Abstract
In this chapter, the philosophy of co-existence faces the tests of practical application. In particular, can it do better than the just war theory in dealing with the kinds of violence common in today’s world? Proponents of just war theory have attempted to amend just war theory to account for the challenges of humanitarian intervention, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. New versions of just war theory have been proposed for unconventional wars that do not satisfy all the conditions found in earlier versions. I have argued that the failure of just war theory in dealing with these challenges is not due to the newness of unconventional warfare, so that mere revision of the requirements of just war will not be adequate. For just war theory is an unsatisfactory ethics of war, even for the wars that have been fought in most of human history. Thus, I have argued for abandonment of the just war theory and its replacement by the philosophy of co-existence.
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Notes
C. A. J. Coady, “The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention,” US Institute of Peace Policy Paper (July 2002), begins his paper with a quotation from US President William McKinley. Others go further back to the “white man’s burden” in colonial policy during the centuries of Western imperialism. In the previous chapter, I mentioned how President Abraham Lincoln could have argued for humanitarian intervention in the American South to end the mistreatment and abuse of African–Americans under slavery.
A good account of how the West viewed humanitarian intervention before and after 1992 is found in Clifford Orwin, “Humanitarian Military Intervention: Wars for the End of History?” Social Philosophy and Policy (2006), pp. 196–217.
Robert W. Hoag, “Violent Civil Disobedience: Defending Human Rights, Rethinking Just War” in Rethinking the Just War Tradition, ed. Michael W. Brough, John W. Lango and Harry van der Linden (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 233.
Examples of the restatement of just war theory are found in Coady, op. cit., and George R. Lucas, Jr, “From Jus ad Bellum to Jus ad Pacem: Re-thinking Just-War Criteria for the Use of Military Force for Humanitarian Ends,” in Ethics and Foreign Intervention, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee and Don E. Scheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 72–96.
Rex Martin, “Just Wars and Humanitarian Interventions,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36 (2005), pp. 439–56. Also using human rights as the basis for just war is David Luban who attempts, in “Just War and Human Rights,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980), pp. 160–81, to justify a much wider scope for humanitarian intervention than Walzer and Rawls do, by placing little weight on state sovereignty and communal self-determination (which I think would not count as “amending” the standard just war theory).
Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue” in Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 69.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 81.
The two problems are stated in Gillian Brock, “Humanitarian Intervention: Closing the Gap between Theory and Practice,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (2006), p. 278.
Louis P. Pojman, “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism” in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 140.
The distinction between a primary and secondary target is found in Carl Wellman, “On Terrorism Itself,” Journal of Value Inquiry (1979), pp. 250–8. These targets may be the same or distinct persons or groups, that is to say, the persons attacked may or may not be the same persons as those to whom the message is being sent.
While it is true that the narrative of the Second World War and other wars are often matters of historical controversy, there will be few examples to discuss if we limit ourselves to undisputed ones. In the case of area bombing of cities in the Second World War, I follow the narrative from Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 69–73.
John Westlake, International Law, Part II: War, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913)
Richard W. Miller, “Terrorism, War, and Empire” in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 187.
Daniele Archibugi and Iris Marion Young, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law” in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 161, write that “a genuinely global cooperative law enforcement response would be more effective in identifying and apprehending culprits, as well as preventing future attacks… than has the war against Afghanistan.”
Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet (October 2006), pp. 1–8. It is troubling that the US and UK governments decided not to track civilian deaths resulting from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Without doing so, how could the government leaders judge the wars to be proportionate as responses to terrorist attacks against the West by Al-Qaeda?
Michael L. Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or Self-Defense?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (2006), pp. 323–35.
Kateri Carmola, “The Concept of Proportionality: Old Questions and New Ambiguities,” in Just War Theory: A Reappraisal, ed. Mark Evans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 108.
Ironically, as pointed out by Karsten J. Struhl, “Is War a Morally Legitimate Response to Terrorism?” The Philosophical Forum 36 (2005), p. 134, if the existing constraints of just war theory are discarded in fighting against terrorism, the United States itself becomes vulnerable to justified attack as a sponsor of terrorism, since it granted asylum in 1991 to the Cuban terrorist responsible for bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976.
Archibugi and Young, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law” and Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing”. Michael Walzer, “After 9/11: Five Questions about Terrorism,” in Arguing about War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 136–41, seems to advocate war in combination with police work and diplomacy. But he does not address the problem of the contradictory status of terrorists in war as opposed to law enforcement. I limit myself here to the two paradigms, as it seems to me that any other methods would involve elements of each.
Thomas Pogge, “Making War on Terrorists –- Reflections on Harming the Innocent,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2008), p. 1, compared the threats of disease and traffic accidents with post-9/11 terrorism, in terms of lives lost, to show the discrepancy.
For the view that US policy on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, reflecting the power of the Israel lobby in America, is not only unjust but undermines US interests in the war on terrorism, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” London Review of Books (2006).
As C. A. J. Coady points out in “Natural Law and Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction, ed. Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 118–19, machine guns could be employed as weapons of mass destruction but are not in themselves geared for such use, whereas WMDs such as nuclear bombs are such that “their normal use will rain death and destruction on the just and unjust, on civilians and troops, on hospitals and military installations alike.”
The logic of preventive war is laid out in David Luban, “Preventive War and Human Rights,” in Preemption, ed. Henry Shue and David Rodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 188–90, with one difference in that he distinguishes between rogue states that are merely despotic and those that threaten their neighbors, that is, threat states. Although there is a conceptual difference, I think the Bush doctrine uses a state’s domestic oppression as evidence of its disregard for international standards and the rule of law, as shown in the case the Bush administration made against Saddam’s regime to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The “fixing” of intelligence to support the Iraq invasion was made public by the release of the Downing Street Memorandum that was reprinted in Mark Danner, “The Secret Way to War,” New York Review of Books (June 9, 2005), p. 71.
Jeff McMahan, “Preventive War and the Killing of the Innocent,” in The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, ed. Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 172.
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Chan, D.K. (2012). Practical Implications and Challenges. In: Beyond Just War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263414_8
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