Abstract
Most philosophers writing on the ethics of war endorse “reductivist individualism,” a view that holds both that killing in war is subject to the very same principles of ordinary morality (reductivism); and that morality concerns individuals and their rights, and does not treat collectives as having any special status (individualism). I argue that this commitment to individualism poses problems for this view in the case of national defense. More specifically, I argue that the main strategies for defending individualist approaches to national defense either fail by their own lights or yield deeply counterintuitive implications. I then offer the foundations for a collectivist approach. I argue that such an approach must do justice to the collective goods that properly constituted states make possible and protect through certain acts of defensive war; and that any such picture of national defense must make room for some form of national partiality.
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Notes
Seth Lazar has argued that a view such as the one I articulate in this essay—namely, one that employs collective or impersonal goods (i.e., those goods that cannot be wholly reducible to specific individuals)—would be, for that reason, non-reductivist. This is because, according to such a view, “The goods that it is worth killing for in ordinary life simply are not sufficient to explain the permissibility of killing in war” (Lazar 2014, p. 33). So, even though the moral principles are the same as those of interpersonal morality, the context of war creates a shift in their application. I think the answer to this terminological question is far from obvious, in part because it is not always clear what distinguishes reductivism from an alternative like the one Lazar envisions. For this reason, I will continue to call the view I propose here ‘reductivist’, even if, in the end, it turns out not to be. This terminological issue is not ultimately central to the arguments in what follows.
Some reductive-individualists have recognized the need for a view like this, though the terms they apply to it, or the way they frame the view, are somewhat different. See, for example, Jeff McMahan: “[E]ven the most reductive form of individualism must take account of distinctively collective goods, such as collective self-identification or collective self-determination, and thus recognize that there may be wrongs that are not entirely reducible to wrongs against individuals because they have a collective as their subject” (McMahan 2005, p. 12).
Perhaps the 1982 Falklands War is, at least in many important respects, a real world case that most closely mirrors this hypothetical example.
But see chapter 8, in which Rodin argues that military action against aggressor states may nevertheless be justified on alternative grounds—in particular, as an exercise of law enforcement. Rodin notes, however, that this would require a much more extensive international state than currently exists, and so would not likely qualify as a justified defense at present.
See, for instance, Chapter VII, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
Like most other reductivist-individualists, cosmopolitans reject any special status that may be thought to accrue to collectives, such as states. Cosmopolitanism applies to domains outside of the ethics of war, and so is much more far-reaching than reductivist-individualism. Nevertheless, when we speak of cosmopolitanism about war, as we will at points throughout this essay, the two views are essentially in agreement.
Later in this piece, she writes, “it would be wrong of combatantsV to kill wrongdoersA in defence of their and their fellow citizens’ [sovereignty] rights” (108).
Rodin (2014) puts the point a slightly different way: “when a direct threat to a lesser interest ins accompanied by a contingent threat to a vital interest, this provides a moral reason not to defend the lesser interest, even if using the same level of defensive force would have been proportional, absent the contingent threat” (82).
Of course, some philosophers claim that such force is proportionate while also endorsing an individualist approach. Though in many ways persuasive, such views are not without problems. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to treat this point in the present context.
This is a controversial claim, and I don’t intend to defend it here. My point is simply that there are other sorts of actions and scenarios that could reasonably be labeled as cases of national partiality.
There are, to be sure, limits to the exercise of this partiality. In particular, states that fail to satisfy a certain threshold of value will have a correspondingly diminished right to exercise this partiality. I shall have much more to say on this point when I discuss national partiality in greater detail in section 5.
There are, of course, several imprecisions here. Nevertheless, I think it serves to show the general worry about aggregation.
Of course, in some cases, population size taken in aggregate does matter. For example, if we could save either Australia or New Zealand—but not both—from an imminent catastrophic natural disaster that would wipe out each nation’s entire population, most of us would think that we ought to save Australia in virtue of the larger number of individuals that would be saved as a result. I do not think this constitutes an objection to the view I endorse here; there is nothing in what I’ve said that precludes my account from fitting with these intuitions.
To put this a bit more mathematically: Suppose the disvalue of using lethal force has some value, y. (Let’s also assume, as the individualist does, that x and y are measured along the same metric.) So, there is some range of cases such that 2x > y but x < y.
Compare Walzer (1977, 253): “But communities, in emergencies, seem to have different and larger prerogatives. I am not sure that I can account for the difference, without ascribing to communal life a kind of transcendence that I don’t believe it to have. Perhaps it is only a matter of arithmetic: individuals cannot kill other individuals to save themselves, but to save a nation we can violate the rights of a determinate but smaller number of people. But then large nations and small ones would have different entitlements in such cases, and I doubt very much that this is true.”
To be sure, this is not the only possible approach. There are other views according to which we can recognize the value of the collective, such as those that emerge from the social contract tradition. The classic defense of a view that most closely approximates this is found in Rousseau, but more recent defenses of views inspired by the classic versions of the social contract view that connect with the points I raise here include (Benbaji 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012; Benbaji and Statman 2019; Statman 2015). Thank you to a reviewer for pointing out this connection.
Moore’s example is that the conscious perception of the beautiful object is intrinsically valuable, which, though it may be true in that case, needn’t be assumed to be true in the state case on which we’re primarily focused.
It is important to keep in mind that different types of collectives will generate altogether different collective goods. Surely whatever collective goods a beautifully conducted orchestra brings about are different not just in degree but also in kind from those brought about by a political collective like a well-functioning state. Accordingly, a one-size-fits-all approach to collective goods would be inappropriate.
Rodin also mentions and rejects the idea that self-determination and autonomy provide plausible grounds for the right of national defense, though his reasons for rejecting it are somewhat obscure. His primary target is Walzer’s view of self-determination, which holds that intervention is always wrong, for the exercise of state autonomy is of paramount importance in creating and sustaining a political system that is, as he puts it, “commensurate with one’s national culture, even if this results in an illiberal and authoritarian regime” (Walzer 1977, p. 87). Rodin argues that such a view requires several dubious claims, such as reducing political self-determination to morally arbitrary factors like the ability (understood descriptively) to coerce others. But while Walzer’s view has been quite influential, I see no reason for assuming that it is the best representative for a view about political self-determination. Indeed, to base one’s rejection of the good of political self-determination on Walzer’s account of it is to ignore the many subtleties and moderate versions of the account that many have defended. Walzer’s account is by no means a defense of the constitutive features of any plausible view of political self-determination.
It is worth noting, however, that while both the goods of culture and history and those of political self-determination will vary in degree (the former more so than the latter), the good of legitimacy appears to be a threshold case. The upshot of this is that even states that don’t pass the threshold of legitimacy, they can still have sufficient goods of the other two kinds to warrant the use of defensive force.
It is perhaps odd that Rodin argues for this point with this particular view of legitimacy in mind, for it strikes me as somewhat tendentious. In particular, I see no reason for thinking that legitimacy is best understood this way. If instead we understand legitimacy as having something to do with consent to a particular system—and not just any system that will achieve a minimum level of order—then our worries about the intervening state seem appropriately placed.
For one thing, Rodin makes short shrift of the idea that a nation is a more wholly encompassing collective—one that secures and encourages a more thoroughgoing way of life. It is precisely for this reason that many see greater value in nations as opposed to companies.
In Rodin (2014), he takes a somewhat different tack. He argues that we do not afford defensive rights to certain other non-state communities, such as companies, even when they have what appear to be the same or other relevant features (intimacy, communal values, etc.). I do not have the space here to reply directly to this argument; however, I think the arguments I make herein will be an important step toward rebutting his argument.
And such an explanation’s failure to accord with one’s prior commitments—e.g., to a certain view about when lethal force is permissible—do not count decisively in favor of rejecting the explanation, and instead may count against a view with such commitments.
While I suspect there are compelling reasons to support partiality among compatriots, this question is somewhat orthogonal to our present inquiry, so I shall leave it aside for now. But, see my concluding section for some thoughts about this point.
Indeed, depending on how the circumstances of the case are presented, it might reasonably be thought that a general permission to resist paternalistic actions would necessarily yield further cases of paternalistic action. This is because if C intervenes to (ostensibly) help A resist B, then it looks as though C is, in at least one relevant sense, interfering paternalistically in A’s affairs. Whether this is so, of course, depends on the particular way of defining paternalism.
Of course, one plausible non-reductive-individualist approach would be to argue that the state is analogous to the individual in self-defense cases, and thus, the permissions afforded to individuals in self-defense cases are analogous (mutatis mutandis) in cases of national defense. This sort of approach—sometimes referred to as the domestic analogy—is one favored by certain just war theorists, most notably (Walzer 1977). I do not discuss this view in what follows, primarily because my focus here is on providing a view in contrast to both Rodin’s and Fabre’s respective accounts. I should say, though, that I see my collectivist account as being distinct from Walzer’s in several important respects. For one thing, I want to deny his view that states have a right to defend themselves regardless of the value of the goods they can be said to have produced.
It may be objected that Quong’s example is simply inapplicable to the cases with which we are presently concerned. That is, while his case involves an innocent threat, the bloodless invasion example—and probably all historical examples of political aggression—involves a threat from an aggressor who does not resemble the innocent threat. In response to this, let me make two brief points. First, I don’t see anything inherently problematic in extracting from Quong’s example his description of agent-relative permissions, even if I take them to apply to a different sort of case than the one he describes. And second, even if it is true that, as a matter of historical fact, all cases of political aggression have involved non-innocent aggressors, I see no evidence for thinking this is a necessary truth; it seems possible to conceive of a case of intervention in which the intervening party more closely resembles the innocent threat of Quong’s example.
There is an interesting related question concerning the distinction between defending and attacking to prevent threats. On my view, thus far described, it may seem that there is no difference: if a state has an agent-relative permission to defend itself against threats to its collective goods, then it would seem it also has an agent-relative permission to attack to prevent these threats. But notice that such permissions are also constrained by the other standard criteria for just action in war; and typically, threats for which one would need to attack rather than defend haven’t yet satisfied the criterion of necessity.
In other words, agent-relative permissions should not be construed as merely offering excuses for certain actions, but rather, justifications so to act.
This would change, of course, if the two became friends. Surely the goods that emerge between good friends are candidates for objective endorsement.
Of course, it’s not difficult to imagine cases in which I am estranged from my sister but quite close with my (nominally) ‘distant’ relatives.
Of course, the value of the goods in jeopardy determines the level of force permissible. Thus, the value of goods of solidarity among, say, members of the Occupy Wall Street movement was not sufficiently high to justify the use of lethal force against those who sought to disrupt their unity. Also, it is important to remember that, when discussing cases of this sort, I am only concerned with the partiality a collective (or members of that collective) may show to the collective. So, the question of what amount of partiality individuals within a collective may show to another member qua member must be set aside for another occasion.
It is worth emphasizing here that many cases in which national partiality arises involves the actions of individuals acting qua state agents. This is one way of understanding soldiers’ roles, but it extends to other agents of the state, such as police, diplomats, elected officials, and others. In these cases, national partiality is not best—or at least not completely—understood as individuals preferring their co-nationals; rather, it ought to be understood as the state, through its agents, showing partiality toward its members. This also has important implications for how we should understand combatant responsibility. Some have argued that there are limits to how agents of the state, like soldiers, bear responsibility for the acts that are part of their official duty. On one view, made most famous by Walzer (1977), soldiers who act in accordance with the jus in bello criteria act justly, regardless of the justice of their state’s cause. Others have argued against this thesis, most notably McMahan (2009b). See also Stilz (2011) and May (2005). Thank you to a reviewer for prompting me to address these points.
It is worth noting here another way in which Rodin’s more recent view (2014) is mistaken. The agent-relative value of the collective goods of a state—that is, the common life, in Rodin’s terms—are different from such goods for companies, even those with important values. This is partly because the agent-relative value—or the most significant part of it, at any rate—of such companies for most employees is almost entirely instrumental and substitutable. To see this, witness the ease at which most people take up work elsewhere for even the most marginal gains in pay or benefits. This suggests that people see their role in collectives that present those values as important, but easily commensurable with other values elsewhere. Now, this may be true for some members of some states, and the mere fact that people believe this does not suffice to make it true, but I hope the general point here will suffice to reveal some difference between the two collectives.
This claim makes no reference to the culpability of the aggressor. It is difficult to imagine a case of political aggression in which the aggressor is innocent; at most, the aggressor would be in possession of some form of partial excuse. (To my mind, acting on false yet reasonable intelligence would qualify as wrong but excused.) At any rate, no matter the case, I am inclined to believe that the citizens are nevertheless permitted to use lethal force to defend these collective goods.
But it doesn’t follow from this that such states forgo their right to self-defense altogether. Perhaps they still possess agent-relative permissions to defend themselves in particular cases, such as attacks from even more systematically unjust states, or those that would make them even worse off than they already are.
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Acknowledgements
For comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I thank audiences in Manchester, UK and Bergamo, Italy. Thanks especially to Tom Hurka, Arthur Ripstein, and Helen Frowe for their detailed comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their thoughtful suggestions and criticisms.
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Davis, J. Toward a Collectivist National Defense. Philosophia 48, 1333–1354 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00174-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00174-w