Abstract
I will assume that the realist account of war and of why states go to war, and why and for what ends states conduct WR, is correct. I have argued that if S undertakes WR on behalf of a state, she must assume it will pursue its own interests in accordance with realism, and hence she should therefore expect that the products of her work will be used by that state exclusively to promote and defend its interests in ways it thinks best; and this may mean they are used in an unjust war, sold to belligerents in an unjust war, licensed or given away, and so forth. But none of this implies that the conditions for a just war cannot be satisfied when a state embarks on a war to protect its vital interests. It does mean that statesmen and women do not deliberate over just cause, worry about having the right intention, do (universal) cost benefit calculations that take account of the interests of all involved, and so forth, but it is still possible that all these conditions become satisfied, so to speak, fortuitously. One would expect this would be most likely to happen when a state is the victim of unprovoked aggression, and so clearly has just cause, when the price of surrender looks to be very great or is not negotiable, and when the state in question is a signatory to international conventions about war fighting. WW2 from the perspective of the Allies looked to be an example that fits this model, at least in the context of jus ad bellum. The aggressor, Nazi Germany, was a totalitarian state run by a dictator who led a party that espoused a violent and irrational form of racist ideology which mandated programmes of conquest, extermination and annexation of land. In the east especially, it seems that countries like Poland and the Soviet Union had little choice but to resist, as the war was over their very existence. Such circumstances would therefore appear to those under which there would have been grounds to undertake WWR even in a world of states acting according to realism, were it not for the fact that JWT prohibits WWR. But we now need to re-examine this constraint in the light of such exceptional circumstances, namely, in the supreme emergency of WW2.
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Notes
- 1.
Right intention would seem to be a problem, as one assumes that states acting under realism would never pass up the opportunity to promote their interests in ways that are not related to the just cause. But this is an ad bellum condition and if one considers the war that is the main topic of this chapter, WW2, Poland, France, Britain and the Soviet Union did not have the opportunity in 1939 and 1941 to do much but try to defend themselves. Before 1941 the Soviet Union saw the chance to gain territory in the pact with Germany over the partition of Poland, but that was before the Soviet Union was at war.
- 2.
Stalin is an unlikely candidate as a statesman who led a country in a just war, given the avowedly realist stance of Marxist Leninism. His dealings with Hitler via meetings between the respective foreign ministers about the partition of Poland, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and other deals were a paradigm of exploiting the international situation in the interests of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s war from 1941 was very much a just war by default – until he was able to capture German soldiers and mistreat them in turn, and later on kill German non-combatants.
- 3.
This is a familiar, and rightly discredited, justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- 4.
This restriction was discussed in Chap. 2.
- 5.
The US Eighth Air force joined Bomber Command in 1943 in what was aptly named Operation Pointblank, whose aim, inter alia, was to destroy the morale of the German people – in other words, to bomb them into submission. This was simply to increase the operations already in place, and by 1944 the US was bombing by day and the RAF by night. This practice, and the experience gained for instance with incendiaries, was used as a basis for the intensive bombing of Japan in 1945. Very large areas of major cities in German and Japan were destroyed: over 60% of large cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Hamburg were destroyed, and over 50% of Tokyo and Yokohama. A.C. Grayling’s book (Grayling 2007), which is a sustained argument for the proposition that the area bombing of WW2 was unjustified although he does not engage with Walzer or discuss any other philosopher’s accounts, has many factual details about the campaigns against German and Japanese cities.
- 6.
But this would mean that supreme emergencies would not really be emergencies, and it would mean that they were not such rare or special events that warrant special measures that violate deeply held moral principles about the immunity of innocents from harm. Or, alternatively, it would allow the violation of such principles on too many occasions, and that would be an unacceptable consequence.
- 7.
The probability of a bomb dropped at night in 1940 of hitting within a mile a specific target was very small indeed.
- 8.
Churchill very rarely expressed any regrets for anything he did during the war. A more plausible view of his intention, whatever his rhetoric, was revenge, revenge for attacks on English cities such as London, Southampton and Coventry.
- 9.
The Luftwaffe stopped bombing airfields and started bombing cities and towns on September 7 1940. Thus the aim of destroying the RAF and preparing for an invasion was given up on that day.
- 10.
Grand Admiral Raeder told Hitler that an invasion was a last resort and then only with total air superiority. The German navy, the Kreigsmarine, was no match at all for the Royal Navy at any stage in the war.
- 11.
Martin Cook wonders why the European conquest of the North American did not constitute a supreme emergency: clearly it did, given the idea of supreme emergency introduced by Walzer, see Cook 2007: 142.
- 12.
I am setting aside terrorists, who do have the capacity to fight and are not states but substate actors, because, by definition, terrorists are not responsible to the demands of morality.
- 13.
As we will see, some have accused Walzer of a pro-state bias and have wondered why other groups are not similarly privileged. My point is that the preservation of the state is necessary for the preservation of peoples, or whatever it is that is really of value. There must be a pro-state bias if there is be an question of a supreme emergency exemption.
- 14.
And Walzer said that the emergency facing Britain lasted from May 1940 to December 1942.
- 15.
In 13.1 E is effective because the probability of E not being realised if W is carried out – Britain not being invaded, the Soviet Union not being defeated, etc. – is greater that the unconditional probability of E, which is in turn greater that the probability of E given W. It is, I think, obvious why this is a condition for W being effective. In 13.2, on the other hand, W makes no difference at all, and hence it is ineffective. By contrast in 13.3, not only does W make no difference, but it is also pointless, as the probability of E is approximately zero. I claim 13.3 represents the state of affairs of the British bombing of German cities.
- 16.
And that is true also of the atomic bomb. It is true if the Manhattan Project is understood as aiming to produce the means to deter a Nazi bomb, and it is true if it is thought of as producing a means to engage Japanese military forces.
- 17.
The British pioneered the use of incendiaries to maximise civilian casualties, for instance in Dresden, and this practice was taken up by the US in the their bombing of Japanese cities after March 1945, see Grayling (2007: 72–77).
- 18.
This viewpoint is not uncontentious. A vast amount has been written about the subject, from within the Soviet Union and East Germany, by West German scholars and by British and American historians, and there are disagreements both between and within the members of these groups. Over the general issue of the causes of WW2 there is a great deal of disagreement.
- 19.
This was, and was intended to be, a ‘total war’, even a total war in a special sense.
- 20.
The Commando Order, issued in October 1942 directed that all enemy soldiers found behind German lines to be shot, but was not specific to the War in the East.
- 21.
There are other ways to understand the nature and hence the duration of the supreme emergency, namely with reference to the genocide of the Jews and more generally to the systematic mistreatment of Soviet citizens for the whole of the occupation of the country.
- 22.
There are many factual accounts of what took place in the East, and I will not give references where the facts are well-known.
- 23.
The Battle for Moscow was lost because the German offensive had passed what Clausewitz called the ‘culminating point of the attack’ (Stahel 2009: 19). At this point, in essence, the initiative passes to the defense.
- 24.
I have not expressed with reference to a justificatory schema, because of course it is a special example, supposedly unique.
- 25.
The ‘others’ are Orend and Igor Primoratz. We have seen that Orend’s views on JWT are close to Walzer’s, so he is an obvious choice here. Primoratz takes a different position, so it is useful to contrast this with Walzer and Orend. Others still have written on the supreme emergency exemption, though again mostly without identifying a suitable example. I will touch on some of these accounts also.
- 26.
The reader may, even after all that has been said, disagree. It may be pointed out that while WR often does produce the means to harm that are used to harm innocent people in unforeseeable ways, and that weapons researchers must acknowledge this and must therefore seek to justify their work, this is not inevitable. It is not certain that this will happen. In response to this, I would say that targeting non-combatants is not certain to kill them either, and that this issue is allowed for by the probability assessments of expressions 6.5 and 13.4. These imply that P(H|M) = P(H|W). It makes no difference to the argument is the former is taken to be slightly larger than the latter.
- 27.
Nathanson is one critic of Walzer who sees allowing supreme emergencies measures in the case of Britain in 1940 as stepping onto a slippery slope that leads to all manner of situations being classed as supreme emergencies and hence leading to widespread violations of moral rules, Nathanson (2006: 23–24).
- 28.
One might recall that the literal sense of the term “innocent” is “not having done harm”.
- 29.
Primoratz thinks that it is not clear what is gained by talking here about dirty hands because this does not explain what is distinctive about supreme emergency, Primoratz (2011: 377).
- 30.
Role responsibility, or any kind of ‘forward-looking responsibility’ is such as to make agents who have such responsibility accountable for certain omissions, namely, those that they are obliged to perform in relation to the role. In many instances this explains why agents can be responsible for what they do not do – I have discussed these matters at length in Forge (2008). So if leaders do have this kind of obligation, then this explains why it is that it can be morally wrong for them to fail to act. Where there is no such responsibility, there is no obligation to act and hence no blame for not acting.
- 31.
It might be thought that culpability therefore also attaches to the role, in some way, and that the person acting out the role does not himself have dirty hands. I believe that this is a mistake, and have discussed the reasons why elsewhere, see Forge (2008: 213–214). S has no role responsibility.
- 32.
A distinction is being made here between second-order and first-order moral judgement.
- 33.
I am not confident this is clear from Igor Primoratz paper, but he has made it clear to me that he sees both of these actions as moral disasters
- 34.
Primoratz’ maintains that his idea of a moral disaster is neutral between whether the people in question have the means to fight back and kill enemy non-combatants or not. I think that in all cases of moral disaster thus far, the people have not had the means to fight back and I think it highly unlikely that they ever would be able to.
- 35.
As was done by Alan Bullock in his Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. Mao and Pol Pot would, in other centuries, stand unchallenged for the this title.
- 36.
For instance, it is estimated that only about 5,000 German prisoners out of some 90,000 taken at Stalingrad survived. Then there were the murders and rapes committed by the Red Army in Germany. And after the war there was the setting up of the highly repressive East German state.
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Forge, J. (2013). Weapons Research and Supreme Emergency. In: Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research. Research Ethics Forum, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5736-3_13
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