LITMIR.BIZ

1 The Justice of Resorting to War

      Walzer was interested in justice in war from childhood, with his longest piece of young writing focusing on World War II, which he continues to view as the paradigm of a just war. His first book, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), ends with a chapter on Puritan attempts to rework the Catholic just-war theory of the Middle Ages so as to allow for revolutionary wars that create a holy republic (268–99; see also Walzer 1963a, 1963b, 1968a). Throughout the 1960s, his opposition to the American war in Vietnam led him to invoke just-war arguments in justification of his position (see especially Walzer 1967b, also, Walzer 1966a, 1966b 1969, 1970a). But it is with the publication of Just and Unjust Wars in 1977 that Walzer really made a name for himself on the subject. Wars is not only Walzer’s most systematic study of the ethics of war but his most famous contribution to political and international relations theory per se: it has sold as many copies as all of Walzer’s other books combined.¹ Wars remains of the utmost importance to Walzer’s career as, although some of his positions have developed over the years,² the basic framework of analysis he introduces in the book continues to guide both his work on just wars and that of many other scholars (as noted by, among others, Lichtenberg 2008: 112, Orend 2013: vii–viii). Wars, and the literature it created, is thus the focus of the next two chapters. My division follows Walzer’s own. He notes that there is a distinction between the moral considerations that govern the outbreak of war (jus ad bellum) and those that apply to conduct during war (jus in bello).³ This chapter thus considers both Walzer’s argument that just-war theory is a plausible endeavor and his account of the justice of resorting to war.

I start by setting Walzer’s work in its context. This is twofold. First, his thought about justice in war developed out of his involvement in the left-liberal or democratic-socialist branch of the anti-Vietnam War movement (Howe and Walzer 1979: 16) and seeks to advance core commitments of that movement. Second, Walzer wanted to “rediscover the just war for political and moral theory” (Walzer 2015a: xxvi) by rebutting objections from both realists, who hold that moral judgments are inapplicable during war, and pacifists, who argue that no war can be just. I show that Walzer’s major contribution to theorizing about the justice of resorting to war is twofold. First, unlike earlier notions of just war that developed out of Christian theology, Walzer’s basis is human rights to life and liberty (Walzer 2015a: xxviii). This brings the theory in line with contemporary ethics, in particular in the insistence that all just wars must be defensive. Second, unlike much recent just-war theory that uses almost exclusively the tools of contemporary philosophy, Walzer situates his account in military history and practice, claiming that these give war a “moral reality” (3–48) that includes a “war convention” (127–221) that is the appropriate guide to just-war thinkers. Walzer calls his method “casuistic,” meaning that he advances his argument through a series of historical cases and insists that it is important that the cases be historical ones rather than hypotheticals (xxviii). The historical basis of Walzer’s just-war theory reflects his determination to offer a politically engaged account (Nardin 2013). It also means that the theory overlaps in significant, and often unrecognized, ways with Walzer’s broader corpus, as both focus on interpretation and critical scrutiny of existing norms. The chapter concludes by considering Walzer’s account of exceptions to the principle that cross-border aggression is never justified, focusing in particular on humanitarian intervention.

Against Vietnam

Just-war theory is now a thriving cottage industry and a mainstay of syllabi in global ethics. During the Vietnam War, while Walzer was writing Wars, however, the dominant notion was that justice in war was a sort of category mistake. We should not overstate this: in his first major work on military ethics, Walzer argued that most Americans accepted that the decision to go to war might be just or unjust but rejected restrictions on military conflict once war had begun (Walzer 1967b). Inceasingly, much of the political left tends toward pacifism, or at least to rejection of the use of force by the USA, fearing a sort of neo-imperialism cloaked in just-war language.

      As a result, even while participating in the movement against the American war in Vietnam, Walzer objected to most of the common arguments against that war, in particular those that sympathized with the communism of the North Vietnamese government and of the Vietcong (Howe and Walzer 1979: 15, Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978: 390–1). While the USA would have been entitled to support an indigenous anti-communist movement – indeed, Walzer would have done so himself – it could not replace an indigenous communist regime with a dictatorship of its own, no matter how benevolent it felt itself to be. The “ghastliness” (Walzer 1968d: 13) of the war consisted in the combination of two particular features, on Walzer’s view. First, it was “partly an inherited colonial war” in which the USA, like colonial France before it, refused to accept the right of the Vietnamese people to collective self-determination (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). This meant that the war could not be won, because the government of North Vietnam and the Vietcong “had succeeded in appropriating the historical energies of Vietnamese nationalism” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). Although those movements were not, Walzer insisted, part of a global progressive cause, they had the loyalty

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