equivalence of soldiers. Soldiers are coerced, even when they volunteer; but they fight according to a convention as though they were free.

(I'm not sure Walzer would agree this is the argument, and I'm sure it has problems, but I do think this is the basic idea. There is some kind of linkage between liberty, tyranny, aggression, and the moral equivalence of soldiers.)

However, it is possible to go with the moral principles that McMahan says correctly are the normal operant moral principles of justice. What happens in that case? Well, it is still a justice-based one. Indeed, it can be called the "super-justice" position and it is made out most dramatically, surprisingly, by William Tecumseh Sherman, of all people.

This may seem surprising, since Sherman is most closely associated with the phrase, "war is hell," and following Walzer that is usually taken as an expression of uber-realism. But if one reads Sherman's quite remarkable memoirs, it becomes clear that Sherman, far from a realist, has a quite extraordinary sense of justice. Overdeveloped, in fact. A genuinely metaphysical sense of justice, in fact. Believing that he has jus ad bellum on his side, anything he does to the enemy is accounted as natural justice playing itself out against the original violator of the just order. He is the hammer of natural law, and at some points in the memoirs disavows any moral responsibility for what he does; it is in the nature of a reaction. It is a remarkable sense of karma, almost, in which Sherman disowns responsibility for his own actions and sees them in a sort of physics of natural justice. But it is distinctively a theory of natural law and right, although vastly different from Walzer's rights-theory and the Catholic version of natural law.

The effect is to reach what Walzer describes as 'realism' in war - but what he really means is a conduct of war that can recognize no moral limits on conduct - through the absolute belief in the jus ad bellum rightness of one's cause. Combined with the other side thinking exactly the same thing, all limits on war cease. But it is not a 'realist' result (i.e., no limits) reached on prudential or consequentialist grounds - entirely to the contrary.

(I've been working for a while on this topic on the backburner, under a tentative title of Sherman's 'War is hell': Three readings. I haven't got as far as I would have liked. There is more discussion of these issues on this blog, some of it overlapping with what is said here, under the just war, Walzer, and laws of war tags.)

Recommended - Malise Ruthven's NYRB review essay on books on Islam

I finished reading today Malise Ruthven's excellent review essay in the New York Review of Books on books on Islam, particularly Islam and war and just war. Very fine essay. I have read one of the books in his review, Olivier Roy's new book, Secularism Confronts Islam, and thought it also well worth reading, although I think Roy uses "multiculturalism" in a way that is not exactly what it means in American or UK ideology (more on that later). I look forward especially to reading the books on Islam and war. The review essay itself is elegant as Ruthven's essays always are. Highly recommended. Here at the NYRB.

(Update. How to embarrass yourself! I've been reading Ruthven's essays in the TLS for years and never realized Malise is a man's name. Thank you Scott in the comments, and I've corrected it above.)

Armed robots deployed in Iraq

(Welcome, Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn for the link!)

I blogged earlier, here, about important efforts to conceptualize the ethics of robot soldiers. For the first time, armed recon robots have been deployed in a warzone - Iraq. HT thanks Instapundit; from Danger Room/Wired Blogs, here.

This is not really about the topic of my ethics of robot soldiers post. That post was about machines with the capability to act independently, independent of human control, and it pointed to very important discussions trying to anticipate how and what the ethical decision making of such independent robots should be. The machines being deployed now to Iraq are not that, and are a long, long way from that - the Iraq deployed machines are a new version of the already widely deployed SWORDS reconnaisance robot vehicle - new because the new machines have a weapon, a machine gun, added to it. They are remote controlled in real time by humans, not machines making programmed decisions about weapons use. (Also, if you are thinking of robots in the I, Robot mode - well, these are more like mobile sleds with a machine gun on top - they don't anthropomorphize.) The ethical and legal questions raised are not about independent machine decisionmaking and action, but instead about the use of a human controlled and operated but remote platform. Still, this is a step closer to what seems to me not just a natural, but an inevitable step forward in warfare for the world's most highly technological army.

Robots as a response to asymmetric, law of war violating warfare:

It is important to understand that the inevitable move toward robots on the battlefield is not merely driven, as in past times, past conflicts and wars, by material considerations of conservation of personnel, force to space ratios, and so on. It is driven as much or more today by moral, legal, and ideological considerations - part of an effort to limit the exposure of one's soldiers when dealing with enemies who will not follow the laws of war with respect to our soldiers. Part of that is obviously the attempt to not get your soldiers killed - but another important of it is to avoid having your soldiers captured by an enemy that does not pay attention to the laws of war except when, by loudly appealing to it, it can benefit from it.

The US, for good moral reasons, has given up the possibility of reprisals against civilians or other people hors de combat, such as captured enemy fighters. It has also shown itself unwilling, for not such good reasons, however, to enforce certain important remaining laws of war with regards to abuses by the enemy (such as the US refusing, in its internal rules of engagement, to fire on a mosque being used as an enemy emplacement, despite being allowed to do so under the laws of war). The US therefore finds that it has few or no behavioral levers with respect to the behavior of an enemy fighting using illegal methods. In such a case, one response is the attempt to compensate through technology - by limiting the exposure of one's soldiers in particular to death, injury, or capture and replacing them with machines.

Will robot soldiers eventually lead to a more "policing" attitude on the battlefield? Might roboticized war be a factor leading, perhaps inadvertently, to fewer decisive engagements and more protracted warfare?

One question we might have is what happens over time if fewer American soldiers were to appear at all on asymmetric battlefields, and when they did and fell into hostile hands, we gradually came to assume, on the basis of experience, that they would be held hostage under terms hardly meeting the Geneva Conventions or else beheaded on internet video. It is unlikely that we would respond by war without quarter of our own. On the contrary, part of our technological drive to create and deploy remote fighting machines is in order to get away from having to enforce a barbarous reciprocity that has always been thought otherwise necessary (the ICRC and HRW and the ICC and all the rest of the modern day "heralds" of war notwithstanding) in order to deter such actions by the other side and so ensure adherence to the laws of war.

We might conceivably move, in such circumstances, to treat those we captured more as criminal detainees than as something closer to POWs - and to reconceptualize, over the long term, the general categories of detainees in asymmetric. We would after all not incline to treat them like POWs because we would have already long since determined that their behavior was that of an unprivileged belligerent. The category of actual legal POW might even conceivably wither (away?) from disuse. We would assume our people would be abused and/or killed, or else held as hostages or for ransom - much as Israel's soldiers held by Hizbollah, for example. It wouldn't make sense to us to treat unprivileged belligerents as POWs, especially given that our people - who would indeed be entitled to such treatment - would not be so treated. I would guess that we would evolve to treat them as some form of quasi-criminal detainee - I say 'quasi' because we would not be be able typically to prove criminality except on the basis of participation in an armed enterprise that as an enterprise systematically violated the laws of war, and often not on an individual basis. And 'quasi' also because it would likely have important elements of administrative preventive detention. Of course, we face exactly such issues now, but we have not really resolved them; the widespread deployment of armed robots on the battlefield, however, might constitute one pressure in that direction.

Curiously, however, it wouldn't surprise me, on the current evolution of things, if "battle" turned gradually into some form of particularly violent and contested attempt at "arrest" after a demand for surrender. Warmaking might evolve, at least in the asymmetric urban setting, to battle as a form of "policing." As soldiers were less physically present on the actual battlefield, and if you had armed machines dominating the battlefield, manned remotely, at least on one side, might there be greater pressure on your military to call for the fighters on the other side to surrender, for example - issuing a call to surrender, rather than simply attacking or undertaking ambush or surprise? Whether that would facilitate winning a conflict, as opposed to merely managing it over the long term is not clear. It might inadvertently create conditions for systematically less decisive engagements - tactical engagements with possibly less collateral damage, but also no victory - which is, of course, the definition of victory for guerrillas in a guerrilla struggle, never win, but also never lose and finally just outlast the enemy. Whether we would care, if such long-term "managed," never-decisive warfare cost us in treasure, but not especially in blood, is also not clear.

Can robot technology overcome behavioral shifts toward illegal warfare by irregular forces?

The development of remote and robot technologies is driven by a parallel consideration that also arises from moral, legal, and ideological consideration. It is the attempt to create machines that will follow determinate legal rules of engagement, particularly with respect to the combatant-noncombatant distinction - in consideration of an enemy, however, that deliberately violates that distinction in its own combat operations. Again, the effort is to find a way to overcome the inability through our battlefield behavior (such as the reprisals we deliberately and properly don't take) to affect deliberately planned, illegal enemy behavior - through a technological fix.

The move to robots is all but inevitable and, in fact, particularly but not just under these circumstances, desirable. I have my doubts, however, that any technological fix can permanently compensate for behavior on the other side. If the nature of arms races is competitive - either a "counter" or a "defensive" move to respond to changes in the conduct of war - then we are in a peculiar historical moment in which one side attempts to respond with equipment changes to changes in behavior on the other side. Is it possible for technological ingenuity to beat out determined and evolving bad behavior? I don't know.

Legal liability and robots on the battlefield:

Those deploying armed robots to Iraq for use in the field, remotely controlled, had probably better be prepared for a much greater willingness on the part of the outside monitors, the human rights organizations, outside critics, etc., to charge illegality, criminal behavior, war crimes, violations of the law of war, etc., in any collateral damage created by these weapons than currently exists - with charges and accusations against operators as well as commanders. And against the companies that design and build and sell such weapons.

Why more than in the case of soldiers present on the battlefield? Well, it doesn't necessarily make much sense - the rules of engagement, after all, are presumably exactly the same - but I would bet with pretty high confidence that the deep and not necessarily articulated premise will be that you are more liable for damage caused if you caused it remotely and were not yourself at risk, not being present on the battlefield, operating the robot remotely.

The idea that you yourself are in some fashion at risk - even if not very much, as in the case of a standoff aircraft or tank or what have you - on the battlefield, hence giving some compensatory justification to your collateral damage, makes a difference, or anyway will likely make a difference, I would bet, in how these weapons are seen by outside critics. It will seem weird to the military - it will seem to it as very close to claiming that remote operators have an "unfair" advantage and hence are entitled to no otherwise legal collateral damage - and it will not, to the military, seem any different from any other standoff platform such as aircraft or remote artillery. Why should it be?

But I would be willing to bet that it will seem quite different to outside monitors and critics. The two core criticisms will be: (a) you are not putting yourself at risk and hence are not entitled to collateral damage because, notwithstanding that the criterion of collateral damage is "military necessity," not "did I risk myself?" it will somehow seem "unfair" - despite the fact that you are battling an enemy for whom asymmetric warfare via violations of the laws of war is de rigeuer.

And (b), the fact that you risk only a robot but risk causing collateral risk in human life means that you should not do anything that risks collateral damage at all. Civilians and even civilian objects, in the lingo of Protocol I, trump any kind of claimed military necessity. This is especially so, it will likely be said, under the ICRC's interpretation of the language of Protocol I referring very narrowly to "concrete military advantage" in the immediate circumstances as the measure of military necessity. That the US has never accepted Protocol I as a treaty and has never accepted that particular interpretation of the customary law rule regarding military necessity - and that many other countries offered reservations and interpretations on that very point when they did join Protocol I is not likely to be seen by the critics as of any account.

If your definition is military advantage is sufficiently narrow, in other words, then no collateral damage is justifiable if all you risk is some equipment, not lives, on the battlefield - if your definition of military advantage is so narrow and immediate that it cannot include the necessity of winning this battle, or any particular battle, as part of a larger plan to win a war.

As I say, this will possibly seem puzzling and quite wrong to the military itself, which operates all kinds of remote platforms for launching weapons - and as armies have done, at least since the advent of the long range bow, the catapult, and artillery. But I would urge it to prepare for precisely such criticisms. I would guess this is how the public argument will go, and it might even culminate in someone or some organization calling for indictments against US soldiers for civilian deaths resulting from the use of remotely controlled robots in combat. Or civil law suits via the Alien Tort Statute against the companies creating this equipment.

Yet this would be disastrous if it led to the curtailment of these weapons, their development and deplyment - disastrous from the standpoint of the long term integrity of the laws of war in a period in which asymmetric warfare is tending to undermine their very foundations, because reciprocity has been largely lost - and disastrous to the effort to find ways through technology of combating an enemy that does not fight by the rules. Unfortunately, that has never been a concern of those who propose to make the rules of war, but do not have anything at stake in actually having to fight using them.

(Note on the first two comments. I emphatically do not think that the JAG and those formulating the US position on the laws of war would take the view that I have here attributed as being likely to come from outside critics in the human rights or perhaps academic communities. Or from countries that, not having any pressing wars to fight, are overly willing to opine on the content of laws in which they have no stake in the outcome. On the contrary, I think that the JAG and the US military laws of war lawyers would see this more or less as I suggest above: that these armed battlefield robots are remote platforms like any other, and that in any case military necessity is, at the end of the day, about winning wars. Military necessity does not justify anything and everything, of course, and it rules out many, many things; but it does not mean that a military has any obligation to risk itself or its personnel as a condition of being able to risk otherwise legal collateral damage. But I would be interested in comments from JAG, from current or past serving laws of war lawyers, and others interested in commenting.)

(Update, 9 August 2007, check out this link HT Instapundit from Popular Mechanics. Here.)

David Martin's TLS review of 'The Price of Peace'

David Martin, the eminent LSE professor (now emeritus), has an outstanding review of what appears to be an outstanding (I just ordered my copy) new book on just war theory - The Price of Peace: Just war in the twenty-first century (Cambridge paperback), eds. Charles Reed and David Ryall - in this week's TLS, June 29, 2007, No. 5439, p 24-25. As it's not online anywhere, I'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it.

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I'm moving this comment from the comments up to the main text to make it more visible in case anyone wants to respond to it. As I said above, I'm waiting for my copy of The Price of Peace to arrive, so I can't respond to what is said here about the book; I will do so once I've received and read it. But I have very considerable respect for David Martin's views, and I think the review an outstanding short essay - I'm very sorry it is not online, even for a fee (eventually it will show up in the TLS subscriber only archive). If anyone else wants to comment, by all means, and I will comment on the book once I've read it.

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I would be very interested in hearing others' comments on the review (which I've not seen) and the book (which I have). The book has some fresh faces, and also, usefully for critics, provides recent pieces by "just war" theorists who've helped bring just war theory into disrepute by appropriating it to support the war in Iraq: James T. Johnson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, George Weigel. Sorry, no Michael Novak or R.J. Neuhaus, but the family resemblances within this group are strong enough that the general picture emerges.

One feature of the picture is the trashing of in bello considerations. Others are its romantic attachment to "precision weapons" and the ongoing assault on the American bishops. Omitted from the book, unfortunately, is this group's disdain for the Peace of Westphalia, for the Catechism's worries about "modernorum destructionis mediorum potentia," among other topics.

They dislike Westphalia because it strengthened state sovereignty, which they generally view as merely a troublesome impediment to selective American efforts at regime change. They seldom tell us why Westphalia was desirable: it's as if one man's 30 Years War is another man's (or woman's) humanitarian intervention.

The book omits any reference to Ann Orford's work on humanitarian interventions. Jeffrey Sachs is nowhere to be found.

This does not mean there are not good contributions here. And it is a service to history, if not to the cause of peace, to include Elshtain, Weigel and Johnson. (That Johnson, a real expert on just war, should be as optimistic about "precision weapons" as he is, is damning testimony to the power of academic compartmentalization.)

I'm providing my address because I would be interested in feedback.

Dan Tompkins
Temple University
pericles@temple.edu

The ethics of robot soldiers?

Increased roboticization of US military operations is both inevitable and, on balance, a very good idea. (See this general article on robots on the battlefield.) Along with the things on the immediate horizon such as robot surveillance and remote sensing and all that has been the exploration, in the long term, of robot fighters. In that process, the more sci-fi inclined among us - that includes me - have been thinking about the issues of ethics and robot fighters, if they were made to include independent decisionmaking in at least some circumstances.

There have been some discussions in the academy, and some references to those in the press. The most easily accessible is this short piece in the Economist, "Robot Wars," June 7, 2007, here:

But whereas UAVs and their ground-based equivalents, such as the machinegun-toting Sword robots, are usually controlled by distant human operators, the Pentagon would like to give these robots increasing amounts of autonomy, including the ability to decide when to use lethal force.
To achieve this, Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, is developing a set of rules of engagement for battlefield robots to ensure that their use of lethal force follows the rules of ethics. In other words, he is trying to create an artificial conscience. Dr Arkin believes that there is another reason for putting robots into battle, which is that they have the potential to act more humanely than people. Stress does not affect a robot's judgment in the way it affects a soldier's.

His approach is to create what he calls a “multidimensional mathematical decision-space of possible behaviour actions”. Based on inputs ranging from radar data and current position to mission status and intelligence feeds, the system would divide the set of all possible actions into those that are ethical and those that are not. If, for example, the drone from which the fatal attack on Atef was launched had sensed that his car was overtaking a school bus, it might then have held fire.

There are comparisons to be drawn between Dr Arkin's work and the famous Three Laws of Robotics drawn up in the 1950s by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer, to govern robot behaviour. But whereas Asimov's laws were intended to prevent robots from harming people in any circumstances, Dr Arkin's are supposed to ensure only that they are not unethically killed.

I have been working on preliminary notes for an essay on this topic, but it is all very preliminary. The most striking part of the project is that I do not see that the attempt to translate ethical decisionmaking into machine terms involves genuinely novel questions of ethics as such. On the contrary, what we seek to do is not to establish novel ethical principles, but rather to create, or re-create, hypothetically ideal or perfect ethical decisionmaking and conduct as we would imagine it for a hypothetically ideal or perfect human soldier but do so within a machine, a robot. The problems are in translation, not the creation of new problems or new solutions. In that sense, one could say that however interesting or important a task of ethical translation, it poses no new tasks in fundamental ethical theory.

And yet, accepting that, there nonetheless remains an area of grave difficulty - not because it represents a new problem of ethical decisionmaking different from humans, but because we do not have an adequately theorized approach to dealing with it. I refer to the question of proportionality jus in bello - the balancing of military advantage and damage to noncombatants that is (one of, if not) the core judgment of military ethics and indeed the laws of war. I can say with a fair amount of authority, having been working on this problem very quietly in my study for the last couple of years, that we have no method of weighing these two that is very defensible as a matter of ethical theory. It may be that the very idea of a "theory" to explain the weighing of what might well be understood as incommensurables is itself the problem, and yet in practice we do it and accept that we must do it. The problem, in other words, is not simply how one comes up with a theoretically defensible moral calculus for partly subjective judgments about how to weigh things that have enough similar properties to count as weighing oranges against oranges. That would be a difficult enough calculus to adapt to a machine but at least it would be about weighing similar things.

The much more difficult problem occurs when the things being weighed are, arguably, apples and oranges - both values, in the Isaiah Berlin plurality-of-values sense, but about very different things that seemingly cannot be weighed against each other, even though, as with many things of value in liberal theory, we must. One might think of Berlin's plurality of values as both a glory of liberalism and the tragedy of liberalism. Arguably, such incommensurability is what takes place in attempting to make moral judgments of proportionality jus in bello. Military advantage is a shorthand for describing not merely winning in a narrow military sense, but instead the values for which winning is morally, and not just prudentially, important - the moral value of a political community, its survival and interior values, stability in the external and internal political order, the assertion of moral values such as counter-genocide, etc. Damage to civilians, on the other hand, while referring in part to more remote and abstract values such as political community, is much more about immediate death and destruction. Although we immediately realize, in cases where the disproportion is great enough, when one or the other trumps, it is not very easy to elaborate a set of decisional rules about how to value these against each other. We can, to be sure, develop a certain practice, in a Witttgensteinean sense, or for that matter, a common law lawyer's precendential sense - but that is not really the same as a set of decision rules.

The point about robot soldiers is that this problem reduplicates itself when trying to reproduce a moral calculus at the machine level. It presents a problem, of course - but exactly, in principle at least, the same problem that we as humans have in conceptualizing the process of weighing and decision. But it also presents, perhaps, an opportunity - a kind of thought experiment, sci-fi made real, opportunity to think about how one would seek to operationalize, to make explicit, make external, what are otherwise highly intuitive and internal moral evaluations. And it is in this that I find the ethical issue of robot soldiers particularly interesting.

(Notes from a slowly developing draft paper, "Robot Soldiers and the Ethics of Proportionality Jus in Bello." Forthcoming ... someday.)

Robert D. Sloane on a voluntarist war convention

Thanks to Jacob Katz Cogan's International Law Reporter, post here, I became aware of this very interesting paper by Robert D. Sloane on a "voluntarist" war convention for addressing jus in bello in fighting with terrorists, at SSRN, here. Very interesting and important new paper, well worth reading.

Richard Hopton's History of Duelling reviewed by Jon Latimer in the TLS

I am eager to read this book, Richard Hopton, Pistols at Dawn: A History of Duelling (Portrait 2007, and it doesn't seem to be on Amazon US), particularly on account of the lovely review essay by Jon Latimer in the May 11, 2007 Times Literary Supplement. It is not online, but will eventually show up in the subscriber only archive.

Duelling interests me for a several reasons.

One is that my childhood sport was fencing - I read the Three Musketeers as a boy and discovered that the college town where I spent my cavity-prone years, Claremont, just outside Los Angeles, had in residence a world class fencer and fencing coach, Francis Zold, a Hungarian who had been on the Hungarian Olympic team before the Second World War. He had gone on to become a professor of intellectual property and copyright at the University of Budapest. He and his family fled Hungary in 1956, and settled in Claremont. Discovering that a specialist in Hungarian copyright law and whose English was so-s0 - although, like so many Hungarians, he was in fact a gifted linguist and was fluent in at least five languages - was not in great academic demand, he went back to coaching fencing at various southern California colleges, including Pomona College.

He also took on high school students in a local community club. He was one of the greatest teachers I have had in any field - others include the UCLA professors Rogers Albritton, Philippa Foot, Herbert Morris, and David Rapoport - and on account of spending all my time fencing, I didn't learn many other sports. At one point, he wanted me to come spend time in the afternoons with the Pomona College team; I was a freshman in high school, and this entailed asking permission of the fearsome head football coach and PE teacher, a huge bear of a man who would tell you to drop and do 50 pushups without thinking twice. I very shyly explained what my fencing coach had in mind - the football coach broke in and said, you are a student of Francis Zold? I said, yes, not sure what that meant. He said, Master Zold is one of the great coaches in this country, and whatever he wants, you do. Now get out and make sure you make him proud. Not being especially good, I didn't, although I tried hard.

Later on, when I finally got around to college at UCLA - I was 24 or 25 years old, I had spent several years working blue collar jobs in LA and a couple of years as a Mormon missionary in Peru - I joined the UCLA fencing squad. It didn't last long after I joined and was cut in a budgetary overhaul - however, I met some genuinely wonderful people there, in particular the LA television writer, Tim Maile, who is a successful writer of teen shows, including dreaming up the Lizzie McGuire Show. Also I received a UCLA letter and handsome leather letterman's jacket, which never failed to impress girls until they found out the sport involved.

All that by way of saying that fencers are often interested in subjects like duelling. I have a second, quite different reason for interest in the subject, however.

In Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer raises the question of wars - fighting, killing - that are not unjust. He offers examples of aristocratic young men who fight each other as a grand game, by choice, perhaps as a rite of passage, and says that a death in such circumstances of choice and autonomy is not unjust. It is a very careful locution, because it qualifies the judgment in two ways. One is that although the death may not be contrary to justice, it might be contrary to other moral virtues and rules - such as not killing or being killed in what is merely a game - a Catholic theologian, for example, would surely reject the notion of "autonomy" here. That is to separate justice from other virtues. The second qualification, however, is that Walzer does not say that such a death is just - merely that it is not contrary to justice, which is a quite different thing.

Duelling, whether with swords or pistols, personalizes the game. It also puts honor, or some notion of it, ahead of justice and other virtues. It is, as the review notes, a practice that in Western societies has long been forbidden by authorities, especially in the military, apparently largely on grounds that it weakened the fighting ranks. At any rate, duelling is one of those social practices that tests the limits of how far we are willing to admit of autonomy.

Robert Wright's Easter Sermon in the NYT

Robert Wright, writing in the Saturday, April 7, 2007 New York Times, on the op ed page but behind the Wall, offers an account of how the teachings of Jesus can be understood to be strategically good for dealing with terrorism - "Jesus as a counterterrorism strategist," in the words of the headline. Wright is a writer who is often too clever for his own good, and this column is no exception.

I leave aside the incentive problem - see, in the post below about my reading list, the If you give a mouse a cookie entry about the incentive problem in turning the other cheek. The real issue in Christian ethics concerning the use of force is one that is not in the least unique to Christian ethical theory, but has a prominent place in it because of the history of a religion that began as a despised mystery cult of the lower orders that eventually became the religion of all society, including the Roman Empire's rulers. That is the question of trusteeship.

When you act for yourself - negotiate for yourself, for example, make deals for yourself - you can afford to take risks that are, so to speak, yours to take because you can decide for yourself. But the nature of diplomacy and international politics, the negotiations over war and peace, are never so easy, because the inherent nature of negotiations is that negotiators and diplomats and poltiicans and presidents and even, one might hope, Speakers of the House speak on behalf of a political community, with whose safety and security they have been entrusted. When you speak and negotiate for others, for their safety, the ability to take risks with the safety is necessarily curtailed by the nature of the fiduciary role you play. It is a common error of international relations modeling games - to assume that the same level of risk and safety that a non-fiduciary can negotiate is the same as that of a fiduciary. What you might risk for yourself - to turn the other cheek, to engage in the highly personal, individual, person to person ethical stance of Jesus' teachings - is not something a fiduciary can afford to do. Christian rulers have understood this - and so have Christian theologians, in elaborating a theory of just war under natural law that comprehends that war can be an aspect of Christian love for others in protecting them.

It might be possible to do what Wright recommends, and might be a good idea as a matter of strategy. But that's not because it is Christian or comes from the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. A ruler, including one who takes the obligations of Christian ethics seriously, must consider the safety of others than himself. In a pluralistic society, this is actually an even greater ethical obligation. A committed Christian community might commit itself, including its children and infants, to martydom in the arena, although today we would no longer countenance it; the leader of a pluralistic community cannot make such a commitment on behalf of others. But the ethical consequence of being a fiduciary means that it constrains even actions that the political actor, acting for himself or herself alone, might be willing to risk. Not completely, of course, because prudence and safety can also counsel compromise, but the range of action of a fiduciary is significantly constrained.

Walzer and moral realism

These are just quick notes following my just war theory class today and may not make much sense to anyone not actually there, but I wanted to keep track of these comments.

1. Walzer's theory is one of working out human rights in war - that is, as he said about Just and Unjust Wars at the beginning of his later book, Spheres of Justice, in Just and Unjust Wars, a theory of rights does real work, it generates the limits that the theory places upon war. That is true of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello; it generates limits both as to reasons to fight wars - resist aggression - and upon its conduct - fundamentally, to limit the "tyranny" of war (or aggression) by limiting those whom it coerces to combatants as much as possible.

2. Walzer's theory of human rights in war treats it as a lex specialis for the special activity of war. Whether this is defensible on a rights theory of the ethics of war is an open question. The alternative is to treat the moral rules as humanitarian concessions made by military necessity, not matters of right. Walzer offers a rights theory; whether a rights theory can be consistent with military necessity as a formal matter of philosophical consistency, as distinguished from a sort of rough and practical accommodation between war and rights that is not consistent but tries to strike a practical balance between incommensurable paradigms remains an open issue. If you offer a rights theory - and the Western, Nato militaries buy into it - then you invite violation in the form of asymmetric warfare on the one hand, and pressure from the purists of the human rights movement to forever shrink the claims of military necessity because of the moral hegemony of rights, on the other. The rough and ready balance does not hold, and you either wind up with an (unfulfillable) utopianism of rights or else a shrugging off of rights and a commitment to win.

3. This invokes the increasingly important gap between "universalist" theories of jus in bello and "bargain" theories of the same (see Eric Posner over at Opinio Juris on this topic). The law of jus in bello has elements of both, as John Bellinger pointed out in his Opinio Juris comments. But there is a question as to whether, under pressure of the violations of the rules occasioned by asymmetric warfare, the universalist "rights" model can survive in its current form. I don't suppose very many people want to go back to a model of reprisals against innocents as a means of enforcing the "bargain" of humanitarianism in war, especially when dealing with enemies for whom it would likely not act as much as an enforcement mechanism. Certainly I would reject that on rights grounds. Yet I am also highly skeptical that a one-sided universalism, in which only one side is under any meaningful pressure to follow the supposedly mutual and reciprocal and universal rules - and, moreover, is expected to compensate in its own behavior for the failure of the other side, thus inviting ever greater failures as the non-compliant side sees a way to weaken its complying adversary through its very compliance - can survive in the long term in its current form.

4. Just war theory is not necessarily a theory of rights, in the sense that Walzer offers it. In Walzer's hands, just war theory is a function of accommodating modernity's virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity into the special hell of war through the device of rights. Put another way, Walzer's "war convention" is essentially a contractualist device for showing how we agree to the terms of rights in the special hell of war. Walzer's "war convention" asks us what we would agree to if we were consenting to its conditions - and then says, under the conditions of aggression, coercion, and tyranny that constitutes the crime of war, let us take those as the conditions that ought to establish rights in war. Yet just war theory need not be contractualist. One of the enormous differences between Walzer's theory of just war and traditional Christian just war theory is that although Christian just war theory is fundamentally about justice, through the device of natural law, it is not fundamentally about rights, at least not in the social contract sense. Traditional just war theory, as set out in the traditional criteria, is about justice, and about justifying oneself in terms of justice before God, but it is not about rights as such. It is not a theory from modernity that would seek to frame itself in the language of rights as such. It is, rather, a theory of natural law, independent of contractarianism.

5. The secularism of Walzer's theory, in other words, is not merely about taking God out of it and substituting some other transcendental term - human rights - and then coming up with an account of those rights from contractarianism or any other source. It is much, much deeper than that - an account that seeks to affirm the fundamental values of modernity and the Enlightenment. Natural law theory can be used to that purpose, but is broader and older than that. The appeal of Walzer's theory is not merely that it appeals on the ground of reason to those who will not accept God as the justification; it is, rather and much more deeply, that it is a theory that partakes directly and affirmatively of modernity's values.

6. Just war theories, whether natural law theories such as Christian just war traditions, or Walzer's rights-based theory, are not the only basis for an ethics that limits war, both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Realism, the moral realism that is offered in extreme form out of a Hobbesian reading of Thucydides - "an argument upon your safety" - can also generate an ethics that limits war. If one reads the international world as something less dangerous than a full-blown Hobbesian brutality, but as something in which a less extreme condition applies, then one can propose a limit on the readiness to go to war. And if one can imagine a bargain theory of war's conduct, a humanitarianism based upon the recognition that not all brutality is required for victory, then limits can be understood as a matter of humanitarianism. It is not a rights theory with respect either to limits to the resort to force or with respect to the conduct of war, and its limits depend upon assessments of safety and the willingness, through convention, bargain, custom, or any other mechanism, to follow certain rules in conduct. But it does generate at least the possibility of limits. This moral realism, note, is historically that which has generated limits on and in war - not just war theory, which has historically actually been a sideline theory until the remarkable success of Walzer's book which, seen over the long run, is part of the general triumph of the human rights paradigm. The historical paradigm for limits in war has actually been, over the long run, moral realism.

7. Moral realism has been the characteristic approach of the United States to ethics on and in war, starting from the Civil War through Vietnam. The basic formula has been, if you fight, fight to win, but confine your damage and collateral damage (in a very broad sense) to that necessary to win. This is what gets to Sherman's campaign in the Civil War - the acceptance by the Union leadership that only a war that widened the targets to treat civilian property, if not precisely civilians themselves, as legitimate objects of destruction, would be able to win. This is not just war theory, but moral realism; Lincoln was a moral realist in his willingness to go to war and his willingness to embrace a harder and harder ethic of fighting in order to win. This moral realism can encompass certain criteria of the just war as what Walzer calls "rules of thumbs," but it will not accept them as matters of rights.

8. Walzer's theory begins as a theory of rights. As many people have noted, however, by the time he adds the special proviso of "supreme emergency," it rather starts to look not like a theory of rights, but instead moral realism - a return, in extremis (and, given his startling choice of examples, the Allied bombing of Germany, not so extremis) to "an argument upon your safety."

9. Walzer's theory is also one which treats political communities not as the pooled rights of their individual members, rather than corporate entities which have rights as communities as such. My sense is that this is likely not the correct approach; we think of political communities as having rights as such, mostly because we think of them as surviving as bearers of moral values over time, beyond the time of individual members. This is a risky line of rights-talk, because it rapidly undermines individual rights, but some notion of the political community as more than just the sum of today's members individual rights seems to me right, and necessary to the strong arguments that many would make for why a political community that faces aggression has a right, and more, to respond.

10. Next week we take up Walzer's arguments on the importance of winning. I would put the point something like this: winning is important not merely as a realist 'argument upon your safety', but, in a war that is justified in just war terms, as a moral proposition. We contrast limits in war against "military necessity," and by the use of the term "military necessity" have a tendency to think of that concept in purely realist terms, necessity terms, doing that which is necessary to survive and win, for the safety and survival of the political community. Obviously a large part of "military necessity" is exactly that. But another part of it, the deeper meaning in a system of just war theory, is that military necessity is the moral proposition that if you are fighting for a just cause, winning is not 'merely' survival, but an affirmative obligation, an affirmative moral obligation. That more "justice"-based account of winning might well - perhaps, anyway - affect how you see the way you fight. Of course, it will do the same even if you have merely convinced yourself, wrongly, that your cause is right. So the question is what role to grant military necessity in a moral framework in which winning is morally, and not just practically, important - but in which every side, every time, will convince itself that it has this moral justification to win on its side.

Categorizing theories of ethics of war

The usual way of setting out theories of ethics of war is realism, just war theories, and pacifism, corresponding to unlimited, limited, and prohibited with respect to undertaking war. I've gradually come to think that, while attractive in many ways, it is not really an exact correspondence. There are versions of realism that lead to the possibility of unlimited war, but you can also set out a form of moral realism that provides limits on war as well. Justice or rights based theories of war can lead to limits on war - but, as I suggested in the "superjustice" version of Sherman's "war is hell," a justice based or rights based approach can also lead to the possibility of unlimited war.

In addition, the classical division of realism, pacifism, and just war theories leaves out the quite important possibility represented by something we might call "positive law eschatology" - viewing positive international law as having replaced moral theories of war with positive law accounts, such as the UN charter or, more broadly, liberal internationalism, in which war disappears in favor of the "domestic analogy" and "police work" in place of war. I call it eschatalogical because it is a kind of end-time ideology, but whether that is a useful label or not, it is not adequately accounted for in the traditional version of things.

Perhaps it would be more useful to start the other way around, and classify theories of ethics of war as unlimited, limited, and prohibited. Then one could divide up realism, just war theories, rights based theories, and so on into smaller subdivisions, which seems better to fit the theories anyway.

Comparing Walzer's just war theory and the traditional Christian just war criteria, Feb 27 class notes

Here's what I propose to discuss in the February 27 class:

I asked you to read two different bodies of stuff. First, Walzer, chapters three and four. These chapters take up what Walzer thinks is essentially wrong with war. He says war is wrong because war is hell, but he gives war is hell a meaning fundamentally different from anything I mentioned in last class's gloss on Sherman's "war is hell." War is hell, for Walzer, fundamentally because it coerces people, combatants and noncombatants alike, in ways that are unjust and which violate their rights. War is hell because, as he says, war is a form of tyranny. This is quite different from any of the readings of that phrase I suggested last week.

This is to say, Walzer thinks that war is fundamentally wrong not because of its bad consequences primarily - of course he acknowledges them, but they are not the sum total of his objection - but because it violates rights. The question is how it violates rights, and Walzer says, well, one way to consider how it violates rights is to consider those (marginal) forms of warfare that do not violate rights - wars consisting of consenting participants who conceive of it as a game.

As we discussed last class, that participation might still be wrong - indeed wicked - but to kill in those circumstances is not necessarily unjust or a violation of rights. (We might think of duelling, for example.) But Walzer confines our consideration of what is wrong with war fundamentally to the question of rights. A theologian - not necessarily Christian, in fact - might object that this is not enough - you cannot give consent to kill or be killed as in a game, because you consent to something that is not yours to consent to. Whereas Walzer is focused on a contemporary and secular way of making out the argument against war, by asserting the idea that what matters in war, and what makes war wrong, is its violation of rights, as evidenced by the lack of consent in nearly all wars. Consent, liberty, freedom for oneself - these are all paradigmatically values of secular modernity - and very different, and providing a different account of the wrongness of war, from the religious view that one's life, and others' lives, belong to God.

This idea that war is a form of tyranny, and a deprivation of rights thereby is a powerful one. It allows Walzer to generate a powerful, and powerfully secular, form of rights discourse by which to talk about what is okay and not okay in deciding to make war, and in conducting war itself. But the move to limit the discourse to a rights discourse also limits the moral impulses, so to speak, on which Walzer's theory draws - and means that it is not really the whole tradition of just war thought and its criteria, which is presumably part of the reason that Walzer does not anywhere lay out the traditional criteria of the just war - the five, six, or more requirements that are usually asserted as the criteria of the just war. He does not do so - in a brief conversation with me at a conference once several years, he sort of said so - because although he is looking for a way to provide a secular theory of the just war that relies on rights but not on God, it is (deliberately) not a full theory of the ethics of war. It is concerned with a particular issue, the violation of rights, the violation of rights that arises from unjustified aggression, and resistance to aggression. Walzer's theory is really a theory of resistance to aggression. That is a very large consideration, to be sure. But the tradition of the just war, with its consideration of overall consequences, of prudence, of many historical, political, etc., factors that stretch far beyond a consideration of rights, even to resist aggression, is actually much broader than that.

2. This gets ahead of ourselves, however. Let us now turn from Walzer, and look at the addition readings I gave - from James Turner Johnson, mostly, who is a famous historian of religion and the just war tradition at Rutgers University - in order to state the tradition in its historical form. You'll notice that Johnson offers, in one of those readings, a critique of the limits of Walzer's rights based approach - notably that it is profoundly ahistorical. So, what are the traditional criteria? (We'll walk through them in class, first in summary, and then over the next couple of classes we'll go over them one by one.)

3. What are the differences you can see between these criteria and Walzer's theory? One example of the differences can be found in Walzer's very strong claim that all things being equal, one should resist aggression, and that one is always justified in doing so, even presumably in a losing cause. The traditional just war criteria do not say that. On the contrary, they say one should calculate the likelihood of success, and if it looks like a hopeless cause, one should consider the total consequences, even as against permitting injustice, and consider not fighting. Why are these things so different? I do not think this is a minor difference in assessing factors of just war theory - my view is that this goes to the very heart of Walzer's secular theory of the rights of political communities, versus a religious tradition in which the right action ought to be assessed from the point of view not of a political community, but trying to see with the eyes of God and the angels, as it were, - from the outside, looking down on the total conflict. Am I right about this? (I write about this a little bit on my blog - I'll post the reference later.)

4. Thus, Walzer is one version of a rights based just war theory; the religious traditions of Christianity offer not just one but several other possibilities. I stress that this is a tradition - it is a framework for arguing about war's ethics, not a calculus. You don't simply plop in some values for this or that and, click, out pops an answer. It is a tradition that invites very different moral conclusions about particular wars and their circumstances, depending on how you read the facts, of course, but also depending on how you interpret and read the moral values themselves. For one thing, in part this is a tradition about rights and justice, but it is also consequentialist - as, it would seem to most of us, any discussion of war must partly be - and also about prudence. It is about individuals and their rights, political communities and their rights, and consequences and prudence, and even including Thucydides 'argument upon your safety'. I would hate anyone to come away from this discussion thinking that this framework yields one simple answer; an essential part of this class is being able to articulate different answers that might come out of this same framework.

Okay, where we go from here is to walk back through the criteria one by one and fill in what they mean, or might mean.

Sherman's war is hell - just war theory class discussion notes, Feb 20

Sherman's 'War is hell'. I want to begin with Walzer's account of Sherman's famous expression, war is hell. The point here is to tease out multiple meanings and ways in which that phrase can be read to express different senses of the moral reality of war. I will give three readings, starting with a "zero" reading - ie, the context in which Sherman actually spoke.

0. Sherman's war is hell speech. Sherman seems not have to spoken the line famously attributed to him. Instead, speaking many years after the war to an audience of veterans but also younger men and boys in Columbus, Ohio in 1880, he said:

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning to generations yet to come."

In this context - a post war context which was increasingly infusing the Civil War with a patina of martial glory and romanticizing battle - Sherman here neither justifies atrocities nor justifies war itself. It seems instead, rather, a reminder to veterans not to gloss over the horror of their experiences and to young men not to romanticize war.

On the other hand, it is also evident from Sherman's writings, his letters, and above all his superb Memoirs, that Sherman indeed regarded war as in immutable, entirely natural part of the human landscape. He was in no sense conventionally religious and, as Charles Royster has put it, for Sherman war was a "natural phenomenon, guided by nature's laws, which God had created but which operated with the consistency of mathematics, not by God's 'mere fiat'." Yet he was a firm believer in order, and that history tended toward order - this constituted progress. When humans, for example, willfully "defied the movment of history ... their deviation would inevitably be corrected either by political persuasion or by violence. In the latter case, combat was as natural, as scientifically explicable, as the thunderstorm or the movement of the planets; the ultimate result followed as ineluctably as did effects of the laws of physics."

In that sense, Sherman was profoundly religious, in a special sense, a believer in a telos of the universe in which even human actions had a purpose toward order even if battle itself partook of a disorder that could not be compassed by generals and their plans. "Wars are not all evil," Sherman wrote late in life, "they are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed." (Charles Royster, The Destructive War.)

That latter sentiment is something quite different from a warning against the glorification of war; it does not glorify war, but it is altogether accepting of it - accepting of it as hell on earth.

1. 'War as hell' as an empirical assertion. One way of reading 'war is hell' is to treat it as an empirical assertion about the nature and experience of war. That is easy enough looking at battle, especially in the Civil War. However, we will also talk about wars, as Walzer notes, where war is not hell - it is a chosen experience, not that different from extreme sports, where the participants are voluntary and it is a conscious effort at self-testing. But those wars are the very, very rare exception - the question is what follows from the empirical observation that war is messy, nasty, brutal, hellish, etc.

The answer most often given is that wars, therefore, should be as short as possible. The most complicated and interesting factual and conseqeuntialist claim is, however, additional to what we've said so far - the claim that it is better to have a short, hellish war that might be a massive explosion of violence and horror, but which is short, than a long war which might be at most moments less violent and horrible but which, over time, is actually worse for the societies involved because of the evils of violent disorder.

There are many versions of this claim. Sun Tzu, for example, wrote of keeping wars short in order not to devastate the peasants who could not survive several years of campaigns without starving. Bertolt Brecht wrote his famous anti-war play, Mother Courage and her Children, against the backdrop of the Thirty Years War, in which the grand irony of the play is that the war itself has become the economic basis of so many people's lives that it's not clear that anyone is interested in peace - echoes of the long-running war in southern Sudan, in which over a twenty year time, international relief aid had become so built into the economy of the region that it had become a reason for continuing to fight.

Or the disasters of failed states, ruled by shifting gangs and clans and warlords - this was the world which Augustine surveyed in which he announced that the obligation of Christian rulers was to provide "ordinary" just order, with an emphasis on the virtues of order, tranquillitis ordinis, rather than dreaming of the eschatological peace of the end of days. One of the fascinating transformations in the current debate over the Iraq war has been the conversion of liberal idealists, previously taken with the idea of "no justice, no peace," coming to the realist view that order, just or not, can be a very good thing. (There is a scene arguing exactly this in the great Hungarian novel The Loser, at the time of the 1956 revolution.) So, goes this assertion, if you are going to have a war, then the best thing is that it be short and sharp, decisive even, because although war is hell, it is much better to experience that and avoid the greater disaster of long term disorder, which is the real hell.

So, in the end, this latter reading of 'war is hell' is an empirical assertion underlying a consequentialist judgment about what produces the best long term results - war is hell, but a short time in hell is better than long term disorder and violent insecurity.

2. 'War is hell' as realist argument for unlimited war. We have already walked through the argument by which descriptive realism becomes a moral justification for unlimited war - this is the Hobbesian spin on Thucydides that we discussed last time. I won't spend much time here on it, just to note that you can easily read 'war as hell' as shorthand for that argument. War is hell, you are, when in war, in the state of nature itself, and so it cannot be limited. This is realism as an argument for unlimited war.

3. 'War is hell' as argument from 'superjustice'. The final way I propose to read 'war is hell' is, strikingly, an argument not from realism but from justice, and yet an argument for unlimited war. It is probably the argument closest to Sherman's deepest views on the moral nature of war - and while it an argument for unlimited war, it is not an argument from realism. Sherman argues that because the South has rebelled against the Union, it has violated what might be seen as natural law. The consequence is a reaction that Sherman himself seems to contemplate in almost physics-like terms - a violation of the natural moral order begets an opposite and equal reaction, and it is one that is irrespective of the agency of those who carry it out. Notice how Sherman, in Walzer's summary, denies responsibility for the things that his army does to the South - because they morally did the wrong, he says, the consequences are both as natural as an opposite and equal reaction to reestablish the status quo, and not in any sense his fault or even doing - what he does is simply what the South did to itself.

Now, this argument is troubling on many grounds, starting with the peculiar and untenable shifting of agency. It will obviously not do for Sherman simply to deny that he and his army had any choice or agency in the matter; of course they did. They could have let the South secede.

More interesting is the claim of natural law that underlies the denial of agency. It is not a claim of necessity in the realist sense, not even in the Hobbesian sense. It is not an argument from the necessity of our survival. It is, on the contrary, an argument from the most profoundly offended sense of justice. And the sense of offense is so great that it permits any form of response - war unlimited in every sense - to right the wrong. We are accustomed to thinking of the concept of justice in war as one which limits war, both its causes and its conduct. But that is not necessarily the case - justice, instead, can also be a profound argument for denying that war can have limitations. No justice, no peace, taken to a very grave extreme. And that is what, at bottom, Sherman is saying. He affects the passive equanimity of a hammer in the hands of a 'natural' response; it is not his doing or his agency. But what drives the hammer blow, it turns out, is a sense of justice that will not admit of any limitation on its drive for justice.

The drive for absolute justice, without limit, is the subject of much literature from the Greeks, who, with their sense of moderation, as hubris and a source of traged, down to today. Durrenmatt's The Visit of the Old Lady, for a modern example; or Albert Camus' very great essay, The Rebel. But Sherman - and this seems to be pretty close to what the man actually believed - was not finally a realist, but a fanatic for justice. I want us to bear this in mind as we look at moral claims to limit the scope of war - the standard account of the ethics of war tends to see, with Walzer, realism as the primary way by which unlimited war is justified. But in many ways, it is even easier to get there with a claim of genuinely unlimited justice.

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The other thing we will discuss, or start discussing, on Tuesday, February 20, is why war is wrong. I will follow Walzer's discussion quite closely. The fundamental question is what makes war wrong for Walzer - the key is that it is a form of tyranny, of coercion, of denial of natural liberty to individuals as to a political community. And I will suggest that it is this element of Walzer - this focus on the denial of liberty - that most importantly makes Walzer's account of just war theory a secular one. It is not merely that Walzer seeks an account that does not explicitly appeal to God or God's laws or commandments - it is, even more, that Walzer's seeks a theory that affirms the basic secular tenets of modernity, starting with liberte, egalite, and fraternite. I will start off into this discussion in class.

Walzer and realism - notes for Just War class, February 13

Below are discussion notes I circulated to my law school just war theory class for February 13. Because not everyone has had a basic undergraduate course in ethics, I usually start out with some basic ethics 101 discussion, before moving to ethics and war.

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Essential ethics theory background. I want to go back (big surprise!) and add one more element to the thumbnail sketch of the moral theories at play in discussing the ethics of war.

I first raised something that is not actually a "moral" consideration at all - prudence, self-interest, what's good for me - in order to distinguish it from moral considerations, questions of good and bad, right and wrong.

Second, I divided the moral questions into two main theories - two main ways of answering the question "what is right and good?" - into consequentialist theories and deontological (for our purposes, rights based) theories. The difference between those two? Very (very) roughly:

Consequentialism says, the right or good action is the one that produces the best consequences in the real world - usually some slogan like, "greatest good for the greatest number," or, as Mr. Spock put it (as he was dying), "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." Utilitarianism is perhaps the most widely known version of this theory, and Jeremy Bentham or Mill its classical exponents, with someone like Peter Singer as a contemporary adherent.

In many ways, this is a deeply attractive philosophy and applied by many social reformers in ways that continue to benefit all of us. However ... it also leaves this considerable problem, what I identified as the "Let's chop Forrest up for his body parts" - our needs might outweigh his, but somehow we still generally think it's wrong. We don't think he "owes" us his body - it's him and it's his - and we usually express this by saying that people have certain fundamental rights. Including not to get snatched for your body parts even if it would save the rest of us. Rights theory is not the only deontological - duty-based - theory, but it's the one that will principally interest us in exploring Walzer's rights-based theory of the ethics of war.

So we have consequentialist answers to the question of what the right and good should be. But we also have answers which say, well, sure, consequences are important, but they do not always settle things - in at least some circumstances, we look not to consequences but to a person's rights, which effectively override what a consequentialist answer would be. An assertion of rights is one form of this alternative to consequentialism. Note that even a rights-theorist is not indifferent to consequences - but holds that they do not always settle things.

What I now want to add to this picture builds on something I mentioned in class and moves in a quite different direction. Viz., that when we deal with groups of people - political communities, for example - then the prudential thing can also be, in a certain sense, also a matter of morality. When you act in a way that, in one sense, is self interested, in your own interest, but do so on behalf of people to whom you owe obligations, for whom you have responsibility, then those actions also take on a very important moral quality.

Here's the new wrinkle. When it comes to war, very often, responsibilities for others, for the political community, is very important. But it is more than just a "responsibility." It is, indeed, a bond of emotion, feeling, bonds of affection, and genuinely love. Yet, strikingly, although what appear to be "prudential" considerations are able to encompass bonds of affection, neither of our two genuinely "moral" theories has a very easy time doing so. It is a problem which has been much discussed in moral philosophy in the past 25 years.

If you are a consequentialist, you should be looking for best total consequences - and it should not matter that you save or don't save your husband, your wife, your child, your anything. Consequentialism is very unforgiving of personal relationships.

Yet the same is true of rights theories - and that strand of deontology that arises from Kant - it is an ethics of duty alone, irrespective of affection. Did anyone read that little snippet of Arthur Rex that I posted in the discussion board? It was my ironic Valentine's Day post, a snippet in which Arthur says to Merlin that he will marry Guinnevere and remain faithful to her, whether he loves her or not because, if he has made a vow, her "identity being irrelevant." It turns love into an impersonal duty, and Merlin is highly skeptical. It is as though Arthur proposes to marry not Guinnevere, but instead his marriage vow itself. It's an amusing exchange because we, with Merlin, understand that this is a matter of love, not duty, and that in love identity of person always matters.

The point is that when it comes to war, the sacrifices of war, what persuades people to march off to war, is often the belief in bonds of affection. It is very hard for an ethics of war to really account for how we actually feel about war without taking into account the feelings people in a political community have for one another and that community. Sometimes it blinds them to fighting for an unjust cause, or to fight unjustly, but often it is what motivates them to resist evil on the other side.

As we move into the ethical discussion, one of the very difficult questions for our two moral theories is how affection is built in. Christian tradition says that war can sometimes be an aspect of Christian love, the defense of another; Christianity, unlike our two moral theories, is not an ethics of consequences nor even, surprisingly, an ethics of duty, but an ethics of virtue and acting from the proper virtuous motivation.

Walzer's realism. That said, we turn to realism, both IR realism and ethical realism. In Tuesday's discussion, I want to consider two different parts of Walzer's discussion in order to understand his view of realism and how it connects the prudential realism of a descriptive theory of international relations and an ethical realism that provides, in Walzer's view, the warrant for unlimited war. So:

The Melian dialogue. What is it, what are the claims on both sides? In particular, what is the meaning of those very, very slippery terms - necessity, nature, the nature of necessity, a necessity of nature, and natural necessity? Walzer reads the Melian dialogue in light of Hobbes especially. The argument connects IR realism with ethical realism in the following way. IR realism asserts that the world of international relations, the world of international states, is essentially the Hobbesian state of nature, anarchy, nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes said, and as someone else said, 'every man for himself and God against all'. If that is the correct description, and if there is no possibility of coming out of that state of nature into an ordered society ruled by a sovereign to impose the rule of law, then we are governed by nature. And the law of nature is that whatever you do to survive is okay. This is natural necessity. A descriptive predicate about the state of the international order is conjoined with a moral predicate about what is morally okay in the state of nature, and the result is, well, anything to survive - and the result is the possibility of unlimited war.

We will try to look back to the Melian dialogue and see if this helps to explain the arguments made there.

(Notice that the Hobbesian argument in the context of political communities in international anarchy makes, in some respects, an even stronger argument for unlimited war in the state of nature than mere individuals do. This is so if one accepts, as I mentioned above, that the apparently merely prudential argument for survival is actually partly a moral argument insofar as the political community bears responsibility for the safety of its members. An individual in the state of nature might take risks with his or her individual life that, as a moral matter, the trustees (literally) of the political community might believe they have no right to take because of their obligations to their members. The result might be an even greater propensity to war.)
(Notice that the moral argument introduces the possibility of another solution to the ethics of war - one that Walzer does not seriously consider, but which is the preferred liberal internationalist solution - let us leave the anarchy of the international system and create a genuine society that will have a sovereign and the rule of law. We will talk about this later in the term; I am very skeptical of this, but it, liberal internationalism is the preferred alternative for many.)

Next week: Sherman's 'war is hell'. I want you to think imaginatively about ways in which this phrase can be understood as an argument about the morality of when and how to fight wars. I will suggest three - only two of which are, curiously, really truly "realist." But you may come up with others.

Final paper topics for my NCS students in Just and Unjust Wars class

I volunteer to teach a class at my daughter's school, the National Cathedral School for Girls, in Washington DC (wikipedia article), on ethics and war, Just and Unjust Wars. It is essentially a stripped down version of a class I teach at my law school, and have taught over the years at Fordham, Columbia, and Harvard law schools. The students I get from NCS are very good writers and thinkers - so are the boys who come over from St Alban's. They are usually seniors, and I get several of the best students in the grade. Actually, some of the youngest students have been among the very best - two girls, then sophmores, for example, who gave me amazingly subtle readings of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, both of whom are now at Yale, and I have one extremely good sophmore this year. I feel like I can give them pretty difficult material to work with in ethics. So here are the final paper topics for the class; pick one or design your own question:

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1. We have spent a lot of time in this class discussing the differences between moral realism and the just war tradition. Pick one or the other and defend it. I mean by that offer a definition of each, assert that one or the other is a better moral theory, and defend that assertion. Assume you propose to defend just war theory against realism. In order to mount a defense, you want to do two things. First, what do you believe is affirmatively correct about just war theory, on its own terms? On what grounds do your support those claims? Second, on what grounds could just war theory be attacked by a supporter of realism – and how do you respond to and answer those attacks framed specifically from a realist perspective? Or flip this around and defend realism against just war theory.

2. Who has right authority to fight a war? Are there any limits on who morally is entitled to take up arms to fight against a political authority in a political cause? If there are limits, what are they? What reasons can you give in favor of any limits you might propose? What objections can be made to your proposed limits? How do you respond to those objections?

3. The great military historian John Keegan wrote this past week in the British magazine Prospect on the question of whether Iraq has now become a civil war. He believes that it is close but not yet there. He might or might not be right about that. More importantly, he offers historical criteria for what constitutes a true civil war as distinguished from more minor internal armed conflicts. Offer a reconstruction and critique of his argument, applied to Iraq but also taking into account other historical wars, such as the American Civil War. The question that I want you to address is, in the first place, whether you accept the criteria he offers for what constitutes a civil war historically, leaving aside whether he is right about Iraq. On the basis of what you know about other wars, are his criteria correct or not. You may express your view as to Iraq, but the question for the paper is whether the criteria against which he purports to examine Iraq are the correct criteria. Give arguments in favor of his view, against his view, and reach a conclusion. The article is here:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7951

4. In saying “war is hell,” Sherman asserts (one of several ways of glossing the phrase) that because his side did not start the war, and because it was aggressed against by a South seeking unlawfully to secede, any action he takes to correct that fundamental injustice is moral, justified, and indeed is not really “his doing” because he is simply taking corrective action, responding, as it were, to an action taken by the other side. Partly he is saying that the non-aggressor side is entitled to any action to correct the injustice of aggression and partly he is saying that the unjust action by the aggressor creates a sort of “opposite but equal reaction” for which the non-aggressor is not morally responsible. This moral view shares with realism a rejection, in principle at least, of any limits in war, but I have characterized the position not as “realism,” but instead as a kind of “super-justice” position, one which relies on a view that what the aggressed-against is entitled to do knows no limits in order to respond to the unjust aggression, because the aggression was unjust. Leave aside the question of whether the South was actually the “aggressor” or not in the Civil War; assume for purposes of the discussion that it was. Is Sherman’s moral argument for potentially unlimited war in the name of righting a wrong morally correct? Assert a view, offer arguments for and against, responding to your arguments, and responding to the critiques, and reach a conclusion. (One source to draw upon by way of critique of Sherman's position is just war theory and the criteria of balance of good over evil and proportionality. But are these criteria of justice, and if not, how do they weigh - how can they weigh? - against Sherman's claims of justice?)

5. Walzer says at page 51: “The wrong the aggressor commits is to force men and women to risk their lives for the sake of their rights. It is to confront them with the choice: your rights or (some of) your lives! Groups of citizens respond in different ways to that choice, sometimes surrendering, sometimes fighting, depending on the moral and material conditions of their state and army. But they are always justified in fighting; and in most cases, given that harsh choice, fighting is the morally preferred response.” (emphasis added)

Focus on the final judgments that Walzer makes – that they are “always justified in fighting” and that in most cases, fighting “is the morally preferred response.” (a) Is this consistent with the Christian criterion of the just war, that one weigh the balance of good over evil in the overall circumstances, including those of your enemy, in deciding whether or not to fight? See the materials in James Turner Johnson and the Stanford Encyclopedia to help sort out the meaning of that Christian criterion. (b) Whether this is consistent or not with Christian just war theory, is Walzer right or wrong in your view in the two statements that I asked you to focus on? Why or why not? What are objections to Walzer’s view and responses he might make to the objections?

6. Consider the definition of a legal combatant eligible for POW status and the combatant’s privilege under Geneva Convention III, Article 4. I have indicated in class that POW status gives a detainee significant benefits – interrogation must be limited to merely name, rank and serial number; treatment in detention must be generally as good as that of soldiers of the “Detaining Power,” trial for war crimes or other matters must be (with some legal limitations; I am sliding over some things legally) the same as court martial for the Detaining Power’s own soldiers, etc. On the other hand, as I have also indicated in class, if one flunks the test of being a legal combatant – because, especially, you belong to a group whose methods of war are the systematic violation of the laws and customs of war, such as Al Qaeda or, back in the Yugoslavia wars, massive ethnic cleansing and massacre such as the Serbs undertook at in Bosnia and especially Srebrenica – then one is an illegal combatant (or “unprivileged belligerent”). The rights of an illegal combatant are far more limited than those of POWs and are those found (more or less; I am fudging some important legal complications here) in Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions (p 151-2 of our materials). It affords important protections – no torture, summary execution, etc. – but falls very far short of the standard of full POW protection.

Is this distinction morally correct? Assume for this purpose that we are in a war – ignore debates over whether the war on terror legally constitutes a war. Should every detainee be afforded full POW protections, irrespective of whether he or she meets the legal requirements of Article 4? What are the arguments for and against giving every combatant detainee in war full POW rights? Is it morally just or even morally required to give all detainees the same rights, or is the distinction as it stands morally justified? Beyond the moral arguments over whether justice requires giving all detainees the same rights in detention – the Serb militias whose systematic modus operandi was rape, pillage, and massacre as much as the honorable soldier – what incentives, good or bad, are created by one policy or the other? If your views about what incentives are created differ from what you believe the just policy to be, which takes precedence?

(Bear in mind that even a POW can be tried for alleged war crimes – indeed, every state has an obligation to do so, whether its own soldiers, those of the enemy, or civilians of either side. But the procedural protections for a full POW in a trial are very different from those under Common Article Three, which affords only a “regularly constituted” court. So the issue of war crimes is not that either legal combatants or illegal combatants are excused from trial for war crimes; the question is whether you have all the trial protections of a POW.)

7. What is the doctrine of the double effect? Describe it and give an example of what it claims. How does it relate the concept of “collateral damage”? (See page 184, my NYT magazine article on the laws of war.) What is the legal expression of it in the law of war? (See Protocol I, Article 48, 51 (4) and (5), 52.) But what are the consequences if you give up the distinction and say that it is morally invalid or false? Is it still possible to remain within the framework of just war theory if you deny the double effect doctrine? What position(s) might giving up the distinction between “intended” and “merely foreseen but not intended” lead you towards? Why, in other words, is the double effect doctrine – whether it is valid or not – understood to be so essential for the jus in bello limits upon fighting of just war theory? With that as the very profound background consequences of your answer - does the double effect principle seem to you a valid moral distinction or merely sophistical? Argue for and against.

8. Should blinding laser weapons be allowed as a means of warfare? Or should they be outlawed, in favor of weapons that “merely” kill people? Are there any other weapons that you think should be outlawed as a matter of law even for use against combatants alone – chemical weapons used tactically in combat only against combatants, small exploding bullets, poison, or anything else? Why or why not?

9. What is siege warfare, and why is it so horrible? Read the account of the acquittal of von Leeb at Nuremberg, in Walzer, pp 166-7. In particular, what is the special role of civilians in siege – as reflected in von Leeb’s cruel yet (then) lawful behavior? What is Walzer’s view of how siege should be handled with respect to civilians and noncombatants. Now read Article 54 of Protocol I (p 163). Describe the differences between the two. (In a roundabout way, Art. 54 seeks to outlaw siege warfare – how? Parse Article 54 and compare to Walzer.) Which is morally the better approach? What as a practical matter is likely to be the result of Article 54 – is it likely to achieve its legal aims? Assume that as a practical matter, Art. 54 is not likely to be effective, even though you believe it is the morally best approach. How do you reconcile the difference between the morally best approach and the practical consequences likely to result from it? (The core of this question is to parse both Walzer and Article 54, and then compare. It is an exercise in close textual reading.)

10. Read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and my commentary on in it in the TLS. Focus on the phrases in the last paragraph of the Address beginning “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in,” ie, finish and win the Civil War though it might mean more bloody battles. Many have taken those phrases and the phrases in the preceding paragraph “both read the same bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other” as an argument that Lincoln essentially accepted that right and wrong in the war was merely how one side saw things against the other side. It is to suggest that Lincoln here espouses a form of moral relativism – we see it this way, they see it that, who is to say who is right, except power and the force of arms? I argue against this in the last two paragraphs of my review. Make the argument that these sections of the Address espouse a moral relativism. Reconstruct my argument that they do not, but instead point to Lincoln seeking to do something morally quite different. What do I argue that he seeks to do, rather than relativism? Agree or disagree with me, offer reasons for your view, offer objections to your view, and then answer them.

11. Should the two sides in a war have to obey the same rules? Suppose one side is significantly weaker technologically and materially than the other side. Why shouldn’t it take the few advantages it has – such as the ability to hide among civilians and to use human shields, to target civilians in terrorist attacks in order to break the morale of the stronger enemy? This is not to suggest that there should not be rules – but that the rules should take into account how strong your side is. The weaker side should not have to fight according to the same rules as the stronger side – the rules simply favor the stronger side, and the weaker side is morally entitled to a more limited set of rules. Agree or disagree with this position, taking into account both moral arguments as well as a discussion of the practical incentives likely to result from such a “non-reciprocal” rule.

12. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also ... love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. Luke 6:38-48.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, among other Christian theologians, and drawing upon Augustine among others, has said that under some circumstances, even war can be seen as an act of Christian love and charity. How do you reconcile Elshtain’s view with the above passage of Jesus preaching, in the Gospel of Luke? Can they be reconciled? Or is the attempt to do so simply hypocrisy? If you think they can be reconciled, what role might the just war tradition play in that reconciliation?

13. Evaluate the following passage from Blood and Belonging (1994) by the (cosmopolitan) Canadian scholar-activist turned politician Michael Ignatieff, reconstruct its several arguments and claims, and extend its meaning to the place of soldiers and armies in relation to cosmopolitanism and those who would claim that they are only incidentally citizens of a particular nation-state, but are instead "citizens of the world."

It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted. Though we have passed into the post-imperial age, we have not moved a post-nationalist age, and I cannot see how we will ever do so. The cosmopolitan order of the great cities - London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris - depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation-state ... In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens. In that sense alone, I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and the rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives. At the very least, cosmopolitan disdain and astonishment at the ferocity with which people will fight to win a nation-state of their own is misplaced. They are, after all, fighting for a privilege cosmopolitans have long taken for granted.