Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of the Classics of Contemporary Political Theory

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars

Terry Nardin

ABSTRACT

Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars remains the standard account of just war theory

despite the criticism it has received. Much of that criticism denies the political character

of just war discourse by substituting general moral principles for principles generated in

reflecting on the use of military force. It challenges Walzer’s view of the relationship

between morality and politics and his conclusions about the moral standing of states, the

moral equality of soldiers, the moral basis of humanitarian intervention, and the limits of

morality in emergencies. Instead of providing a foundational argument, the book

reconstructs a tradition of discourse that transcends particular contexts because of the

range of historical experience on which it draws. The critics raise genuine issues but their

objections do not undermine the book’s argument. That argument stands in a complex

relationship with political realism, which it rejects in some ways and embraces in others.

KEYWORDS

Michael Walzer, just war, moral standing of states, humanitarian intervention, moral

equality of soldiers, emergency, political realism

Just and Unjust Wars has been translated into more than a dozen languages and published

in four editions. Each edition after the first includes a new preface relating the book’s

argument to current concerns: in the second edition (1992), to the Gulf War and

preventive war; in the third (2000), the Rwandan genocide and humanitarian intervention;

and in the fourth (2006), the American occupation of Iraq and regime change post bellum.

The book was treated as a classic almost from the day it was published. Written in

the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which inspired the activism and subsequent reflection

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on which its argument is based, it explores recurring themes of just war thinking in the

context of great power competition, colonial rule and national resistance, and changing

military technologies and practices. Among the topics considered are moral skepticism

and historical relativism, aggression and self-defense, preventive war and intervention,

military necessity and noncombatant immunity, guerilla war and terrorism, and individual

and collective responsibility for crimes of war. Early reviews recognized the book’s

importance even as they questioned its central arguments. Richard Wasserstrom, writing

in The Harvard Law Review (1978), challenged Walzer’s attribution of moral standing to

states—a theme that others would subsequently take up—and J. M. Cameron, in The New

York Review of Books (1977), noticed a tension between the book’s claimed commitment

to human rights and its utilitarian argument for violating those rights in a supreme

emergency. Later critics, including David Hendrickson (1997), Brian Orend (2000), and

Jeff McMahan (2004), affirmed the book’s status as a classic by treating it as the standard

statement of views they rejected.

Linking these themes and criticisms is the relationship between interest, policy,

utility, and necessity, on the one hand, and morality, law, justice, and human rights, on

the other. For Walzer, that relationship is political. Just war thinking is concerned with

the conduct of states and with the acts of individuals in their public roles as soldiers,

citizens, and government officials. It therefore has a public dimension that is missed

when the effort to guide or judge this conduct is viewed as an exercise in applied ethics.

By applied ethics I mean deciding according to moral principles with little attention to

nonmoral considerations such as those of law or policy. The principles may be

philosophically defensible but can be oddly irrelevant to the political circumstances in

which they are applied. And when they are amended to take account of those

circumstances, they converge with the political understandings they were supposed to

replace.

The principles of just war theory, in contrast, have been shaped by use in the

circumstances of war and by reflection on that use. They are expressed in a shared

vocabulary that recognizes these circumstances, which have political as well as ethical

implications. By starting with acts and practices to be examined instead of abstract

principles to be applied, Just and Unjust Wars captures the political character of ethics in

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war. In doing so, it pays close attention to the requirements of political and military

decision-making and reveals the complex relationship between its arguments and those of

political realism.

Moral discourse

Just war theory is an interpretation, and what it interprets is a tradition of judgment and

argument. The theory reconstructs the ideas that constitute the tradition, but what gets

used when judgments are made is not the theory but the particular principles it identifies.

Distinguishing right from wrong in particular situations is a practical activity, not a

theoretical one. It is “casuistry,” in a general and non-pejorative sense of that word:

reasoning in relation to cases and learning from that reasoning (Boyle 1997). The cases

examined in Just and Unjust Wars are actual and historical, not imagined or hypothetical.

As its subtitle indicates, the book offers “a moral argument with historical illustrations.”

This approach sets it apart from analytical political philosophy, which (to use Walzer’s

terms) “discovers” or “invents” principles, previously unknown, and applies them to

particular situations. For Walzer, the discoveries or inventions claimed by philosophers

are in fact disguised interpretations of an inherited body of ideas and principles. Their

purported theoretical superiority cannot put an end to disagreement. Arguing about war,

like arguing about morals and politics in general, is persuasive and rhetorical, not

demonstrative or a matter of proof (Walzer 1987, 32).

Instead of a foundational argument, Just and Unjust Wars offers an interpretation

of just war tradition to defend a theory that achieves a high degree of generality because

of the wide range of historical experience on which it draws. Much criticism of the book

misses the mark because confuses personal morality with the demands of justice in and

between the legally-ordered, non-voluntary associations we call states. If justice is about

how people can be compelled to treat one another, the political character of just war

theory is evident, for it primarily concerns what states can justifiably compel people to

do. With the revival of political realism in academic political theory, this insight is once

again coming to be appreciated.

Part of that realism is to appreciate the situation of the interpreter. Much can be

learned about Walzer’s approach in this book from the preface to the original edition,

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which is reprinted in all the later ones. It explains its origins not in philosophy but in his

opposition to the American intervention in Vietnam. The philosophy, which emerged in

reflecting on this political activity, came later. What just war theory provided “us,” he

writes, was a shared vocabulary through which opponents of the war could articulate their

indignation. The experience of political criticism, and even more their subsequent

reflection on it, taught critics of the war that the thoughts expressed in their inherited

vocabulary were “reports on the real world, not merely on the state of our own tempers.”

The “moral reality of war” is constituted not by what people do but by “the moral law”—

“those general principles that we commonly acknowledge, even when we can’t or won’t

live up to them” (Walzer 1977, xii, xiii).

Two points are evident here. First, the “us” expands to include not only those who

condemned the war but also “those who understood the condemnation (whether or not

they agreed with it)” (Walzer, 1977: xiv). The members of this larger community inhabit

a common moral world not because they adhere to the same doctrines or make the same

judgments but because they share a moral vocabulary in which to express their agreement

or disagreement. Just war theorizing not only describes the arguments people make; it

dissects those arguments, uncovers their presuppositions, and exposes the hypocrisy of

those who invoke shared principles to justify acts that violate those principles. Second,

the principles govern our judgments even when they fail to govern conduct. They are

historically embedded, not permanent or unchanging, though many are recognizable in

different times and places. Because Walzer’s aim is ultimately practical—to identify

moral principles for use—he is concerned with the present structure of the moral world.

His just war theory, in other words, is a slice in time across a slowly changing tradition of

just war discourse. That discourse enables arguments that are mutually comprehensible

even when their context is different or they contradict one another. Like the Athenians at

Melos, whose cynical dismissal of the vocabulary of justice is betrayed by their appeals

to honor and to their empire as a good that justifies their ruthlessness, we cannot escape

the common moral world within which our conduct is judged, even if we deny its reality

or its application to ourselves. We will be judged, and those judgments will—like the

judgments that Henry V’s massacre of prisoners of war at Agincourt was incontinent,

ungallant, excessive, brutal, murderous—reverberate down the centuries. “The clearest

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evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies

soldiers and statesmen tell,” for these lies depend on principles that everyone to whom

their justifications are offered may be presumed to acknowledge. Therefore, “whenever

we find hypocrisy, we also find moral knowledge” (Walzer 1977, 19)—that is, a moral

world sufficiently real and a moral vocabulary sufficiently stable to enable shared moral

judgments.

The moral standing of states

A state is a legally-defined community. Peoples defined by their nationality or ethnicity,

that is, in terms of a common ancestry, race, religion, customs, or collective experiences,

are not as such states. As an association on the basis of common laws, a state claims

authority and imposes duties. It can make these claims and impositions justifiably only if

in doing so it respects the moral rights of its citizens. Walzer makes an argument of this

sort when he says that just war theory rests on a morality of human rights (1977, xvi). It

rests above all on one’s right to make choices for oneself, which means not having other

people’s choices imposed on one except as consistent with having a common system of

laws within which similar rights for all are recognized and secured. Using law to impose

the arbitrary will of some on the choices of others violates the latter’s independence; it

constitutes “tyranny” or domination. The right of a state, through its government, to

exercise sovereign powers derives from this basic individual right to independence or

nondomination. States as well as persons have a right to make their own decisions: the

right of self-determination. And since states as well as persons occupy physical space,

states have a right to territorial integrity corresponding to a person’s bodily integrity.

Just war tradition affirms the right of states not be victims of aggression, the crime

of violating their rightful independence and territorial integrity. Under the principles of

jus ad bellum a state may defend itself against aggression when it takes the form of an

actual or imminent armed attack. It may also defend another state that has been unjustly

attacked and may even use force inside the territory of a state in certain circumstances,

such as to protect a fledgling political community against imperial oppression (1977, 94)

or rescue victims of genocidal violence (1977, 107).

The scope of these rights has been the subject of many challenges to Walzer’s

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reconstruction of just war tradition. The main line of criticism is that only legitimate

states can exercise sovereign rights and only states that fully respect human rights are

legitimate. But because human rights are violated in and by every actual state, the

question becomes one of deciding when those violations have reached a level that

justifies the use of force to resist them. Walzer thinks the just war tradition is correct in

setting this level rather high. Force is justified to resist armed aggression against a state

and, if sufficiently grave, by a state against its own people. Many critics set the level

much lower. They think that any significant violation of human rights by or within a state

casts doubt on its legitimacy and therefore limits its sovereign rights. According to one

such critic, a significant violation is one that infringes “socially basic” human rights,

which he defines as rights to security and subsistence. “Any proportional struggle for

socially basic human rights is justified, even one which attacks the non-basic rights of

others” (Luban 1980, 175). Sovereignty and law are unimportant in this argument. If

there were famine in one state, a war to secure food that is plentiful in a neighboring state

would be just, for example. Such reasoning has been used, however, mainly to challenge

Walzer’s views on intervention, which (it is argued) are insufficiently permissive because

a regime can violate the basic rights of its subjects in ways that fall short of genocide or

other crimes against humanity but nevertheless warrant foreign intervention.

Walzer’s response to such objections is to assert the importance of the state in

protecting the rights of “political communities.” The tension between state and political

community arises, when it does, because there are forms of community whose claims

might in certain circumstances justify political independence. A political community, in

this sense, is a community that has a right to national self-determination. A “nation” or

“people” might acquire rights of self-determination and territorial integrity that at some

point trump those of the state that governs it. This might occur in a state that encompasses

two political communities, one of which uses the apparatus of the state to dominate the

other. In such a case, the state loses its presumptive legitimacy. A tyrannical state is

presumptively illegitimate and is subject to intervention if its oppression is sufficiently

grave. The bar is set high—its oppression must involve crimes against humanity, not less

substantial violations of human rights—and not only on cost-benefit grounds but because

interference in the jurisdiction of a state violates its sovereign rights unless those rights

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are exercised in a way that undermines its claim to represent a community. The reason is

political, not philosophical, however: it cannot be the case that a political community is

immune from intervention only if its struggles to shape its own laws and institutions

“have a single philosophically correct or approved outcome” (Walzer 1980, 225; Nardin

2013). Such a requirement would displace politics, which is never entirely rational or

legitimate.

Judging from the subsequent history of this debate over the moral standing of

states, Walzer seems to have had the best of the argument. Not only has his “statism” (to

use the pejorative term applied by critics) gained defenders, but the critics have had to

progressively qualify their objections. Those objections are grounded in a decreasingly

attractive “political moralism,” the application to politics of moral principles with

insufficient attention to considerations of law and politics (Williams 2005). The

complaint that the idea of consent, which Walzer invokes to justify political authority, is

meaningless in nondemocratic states (Doppelt 1978; Beitz 1980) ignores the difference

between agreeing with the policies of a government and acknowledging its authority. The

claim that he privileges the state over other forms of community ignores the difference

between people’s identities as citizens and legal subjects and their identities as members

of other groups or associations. The suggestion that the claims of states must diminish as

global norms and institutions develop (Beitz 2014) indirectly affirms that states have

moral standing by acknowledging the defects of the international state of nature on which

just war theory is premised. The moralism of Walzer’s critics has been moderated by a

political realism that allows that a state can be legitimate, that its legitimacy does not rest

solely or directly on moral principles, and that political arguments are a matter of

persuasion and agreement rather than of certainty and proof.

The moral equality of soldiers

Movement from political moralism towards political realism is also evident in criticism

of Walzer’s account of justice in the conduct of war, jus in bello. A state’s decision to

wage war can be just with respect to its cause but unjust in execution, and vice versa. The

two kinds of judgment are independent. One implication of this independence is that

soldiers fighting in war for an unjust cause have the same rights as soldiers fighting in a

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just war. The injustice of the cause they serve does not make them war criminals, though

they can become criminals if they violate the rules governing military conduct, and they

are no less entitled to the status of prisoner of war if captured than soldiers serving a state

whose cause is just.

This “convention,” which rests on widespread agreement although its moral basis

is contested, seems at odds with the common sense that divides the world into good guys

and bad guys. That common sense finds expression in philosophical criticism of the war

convention’s principle of moral equality. Why should soldiers fighting an aggressive war

have the same protections as those fighting to resist aggression? It is not a matter of self-

defense. A bank robber commits murder if he shoots and kills a guard reaching for his

gun: he cannot plead that he shot in self-defense. Nor is it a matter of excuses. One

cannot say that the soldier fighting in an unjust war is excused from blame for killing

enemies because he had no choice; he did have a choice, even if a constrained one.

Rather, it is because the soldier, unlike the bank robber, kills in accordance with law—in

this case, the positive laws of war found not only in international law but also in the

military law of every state (Walzer 1977, 128; McMahan 2004, 699). Excuses like

ignorance or duress apply only in particular cases, not across the board to all those

fighting a particular war. The argument against the moral equality of soldiers is plausible

only if we ignore the claims—and point—of political authority. Soldiers have rights and

duties as citizens of a state. To substitute morality for law in determining the obligations

of soldiers is to bring moral uncertainty inside the state, thereby reproducing the very

problem the state is supposed to resolve: how to enable people to coexist under known,

common, and enforceable laws, and thereby avoid the violence and injustice that must

otherwise be their lot.

It has been argued, against the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello,

that only a morally legitimate state can have authority over individuals. Obligations to

obey the law “arise only in the case of institutions that are genuinely just and important,”

so if a government is illegitimate, or a particular war “lacks democratic authorization,”

soldiers serving that government are not obligated to obey its commands: “they have no

institutional obligations that can justify their fighting” (McMahan 2004, 705), though

there may be other considerations such as duties to fellow soldiers that justify doing what

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would otherwise be wrong. Without further treading the winding paths of this argument,

one can see that it puts the ordinary soldier in an impossible position. In place of positive

law it offers an ill-defined set of criteria including morality, loyalty, and judgments

regarding “the importance of an institution in securing social goods” (McMahan 2004,

733). People—soldiers—cannot be expected to combine such criteria to reach consistent

and defensible conclusions. The argument substitutes private judgment for the public

judgment found in positive law, not only in special cases, but in all cases. It not only

invites disorder, but denies the very idea of a common public order.

Recognizing this defect, McMahan proposes a solution in the form of an ethical

court—a court of morality, staffed by moral philosophers, not a court of law—to devise

and apply an improved jus ad bellum to determine when a war is unjust and when those

who fight in it might be excused for doing so (McMahan 2014, 242). Where Walzer’s

account reveals the logic of the war convention, McMahan’s substitutes a rationalist and

utopian proposal that ignores that logic. It is, however, a half-hearted substitution, for as

soon as he pays attention to the claims of law and politics that have shaped the tradition,

reason and custom converge. There are practical reasons, he thinks, why the laws of war

should be upheld “as a convention to which all combatants are bound.” Soldiers cannot

be punished for participating in an unjust war because the procedures for determining the

punishment are unlikely to be fair, and the prospect of being punished might deter

soldiers from surrendering (McMahan 2004, 730–731). Most importantly, the convention

lessens the savagery of war because its rules, which have been shaped by the experience

of many centuries, are well-adapted to regulating military conduct. Walzer’s error, it

seems, is only to present the convention as being grounded on morality rather than on

utility.

The war convention is in fact morally grounded, not directly on human rights, but

on the responsibility of the state as their guarantor. Actual states frequently neglect that

responsibility. They may fail to respect human rights, sometimes grossly, but this does

not undermine the rationale for civil authority as a solution, however imperfect, to the

moral uncertainty of the state of nature. People can know and enjoy rights only in a

system of authoritative and effective laws. The just war tradition recognizes the moral

standing of states, and its corollary, the moral equality of soldiers, because it rests on this

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rationale for political authority. The error of much political philosophy is to treat political

authority as if it derived directly from moral legitimacy. If this were the case, there would

be no need for authority, which is needed because legitimacy is contested and therefore

uncertain. The moral equality of soldiers reflects this rationale for political authority and

for the claims of law and politics in applying moral principles.

The limits of sovereignty

The distinction between moral and political justification is illustrated in the debate over

humanitarian intervention. Just and Unjust Wars restates the common understanding of

the nonintervention principle as a corollary to sovereignty and therefore as fundamental

to international order, but also as admitting a number of exceptions including intervention

to resist massive violations of human rights (Walzer 1977, 101). Humanitarian

intervention must be distinguished from efforts to liberate a people from a tyrannical

regime, imperial or homegrown. Genocide justifies intervention to suppress it; ordinary

oppression does not. A state, even a tyrannical one, represents the will of its people so

long as people continue to acknowledge its authority, which is always a matter of current

belief. That authority is the basis of its claim to sovereignty. Misconduct weakens the

claim, but discontinuously: a state loses its rights to self-determination and territorial

integrity only when its crimes cross a threshold marked by phrases like “crimes that

shock the conscience of mankind” or “crimes against humanity.”

Many critics of the book challenge this claim. If outsiders may intervene to end

gross human rights violations, they ask, why not to end lesser violations? One answer is

pragmatic: military intervention is justified in principle but may be too costly, or unlikely

to succeed. Another is principled: states have moral standing and therefore sovereignty,

which entails rights that are lost only if they are grossly misused. Just war theory

acknowledges the right of states to govern, which means enacting laws that displace

moral judgments and making decisions that might be morally objectionable. The

authority to govern therefore sets up a normative barrier to external intervention even

when a government is oppressive. Intervention is justified only when oppression becomes

extreme. Allowing military intervention as a way of dealing with ordinary human rights

violations would deny political communities the right to govern themselves. Intervention

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to suppress abuses that fall short of crimes against humanity is wrong in principle, then,

because it denies states the rights of political self-determination and territorial integrity to

which they are morally entitled.

Subsequent debate has modified but not overthrown these arguments. It has also

identified other issues. One arises from the objection that intervention is always selective.

But interventions are risky and therefore warranted even in the face of genocide only if

they are likely to succeed (Walzer 2000, xiii). States must consider the benefits and costs

of intervening as well as questions of legal authorization. They must consider not only the

ethics but also “the politics of rescue” (Walzer 2004).

Another debate goes beyond the right to intervene to whether there might be a

duty to intervene. This question became the focus of discussion post-Rwanda, leading to

the idea that there is a duty to protect that must be performed by outsiders if a state

cannot itself perform it. This “responsibility to protect” rests with the international

community, which may intervene if necessary. As a matter of international law, the

Security Council must authorize military intervention. But if the international community

cannot act, individual states might have a moral duty to do so. But which states? The

problem, as Walzer and many others observe, is that the duty doesn’t clearly belong to

anyone in particular. “Somebody ought to intervene, but no specific state . . . is morally

bound to do so” (Walzer 2000, xiii). The problem may have no evident solution, but that

does not mean that the principle is empty. States have a duty to support an international

legal order with institutions to deal with crimes against humanity, but they also have a

moral duty to act unilaterally in the absence of such an order if they can do so effectively

and at reasonable cost.

But if there is a duty to protect, we can ask whether rescue is enough, for even if

an intervention succeeds in ending a massacre, it may leave a murderous regime in power

and expose its people to renewed violence after the intervening force is gone. In Just and

Unjust Wars, Walzer argued that once the violence that invited intervention has been

suppressed the intervening power must withdraw, as India did after invading East

Pakistan in 1971 to suppress the slaughter of those supporting independence (1977, 105).

But India could withdraw because East Pakistan had a government as the new state of

Bangladesh; continued occupation was unnecessary and therefore unwarranted. If the

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intervening power departs too soon, it may leave in place conditions for renewed

violence. When a regime commits crimes against humanity, it must be overthrown and a

new, more civilized, regime established. Those who intervene may have to replace that

regime with a new one of a different, possibly more democratic but certainly less

murderous, character (Walzer 2006, x-xi). This is as close as Walzer ever comes to the

argument for “reform intervention,” the argument of his critics that intervention might be

justified not only to halt a massacre but to replace a tyrannical regime with a democratic

one (Beitz 1980; Luban 1980; Tesón 2005). But he does not share their view that only

morally legitimate or democratic states have sovereign rights.

The limits of justice

A theory of just war is a theory of justice in the circumstances of war, but at some point,

realists argue, justice must give way to necessity. For the moral skeptic, this point comes

as soon as the word justice is breathed because there is no such thing as justice: what we

call justice is, in the words of Plato’s Thrasymachus, the interest of the stronger—nothing

more than fine words to mask what the Athenians at Melos claim we all know, that the

powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must (Walzer 1977, 5). But

claims like these are themselves mere words: acts defended as necessary are never, from

the perspective of the agent, inevitable. There are always choices, even if the alternatives

are not attractive ones. Nor are acts ever indispensable: not only can an agent never know

that a given act is the only one that can produce a desired result but the claim presupposes

some end, such as victory or national independence, for which an unjust act is said to be

necessary. This reopens the question of justice by calling attention to whether that end

justifies the means proposed for achieving it (Walzer 1977, 8).

Those who are not moral skeptics, who acknowledge that justice has a place in

politics and even in war, identify some other point at which the claims of justice must

yield to those of prudence or utility. The argument that the rules of war do not hold when

they are an obstacle to victory or increase the costs or risks of fighting sets prudential or

utilitarian calculation against moral obligation. But the point of the latter is always to put

a limit to calculation: we are permitted to calculate within the bounds of justice, permitted

to act to achieve our ends provided we do not violate rules that protect others from being

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forced to serve our ends instead of their own. That is why “military necessity” operates

within the jus in bello, not as an exception to its rules. Soldiers are permitted to use as

much force as is reasonably needed to subdue the enemy, but they are not permitted to

attack noncombatants deliberately, as an end in itself or a means to an end. Similar

reasoning applies at the level of jus ad bellum: prudence can justify an action consistent

with the principle that aggression should be forcibly resisted. The argument for military

action to forestall an invasion depends not only on evidence that the action is expedient

but also that it falls under the principle of self-defense. It is an argument within the jus ad

bellum, not one that repudiates it. The German argument for violating Belgian neutrality

in 1914 did, however, repudiate the idea of justice in war by justifying aggression to

reduce costs by achieving a quick victory in the west before turning to fight the Russians

in the east. It was an argument for aggression, not for resisting it (Walzer 1977, 240–

241). Walzer makes a similar point about Churchill’s argument for violating Norwegian

neutrality in 1939 (1977, 242–50). These are not genuine arguments about the limits of

justice but arguments that purport to justify injustice.

That way of putting it reveals a paradox, however, for how can injustice ever be

“just”? Perhaps an unjust act can be shown to be warranted on grounds other than justice,

but so long as the word “justice” has meaning it cannot be shown to be just. The issue is

brought into focus in cases of emergency, where (it is argued) morality must at last give

way to necessity. Often, however, the claim of necessity is overblown. A crisis, though

real, may not require statesmen to act unjustly because their responses can be justified on

the basis of just war principles. Military intervention to suppress genocidal violence, for

example, requires injustice only if sovereignty is viewed as absolute. But the moral

argument for humanitarian intervention is not an argument for injustice. An intervention

to rescue the victims of mass murder perpetrated or permitted by a regime does not

violate the latter’s sovereign rights because that regime has forfeited its right against

foreign interference.

A genuine (“supreme”) emergency, Walzer suggests, is one that might call for a

response that really is unjust because it involves a danger that is unusual and horrifying.

It occurs in war, he think, not when a country is facing defeat but only when defeat would

mean the triumph of barbarism—of a “domination so murderous, so degrading” that it

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represents “evil objectified in the world, and in a form so potent and apparent that there

could never have been anything to do but fight against it” (Walzer 1977, 253). Walzer

argues that such an emergency would warrant a state in violating the rules of war; he is

reluctant to say that it can “justify” violations because justification, strictly speaking,

shows conformity to principles of justice, not good consequences or excuses from

responsibility. The British bombed German cities starting in 1940 not because those cities

contained military targets but to terrorize the country into surrender. Here, he argues, is a

case in which justice must yield to consequences.

Critics have suggested several problems with this argument. It does not belong in

just war theory because it is an argument for injustice, based on expediency rather than

on moral principle (Nardin 1983, 300). It equivocates between state-centric realism,

which concerns the fate of a particular political community, and utilitarianism, which

concerns the good of human beings everywhere, as members of the “civilized

community.” But Walzer concludes, “not without hesitation and worry,” that the rights of

innocent people can be overridden to preserve a particular political community. Even if it

were only Britain whose survival was at stake in 1940, the choice would be brought

“under the rule of necessity”—and (genuine) necessity knows no rules. Walzer’s theory

of just war, then, ultimately collapses into political realism, understood not as moral

skepticism but as reason of state (Nardin 1983, 302). And even if given a broader

utilitarian interpretation, the theory offers a bifurcated ethic in which morality governs

ordinary situations and utility the extreme ones. But “if utilitarianism is what gets us out

of our moral difficulty in the hardest case we can conceive, then it may perhaps be a

serviceable doctrine in cases that are not so extreme” (Cameron 1977, 13).

A quite different objection is that calling Nazism an ultimate evil turns just wars

into holy wars, in which ordinarily-forbidden means can be used. This raises the question

whether an ultimate or transcendent threat can be recognized in history, by finite human

beings (Johnson 1981, 25). Walzer sees the problem: people are all too likely to err in

distinguishing ordinary evils from ultimate ones. “Emergency” and “crisis,” he

acknowledges, “are cant words, used to prepare our minds for acts of brutality” (1977:

251). We need criteria like imminence and seriousness to distinguish genuine

emergencies from lesser crises. Nevertheless, he defends the judgment, made in Britain

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after the war, to withhold honours from those who participated in the terror bombing.

This was appropriate, he thinks, because those people were murderers, even though in a

good cause. They “killed unjustly . . . for the sake of justice itself, but justice itself

requires that unjust killing be condemned” (Walzer 1977, 323). Behind this doctrine of

“dirty hands” is the Weberian ethic of responsibility, which holds that to lead in dark

times means sinning for the sake of the collective. That ethic expresses the romanticism

and hubris from which Nazism itself emerged (Cameron 1977, 15).

A state is constituted as a political community by its laws. When political leaders

act unjustly in its name, do they protect or destroy that community? One can argue that

by violating its laws, they deny the principles that make it a community. One does not

defend civilization by barbaric means, even against barbarians (Donagan 1977, 180–183).

This is why, as Walzer acknowledges, those who sin for the community must be

dishonored or punished: those who do wrong must in the end be judged. It is also why, in

reconsidering his arguments in Just and Unjust Wars on what has since come to be called

“asymmetrical warfare,” he affirms the possibility as well as the moral importance of

fighting justly (Walzer 2013).

Conclusion

Just and Unjust Wars is a classic because it thoughtfully and engagingly explores issues

in the morality of war that arise whenever military force is used. It has shaped subsequent

discussion of the topic, and even those who dispute its conclusions treat it as the standard

statement of the just war tradition they wish to challenge. The philosophical abstraction

and practical implausibility of much of the criticism that the book has attracted, together

with the fact that even the more radical critics eventually revert to traditional positions,

suggests that Walzer has got it more or less right. The issues on which his judgments

seem most open to objection, such as the utilitarianism of extremity, reveal conceptual

fault lines that divide moral from other kinds of practical reasoning, and make clear that

the just war tradition is not only marked by internal disagreement but also by tensions

with other ethical traditions such as pacifism, holy war, and political realism. If there is a

larger lesson for political philosophy in the debates provoked by this book, it is that ethics

16

cannot be usefully divorced from engagement with politics or from the history of that

engagement.

One puzzle posed by Just and Unjust Wars is why, if just war theory is the result

of political as well as philosophical arguments, Walzer is so dismissive of what he calls

the “paper world” of positive international law (1977, xiii). To support its claim to count

as law, and for its institutions exercise authority justifiably, a legal system must impose

reciprocal limits on those it governs that are compatible with their rights and those limits

must be authoritatively ascertainable and enforceable. These conditions are fulfilled in

civil society, which has institutions to recognize, interpret, and enforce common laws. In

international society, however, such institutions are rudimentary and international law

therefore uncertain and ineffective. Just war theorizing articulates principles of rightful

coercion that are morally justifiable in the absence of a robust international legal order.

But its principles are no more effective than those of positive international law, nor are

they on Walzer’s account any less political. Each provides a vocabulary for debating the

rights and wrongs of war, vocabularies that overlap significantly. Perhaps the solution to

the puzzle is that just war theory is the result of efforts to find a stable ethic between too

much philosophy on the one hand and too much politics on the other.

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