Abstract
It is widely agreed that deception of the enemy can be morally permissible in war. However, the question of the morally acceptable limits to deception in war has barely been explored in contemporary ethics. This paper defends the thesis that there are no moral limits on military deception per se, that is, no limits based on the ethics of truthfulness. Rather, all moral restriction against deception in war is based on another moral principle: military deception is morally unacceptable only when it violates the principle of not harming those who do not intend to harm us.
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Notes
The Art of War, Chapter 1, section 18.
Quoted in Rothstein and Whaley (2013), p. xix.
See for example, U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Doctrine for Military Deception (accessible at http://www.information-retrieval.info/docs/jp3_13_4.pdf [accessed May 10, 2015]).
Nor did I find a book chapter dedicated to the subject (chapter 10 in Bok (1978) is titled “Lying to Enemies,” but does not in fact provide an analysis of the question of moral limits of military deception). A Google Scholar search shows that Mattox’s article, though published 13 years ago, has been cited only twice, and even those two citations discuss other topics (one of them is a paper in Korean; my judgment of its irrelevance therefore relies on Google’s translation—the necessary qualifications apply).
I shall make references to international humanitarian law throughout; I use them to provide helpful illustrations of the ethical claims, not as legal interpretation.
Hugo Grotius, quoting Tertullian, in Grotius (2005). p. 1746.
This claim with respect to the ethics of truthfulness specifically was forcefully made recently by Saul (2012a).
See footnote 2 to the 1987 commentary on Article 37 (“Prohibition of Perfidy”) of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (“Protocol 1”), 8 June 1977; available at https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Comment.xsp?viewComments=LookUpCOMART&articleUNID=3EA868BE16BCBB86C12563CD0051DB0B (accessed May 10, 2015). It is also mentioned there that “others” view the fundamental reason differently: as referring to “morality” being a condition of the law; this, however, is left as a cryptic remark.
Freud’s view is expressed notably in his correspondence with Einstein, titled “Why War?” (See Volume XXII of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey.) Other irrational accounts are discussed in Anatol Rapoport’s introduction to von Clausewitz (1968, pp. 15-17). The term “rational instrument” too is from Rapoport (ibid. p. 13). (Beyond adopting the idea of rationality itself, the presupposition of war as a rational instrument surely does not have to assume the specific Clausewitzian form—indeed, a narrowly Clausewitzian view of raison d’état would be difficult to defend in our days.)
The example of feigning to be wounded is given in Article 37 (Prohibition of Perfidy) of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. It is instructive that all the examples of forbidden perfidy given there seem to be small scale, tactical tricks rather than large scale, strategic moves.
It was due to an ingenious bluff that Belisarius, Justinian’s most brilliant general, managed to force the Persian king Chosroes to retreat; no doubt preventing thereby carnage of great proportions. It is understandable why, according to Procopius, “this retreat of Chosroes…procured for Belisarius greater glory than he had won by his victories in Africa and Italy” (Bury 1889, p. 434).
It would take me too far afield to analyze the distinctions between the goals of (merely) ending hostilities and of making long-lasting peace. The computation of their different values and probabilities under different conditions adds further elements of complexity to the overall calculus.
One might describe this by saying that Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle is suspended.
Beyond an appeal to intuition regarding this particular example, its legitimacy is explicitly endorsed in section 1521 of the 1987 commentary of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions, op. cit.
This seems to be acknowledged even by interpreters with a strict ethic of truthfulness; see in Mattox (2002) pp. 11–12.
“Essential non-combatants” are also those formal combatants who retain the intention to harm us yet have become incapacitated (for as long as it is relevant). Since they are incapacitated, however, the need to deceive them does not arise; they are therefore irrelevant for our discussion.
The idea of distinguishing essential non-combatants is a particular implementation of the moral position whereby “certain persons…will be the proper objects of hostility only…when they are engaged in certain pursuits.” (Nagel 1972, pp. 133-34) Jeff McMahan has argued forcefully against the idea of “the moral equality of combatants,” though from the very different perspective of jus ad bellum (see e.g. (McMahan 2007)). Asa Kasher has argued against this idea in a context much closer to mine in (Kasher 2007).
In the doctor-patient example, this is expressed in the well-known idea of “therapeutic privilege.” A parallel example from bioethics is the judicious use of placebo when it is the best available treatment; see e.g. Foddy (2009).
Those specific cases where deception in war is immoral de facto require truthfulness. Logically speaking, this could be described as falling under a highly specific principle of truthfulness, tailored to that particular type of cases. While logically legitimate, this way of presenting matters would obfuscate rather than illuminate our subject, given that that specific principle would not partake in the rationale of the general moral requirement of truthfulness, but would be grounded in a contingent association with a different moral principle—once that association drops, so would the requirement not to deceive.
In Hobbes’ words: obligatory “in foro externo” (Leviathan, p. 103).
The cases mentioned in Whaley (2007), p. 54, footnote 42 can be interpreted as examples of this kind of dynamic. (In civil wars such cases may not be as rare.)
There is another, interesting variant to the exception where deception as such is illegitimate between specific adversaries, yet where, in addition, their being adversaries is not coincidental to the wrongness. Such may be the case between master warriors, who are interested in winning only as an affirmation of their mastery, from which deception can only detract (this is one interpretation of the famous medieval “norms of chivalry”). This exception too does not invalidate our rule, since the confrontation involved is a competition of skill, a lethal type of sport, if you will (yet another scenario-type), not war in the relevant usual sense of political action.
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Cohen, S. Are There Moral Limits to Military Deception?. Philosophia 44, 1305–1318 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9826-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9826-z