an - Weeblytheanthropocene.weebly.com/uploads/4/0/8/6/40868755/morals_and_modern_war.pdfInove hinl into war. But these also lilnit the degree of moral soiling he can live with. I think

n an

BY ARTHUR C. DANTO

A war of extermination, in which the destruction of both parties and of all justice can result, would permit perpetual peace only in the vast burial ground of the human race. Therefore, such a war and the use of all means leading to it must be absolutely forbidden.

Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace.

SHALL CONSIDER war initially from the point of view of attackers, and define a central case of it as the resort to anned violence as a means to modify political policy. The definition is accomITlodating enough to include assassination as a degenerate instance, but to exclude, as it ought, such events as armed riots which happen to have the consequence of altering political policy, riots not being means to anything. And though it nonnally takes, as with love, two parties to make war, there always is a possibility that, because of surprise or inlmobility or derlloralization, no one fights back. If any wars can be morally justified, these wars will be, since no institutions more affect the Inoral quality of life than political ones, and these B1USt then put maximal pressure on pacifists. Of course we must not sentimentalize politically motivated warmakers, must not allow our thought to be dominated by the example of the fighter against injustice, imperialisln, or totalitarians. and repressors: men have hideous political ideals they are willing to fight for. But this again must put pressure on pacifists who will countenance no violent measures in defending benign political policies and practices.

Copyright (c) 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) New School of Social Research

MORAL CODES AND MODERN WAR 177

(2) The pacifist is of conceptual interest in a discussion of moral codes in war inastTIuch as he rejects the tTIorality of war as such and hence rejects, as morally inadmissible, any anned violence: so every warmaking action is morally out of bounds for him. In supposing the question of boundaries to violence open, I suppose we are committed to regard the question of the morality of war as itself open. The question I ultimately shall be concerned with is whether there are boundaries, the crossing of which even the m.orality of the war in which they happen does not excuse. But the pacifist, who thinks political reasons never justify recourse to war, thinks the taking of life as a tTIeans to political change outweighs in the scale of tTIoral condemnability any consideration of the moral quality of life. So in a way he is not of this world. Of course the pacifist would want violence tTIitigated: he is not required to suppose one piece of violence as just like any other, indifferently and unifornlly condemned just because they are violent; but he cannot ground his reservations in the nature of war, as I should want to do. All I want to insist upon now is that tTIost of us can think of political practices so inconsistent with our tTIoral schetTIes that, other avenues of tTIodification believed closed or too slow and uncertain, no ITIoral choice alternative to war is open.

(3) Violence of means, which is entailed by the concept of war, will not be the only violence we can realistically anticipate in going to war. Battlefields are not like tennis courts, areas specifically set aside for the enacunent of anned contests. Life will be taken and lives brutalized not just as Ineans but as consequences of those Ineans "secondary effects," as they are termed by theologians of warfare. These may often exceed vastly the primary effects of violence done by soldiers to soldiers as soldiers: 70 percent of the casualties in the VietnaITI War were sustained by civilians in contrast with 5 percent in World War I, a horrendous cost even if secondary in the sense that such violence was only the derivative by-product of means


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used primarily against soldiers and that brutalizing civilians was not regarded as a means, that the war was not by intention but merely in fact a war against a people. Moreover, even in the most disciplined of armies, we may expect a coarsening of moral perception and a weakening of moral restraints as opportunities open for the gratification of vile impulses. Though by Nuremburg criteria these will be counted crimes, since they are so considered already by the states the soldiers belong to, by going to war we enhance the frequency of such crimes even if we do not, in modern war in contrast with the Sack of Rom~ or the Thirty Years War, exploit the potential criminality of our soldiers as a rneans.

All this is a moral cost we must reckon in, and to which we cannot be indifferent if we suppose ourselves to have gone to war for moral reasons. It is thus that we admire the initial reticence to make war on the part of Arjuna, the great archer and moral hero of the Bhagavat Gita, who is prepared to abandon what all would adInit as a just war because of the unacceptable distortions it would induce in the cosmopolitical fabric. He is persuaded by Krishna that not fighting will induce comparable distortions, and that he will sacrifice his karmic standing in the bargain: fighting becomes a way of life rather than a means to change, all the more so as he is instructed by Krishna that consequences are irrelevant to the quality of his actions and that he should not be guided by theIn. But then, like the pacifist, Arjuna is no longer of this world. It is consistent with Arjuna's posture that war should be a perpetual state rather than a means to anything, whereas for the class of wars of interest to Ine, just because they are means they iInply an end in both senses.

Nineteenth-century theorists of war thought of war rOInantically as a wind stirring the otherwise stagnant life, as a prophylactic against corruption, perpetual peace being viewed with a kind of Inoral horror because of what would happen to the human Inaterial. Sorel's notion of the moral sublimity of violence reflects the same thought. But nothing could be more



corrupting than perpetual war, where war is a condition rather than a Ineans, and no one who thinks that warmaking might be a morally acceptable act can regard it as a condition without an end. To be of the world is to think it possible that the quality of life can justify the taking of life as a means to changing or preserving it. But exactly because the political quality of life can give a rnoral reason for going to war, those for whom it is a reason cannot be indifferent to the moral boundaries of war and cannot consistently pursue victory at any price. When the costs, primary and secondary, of the use of violence are morally less supportable than allowing to stand the practices for the sake of changing which one took to war, the moral quality of one's war is compromised. In war as elsewhere, there is a continuity between ends and means, ends never all by themselves justifying the Ineans. The way in which we conducted the VietnaITI War was so tremendously out of scale with the end we envisioned in fighting it that even if we see that end in the most favorable 1110ral light we have to condemn the war. A moral warmaker's hands are always going to be dirty, silnply because of the In oral perceptions which Inove hinl into war. But these also lilnit the degree of moral soiling he can live with. I think it is inulloral as well to undertake a war one believes one cannot win, merely for the sake of fighting. For that is equivalent to perpetual war, where violence is not a Ineans but a way of life: and a violent way of life cannot be Inorally accepted. So that it should end, and that the end be achieved at a moral cost less than the cost of not Inaking the war to begin with, are necessary conditions for a moral war.

(.<:1) Briefly, then, the question of the morality of war is internally related to the questions of morality in war, and when violence in war becomes criminal the war itself is criminal, for no Inoral end can justify crilninal means. In this I am supposing, contrary to the pacifist, that violence is not criminal as such and that use of it can be justified. But. not any use. So it


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does not follow that once started on violence there is no justified stopping, no logical friction to keep us from sliding down the sInooth slope to utter degradation. Or at best such considerations are psychological rather than conceptual: the question is whether a line can be drawn, however difficult it may be for us, say out of weakness, to draw it. But even as a psychological thesis it is dubious that to accept violence is already to have weakened one's resistance to its increase, until one resists nothing and becomes callous to anything. "Not at that price," was the response of Frenchnlen to the war in Algeria and of AInericans to the war in Indochina, even when the wars thernselves nlight have seemed justified within boundaries. When the boundaries were crossed the wars were forfeited. Still, I have not said what the boundaries are in saying they must exist, and everything so far must be regarded as exceedingly primitive. I have tried only to begin to block the folkthought that just because it is a war anything goes, that "all is fair." What I should like to be able to do is to derive the morally defined lilnits froIn the very concept of war itself, so that if these are broached we no longer have war but slaughter, and whether there are moralliInits to slaughter hardly can arise since slaughter is the other side of moral liITlits already.

(5) Hobbes speculated that the relations between slates are simply the relations between individuals raised to a higher power, and that states in fact stand to one another as lnen stood to

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one another in the logically crilneless circunlstances of the state of nature. Logically criIueless, in the sense that, though the latter's daily history was black with deeds of violence, the institutional framework through which any of theIn could be constituted crimes was, by definition of the state of nature, lacking. Thus though there were killings, there were no nlurders; and though there were violent seizures of objects, there were no robberies since there was no property, an object being sOIneone's property only if he owns it, and ownership is not a natural state. By projection, there are no crirnes one nation



can comIllit against another, however violent their intercourse Inay be. Hobbes's thought was that in the state of nature

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nothing is forbidden, which does not lnean that everything is pernlitted but only that the cluster of concepts in which permission and prohibition have a location are defined as inapplicable here. One can tell a Inan not to do something, but one forbids only if one has authority to do so, and in nature there are no authorities but only persons with the power they are born with and such amplifications of it as weaponry affords. There is authority only where it is given through law, and the generalized power to enforce it.

It evidently escaped Hobbes's attention that there is no war in the natural state either, only violence and the meeting of violence with violence. But quite apart froIn whether there is anything between states cOlnparable to governlnent between Iuen, there has for a very long tiIne been a distinction between war and Inere violence; there has been a basis for distinguishing war froIu slaughter as there has for distinguishing annies from mere bands of marauders or pirates. In nature there are no soldiers, orders, desertions, truces, and the like, so the space between states is not quite the institutional no-man'sland required by Hobbes's theory. SOlnething like the distinction just alluded to is in issue in the ICRS draft proposal regarding article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which Ineans to extend to all anned conflicts the protections assured by article 3 to soldiers in international anned conflict for example, that prisoners be treated humanely, that there be restrictions on the lneans of conlbat, and the like. A good many nations do not favor this draft protocol, since it would have necessary application to forces whose aim it is to overthrow them, SOlnething we might appreciate if it required us to reclassify arrested Illenlbers of the SYlubionese Liberation Army as prisoners of war and certain of their killings as acts of war rather than as criluinal luurders, no more crilues than what our soldiers are routinely responsible for in international war. I should think hUInane treatInent of prisoners is called for


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whether they are prisoners of war or nlere prisoners, but I cite the case for purposes of underscoring the practice that the distinction is there as a matter of ilnplicit convention, that there is no war without a convention of war. This is important in case SOIlleone should believe, for Hobbesian reasons, that anything goes when violence is enacted between rather than within states. The conventions are ours, and in tenns of theIn we differentiate criruinals froIn warmakers, even if, taken at their absolute magnitude, they equally seize and destroy. To have a convention is to have the power to interpret and change the" convention.

(6) It would be interesting to question why there is this convention at all, how we make distinctions between killers and warInakers, and why warmakers should be entitled to special treatment if Inere killers are not. The distinction indeed is honored even in wars which fall outside the class I have defined, concerning whose rTIorality as wars there is perhaps no possibility. Even if we regard the war they n)ake as unjust and possibly criIninal, the soldiers rernain entitled to special treaunent as warmakers, almost as if they were players in an unfortunately deadly game. I shall try to answer this question in away, and I think its answer shows the direction in which we must go to deduce the lilnit from the concept of war. The question of humane treatment I think should in fact be raised in ternlS of the rights of prisoners, not just prisoners of war, and an obstacle to the acceptance of the ICRS draft protocol would be erased if the countries in question would change the conditions they put their prisoners under. About sixty-four states use torture routinely and cold-bloodedly, and Inany of their penal practices amount to torture in the end. They are reluctant to abandon this hideous practice, as they would have to do if political prisoners were classed as prisoners of war. I don't think prisoners of war should be treated inhunlanely to even things out: but whence derives their special claiIll to be treated hUInanely? Why should torture of theln be counted a


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crime when the same ghastly things done to prisoners of conscience or even plain criminals is sOlllehow accepted? Why this respect for soldiers if there is evidently no respect for hUInans as humans?

(7) The analogy to games is dangerous but instructive. I can touch anyone with a ball, but he will be "out" only if we both are players in a game where there is a rule that a player is out if touched by a ball held by another player, who touches him with it in order that he should be out. Similarly, a man can kill anybody, but this will be an assassination only if the victim is a political figure killed for political reasons. And again, though anyone can shoot anyop.e, this will not be murder even if there is a concept of murder in the society he belongs to if the victiIll is an eneIny and he is a soldier and shoots the eneIny because he is an eneIny. Invariantly as to institutionalized elllbedlllent, the person in the first example is touched, and the persons in the other two are killed. But the n10ral coloration of the latter two, when complicated by the institution which gives them this coloration, differs, perhaps to the despair of the pacifist. Suppose we now say: Shooting the enelllY is part of the game, the way the war game is played. And the question before us is this: Once it is a war, is anything against the rules? A soldier who happens to kill another, say out of spite and as a nlatter of vendetta, is merely a 111urderer, not playing the game. But within the game are there any restrictions we might recognize as 111oral, or is anything fair if it is part of the ganle?

The concept of sport implies Inatched opponents with an antecedent even chance of winning, a game in this genre losing interest as a gaIne if its outcome is obvious from the start. Thus we do not, unless interested in mayhell1 rather than sport, Inatch heavyweights with featherweights, or Christians with lions, or grandmasters with duffers, unless the conspicuously weaker opponent is given, through some system of handicaps, what is called a "sporting chance." These are intended to even the odds, moving the chances of either side


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winning to as close to 0.5 as is feasible, and to distribute disadvantages as fairly as possible. So the concept of sport entails fair playas an analytical cOInponent. Cheating, because it biases the outcome, is necessarily inconsistent with fair play and hence with the concept of a gaIne, which opponents as well as spectators Blust believe is not so rigged in advance that playing it out is a kind of ritual, like reading the written parts in a play. Within these paranleters it is expected that participants will play to win, the reverse being tantamount to cheating; and it is no part of the concept that players help one another out of tight corners: indeed, there is almost a positive obligation not to help others, since avoiding tight corners is part of playing the ganle (which is one reason why sex is not really a ganle).

To say that in war anything is fair is to say that war is not a gaIne. Each side is rather expected to do anything which biases the outcoIlle in its favor. A boxer who crosses the ring before the opening round and knocks the other boxer out not only has not won the 11latch: he disqualifies hilllself froIll playing. But can we extend this notion to sneak attacks in war? Surely not, according to this view of pure war. To warn an eneIllY is to reduce one's chance of winning, and the stakes are high and serious, having to do, in the cases we are concerned with, with the Illoral quality of life. War is a license for violence, and anything that contributes to victory is legitimate.

I have supposed that anyone who fights what he believes is a llloral war cannot accept this view. But I also believe that no one really accepts this view of war, and the reason, in which I think that the concept of liinits to war is grounded, connects with a deeper analogy with garnes than I have so far stated, nanlely, that gailles are not a part of real life. War is not a permanent condition but only a llleans of political change. The limits of war are detennined by the structure of peace, to which it is anticipated the world returns when the war is done. To this I shall revert in a nlOIllent.



(8) Discussion of constraints on violence in warfare have often, even typically, been conducted in largely legalistic tenns: in ternlS of pacts and conventions in which signatories give their words to honor certain limits. This has almost a Hobbesian ring, as if the signatories surrendered a right to pure warfare and exposed thelnselves to sanctions if they exceeded the boundaries they cOlnpacted themselves to respect. A degree of cynicisln here is inevitable, or at least a degree of pessilnisln, which is supported by the dilu history of such hopeful but evidently elnpty agreements as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, flaunted in the event by totalitarian and delnocratic powers alike. What I think is insufficiently appreciated is that such agreelnents embody moral beliefs which are very widely shared. The Hague convention of 1907, the Nurelnburg principles, the four Geneva conventions of 1949, the United Nations declaration on hurnan rights imply a belief that, while war itself may not be abolished, wars tenninate and Inen and nations should in fighting them be exposed to such costs and danger as are consistent with returning to a state of peace in conditions as nluch like those under which they left it as is consistent with making war: to take up life again.

For death, obviously, there is no remedy, and the killed do not come back. But it is required by the principle I have just alluded to that only such wounds are to be inflicted as allow a standard possibility of recovery. All wounds are painful, but pain can be reduced by drugs. The issue is whether the weapons are such that they assure irrecoverable wounds. This goes beyond mere humaneness. It has been argued that there are no inhumane weapons, only inhulnane uses of weapons, although it is difficult to see what a humane use of napalm Inight be. It is not, however, that napalrn causes wounds of an inhumanely severe order but that there is at best one chance in four of surviving a standard attack with napalm. The M-16 rifle, our routine infantry issue, has been ruled out on hUlnane grounds for use against big galne in all fifty states.

,


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But again it is the difficulty of recovery from. wounds caused by lightweight bullets delivered at high velocities which recommends the banning of the M-16 rifle. It is, again, with reference to some such principle that our army was required to abandon the use of defoliants after 1970 in Vietnam, since we now know the extraordinary slowness with which a land recovers for use after exposure to these. And perhaps it explains why use even by us of hydrogen bOlnbs was never made. It explains why saturation bombings of cities is regarded as criminal, and why destruction of a people is impossible to justify in the naIlIe of war, however lofty its aiIlls.

Prisoners, thus, are to be maintained at a level consistent with return to nonnallife, and for the same reasons are not to

-be enslaved: and so on. However pessimistic Illen rnay be as to the likelihood of wars no longer being fought, there is a touching optimism in their belief that the hUlnan condition is not essentially one of war but of peace. So we lilnit ourselves not to annihilate enemies but only to change their ways. A warnlaker who takes the reverse view is a lnonster. It was, I think, because it sought to change the conditions of warfare in these tenns that Nazi Gennany appears in the eye of the world a rnoral Illonster, but also why retaliation in kind against Nazi Germany would have been equally monstrous. We could not have held our war with Germany as moral if we elnulated our enemy: they set out to enslave the world and pennanently to alter the form of peace. And surely it is this that moved even pacifists to regard that war as just.

(9) It is because nations do not wish to be reckoned Illonsters that they may voluntarily subscribe to the codes of war, and hence ilnply that they regard wars as parentheses in life. Nations, like individuals, have a pour autrui, an iIllage of thelnselves in the consciousness of others. It is important to them that this not be radically discrepant with the irnage they rnay have of theIllselves as Illorally legitinlate. This is especially so of the leading powers of the world who, as it happens, wish to think of thelnselves as nloral leaders. There are, I think, two


MORAL CODES .\.ND MODERN WAR 187

avenues through which leadership can be achieved. One is dOluination through material power or its equivalent, and as the world is now structured there is no likelihood that one nation can dominate without being annihilated in the attelnpt: and annihilation on the scales presently available, which are total, is the sardonic death to which Kant alludes in the epigraph of this paper; and this cannot be a means of war since there is no recovery froln it. The other way is through Inoral authority. But no nation can clainl nlOral authority whose warmaking is so inconsistent with the conventions of war as to iluply a disregard for the primacy of peace. It is ahnost certain that the conduct of our war in Vietnanl seriously if not fatally degraded our llloral iluage, so llluch so that we caIne close to subverting the ainls for which we ostensibly fought that war by weakening any Inoral clailll we might lllake for leading the world.

In any case, the sole avenue I can see for effectively lilniting the use of violence in war is the sort of Illoral Illonitoring to which each nation is susceptible and because of the essential commitment to peace as the standard condition of mankind .

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(10) My thought then is that peace is not siluply the absence of war, as a cynic has defined it, illlplying that it is the interruption, lllerely, of a standard condition of bellicosity. And this is so even should it be historically established that more time has been spent in war than not, for the issue is not one of numerical preponderation: Newton's First Law holds even if we only find acceleration in the universe and never uniform velocity. War remains the aberration, and the commitment to peace governs the degree of allowable violence in war: which is why victory at any price is disallowed, even victory over those who imply by their conduct of war the belief that war (:ould be the norm. If it were the norm, there would be no war, only slaughter, and anything then would go. The conct:!pt of war implies the sorts of liluits I have sketched.

Inevitably, then, war places its makers at a disadvantage relative to the concept of victory at any price, and this will


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naturally be used by their eneluies in the following way: They will attempt to force broaching of these limits by putting the wannaker in positions where, unless he violates theIn, he puts his enelllY at an advantage. Such tactics are unavailing if the warmaker on the other side feels no Illoral pressures. Let me illustrate. A lnan will get nowhere with a hunger strike if his captors to begin with are indifferent to whether or not he starves to death. Only if they care can he put pressure on them by Inaking thelll accessory to his death if they do not Illake the changes he wants. A strike will be an ineffectual practice if employers are ruthless and will kill wholllever interferes with production. It is widely appreciated that passive resistance would not have worked in India had the governors been Nazis instead of the British. Students occupying a building will have no effect or a negative one if the police are used routinely and refuse to accept III oral pressure of this order. It is a standard practice of the weak to use the Illoral cOIlunitlllents of the strong as a way of controlling them, and it is not plain that these tactics implicate thelll in the illunorality of the strong who break their own code, in case they crush the weak. Something like this, I believe, must be in issue when we ask whether a uniform moral code does not induce injustices of its own. And I want to argue now that it does not.

Consider SOI1le strategies of the weak. Suppose they take hostages. There are conventions against killing hostages, grounded largely in the fact that usually they are regarded as innocent. But the conventions are availing only against S0I11eone who honors theI1l, and if the enemy did not honor the conventions, was callous as to what happened to hostages, the strategy of threatening their lives to wring concessions could not work. Or consider maltreating prisoners or threatening to: to a nation c0I11mitted to the view that its soldiers conle back victorious or dead, the threat is impotent. Or one sets up an artillery post in a clearly Illarked hospital: this would just be another target to an enelny unconcerned with the weak and wounded. The problem arises in an aggravated way with guerrd-

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las, who, by refusing to wear uniforms and carry standards, eInploy their indiscernibility from civilians as a kind of llloral call1ouflage. This could give an enelUY an excuse to kill everyone, since anyone might be a guerrilla and we caIne close to doing that in Vietnam. But it is not clear to lue that guerillas share in the criIuinality of an action which 1l1ade the indiscriIninate response a viable if 1110rally costly response.

These are difficult Inatters to assess, but I think the general outline of a fair asseSSInent is discernible. The exploitation of Inoral constraints by guerrillas is an attenlpt to have the war fought on their own tenus, any other terms requiring the enemy to cross a boundary and expose himself to the Inoral

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condelnnation of the world. This Inay strike the eneIny as "unfair," but our arguInent has been that war must be fought within moral boundaries and this cannot be regarded as unfair, Inoral conduct not being the sort of thing to which unfairness can apply save relative to nonInoral considerations. So we would have been acting iInmorally in fighting a war in the style of World War II in a situation in which the enemy was of a different order altogether. The conventions of war have the effect of evening the terms of conflict, of Inatching the sides. And siInilarly, setting up artillery posts in Inarked hospitals is a good way, if the eneIUY respects hospitals, to lilnit its use of bOlllbs, not an unacceptable tactic if, as in Vietnaln, their control of the air was IniniInal and they had only the unfortunately fragile restraints of their eneInies as a possible shield. It is not unfair to put an eneIny in position where his choice either is to alter his tactics or behave as a barbarian.

(11) But such strategies have to be taken up case by case. Killing a hostage, for instance, can never be justified; the weak have no option to behave as barbarians either. But in general what we might tenn a uniform moral code in warfare is going to be disadvantageous to the weak only if they refuse to exploit the opportunities it gives them to liInit the conduct of the strong. And it will be disadvantageous to the strong only with refer-


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ence to an unacceptable standard of victory at any price. So the conventions of war have the effect in the end of transfonning wars into terrible garnes, and are justified only in that without them violence would be unspeakably more terrible and peace unspeakably less controlling a factor in their conduct. The weak are given what anlounts to a sporting chance. There is little doubt that the nlost powerful advantage the Vietnamese had in the face of our aWeSOITIe arnlanents was our grudging adherence to the conventions. We Blight have won, but only by violating the conventions lllore than we did, or fighting as the Vietnanlese did, only better.

Afterword. Since this article was written, the neutron bomb has Blade its alubiguous entry in the world's arsenals. Billed as a weapon which destroys hUlnans without destroying property, the neutron bornb has been denounced as "the ultinlate

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capitalist weapon." I raised with a student the question of what the ultimate communist weapon nlight be: he wittily proposed a bomb which destroyed only private property. In truth the neutron bOlnb is not all that benign to real estate: its use is not quite cOlnparable to extenninating roaches, leaving the cupboards intact. The grisly details lie beyond Illy iiTIagination and cOlnpetence, but the central argument of this paper would favor development of the neutron bomb over bOlnbs which destroy both humans and property. For there will always be survivors, and they nlust be left shelter froIn which to reCOlnInence life. But I have no argument which favors bOlnbing, which, when used against a populace to get theiTI to put pressure on their leaders to sue for peace, has the same nloral profile as terrorisIll, violating the boundaries I have Ineant to draw.


Documents

an - Weeblytheanthropocene.weebly.com/uploads/4/0/8/6/40868755/morals_and_modern_war.pdfInove hinl into war. But these also lilnit the degree of moral soiling he can live with. I think