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Thinking Historically about Just WarJames Turner Johnson aa Department of Religion , Rutgers University , USAPublished online: 30 Sep 2009.
To cite this article: James Turner Johnson (2009) Thinking Historically about Just War, Journal ofMilitary Ethics, 8:3, 246-259, DOI: 10.1080/15027570903230307
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Thinking Historically about Just War
JAMES TURNER JOHNSONDepartment of Religion, Rutgers University, USA
ABSTRACT This essay responds to the six essays on my thought above, doing so both directly onparticularly important points and indirectly through my own reflections on how I understand mywork and its development.
KEY WORDS: Authority, international law, force, historical reasoning, just war, pacifism,shari‘a, tradition
Let me begin by acknowledging the honor these essays pay me. I deeplyappreciate the attention the authors have given to my work, and I amespecially grateful to Cian O’Driscoll for conceiving this symposium of ideas,organizing it, and seeing it through to publication. That the publication ofthese essays appears in a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics, andindeed marks my retirement as Co-Editor of JME, a position in which I haveserved since its founding, is another source of pleasure to me, and I thank theEditor of JME, my colleague Bard Mæland, for his support to Cian inmaking this special issue possible.
This contribution of mine is the result of my having been asked to provide aresponse to these six papers. I want to use the opportunity not chiefly tocritique what they say but to build on, clarify, nuance, and in a few rareinstances offer a bit of correction building on what these six authors havesaid, but also to offer something of my own perspective on what I have beendoing all these years.
There is a great deal of use of the term ‘just war’ in contemporary literatureon the ethics of war, but sadly, much of what appears under that heading isconsciously or unconsciously unconnected to the broad cultural and moraltradition that historically has defined just war as a conception and body ofpractice. My work, by contrast, has been focused on the tradition that hasdeveloped and carried this idea historically and the implications to be drawnfrom this tradition of just war for present-day reflection and, maybe, practicaldecision-making. The six papers above also engage this historical tradition,though (as is to be expected from any group of individuals) from differentangles and in different ways. Broadly, these papers define a kind ofconversation about the meaning of just war both as shaped and transmitted
Correspondence Address: James Turner Johnson, Department of Religion, Rutgers University, 70 Lipman
Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8525, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/09/030246�14 # 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/15027570903230307
Journal of Military Ethics,Vol. 8, No. 3, 246�259, 2009
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in a historically defined tradition and as having worth for present-daythinking about the ethics of war. This response of mine aims to continue andextend that conversation.
While each of these papers has its own distinctive character, I think of themas belonging to two groups. The first three papers, those by O’Driscoll,Kelsay, and Zehr, bear on the question of how to use history in ethicalreflection; that is, their main focus is methodological. The second group ofthree, those by Lang, Sharma, and Bellamy, all deal with specific problems inapplying just war thinking to contemporary uses of armed force. Bothconcerns, of course, are found in my work, and the distinction I draw betweenthese two groups of papers broadly mirrors that between my three booksfocused on the Western normative tradition on war (Johnson 1975, 1981,1987) and those explicitly seeking to apply the conception of the ethics of waridentified there to contemporary issues in the use of armed force (Johnson1984, 1993, 1999, 2005; Johnson & Weigel 1991). The two books I co-editedwith John Kelsay on relating the traditions of just war and jihad of the sword(Johnson & Kelsay 1990; Kelsay & Johnson 1991) fall into the first camp, andso does my own book on the idea of holy war in the Western and Islamictraditions (Johnson 1997). But a close look at all these books will reveal thatthe difference is hardly absolute. Indeed, in my thinking both sorts ofconcerns are always present right alongside one another, since my historicalinvestigations are about moral traditions and their implications in particularhistorical situations, and my efforts at applied ethics proceed by extrapolatingfrom how just war tradition was applied in such historical situations to howits meaning should be understood in present contexts.
Not everyone has been able to make sense of the results of this admittedlycomplicated way of ‘doing’ ethics. John Kelsay above comments on TerryNardin’s bewilderment at it; I have given papers at societies of academichistorians when clearly some in the audience wondered why I did not simplytrace the historical facts and not spend so much time on how those factsdefine an ethical tradition; and there are certainly numbers of contemporaryphilosophers (and religious ethicists as well) who simply do not see thathistory has anything at all to do with ethical reasoning. To my mind, ofcourse, this last attitude has led to what is wrong with large parts of recentthinking put forward under the rubric of ‘just war’, but this is not theoccasion to go further into that.
Two of the papers above, O’Driscoll’s and Lang’s, point to the similaritybetween my way of thinking and that of Alasdair MacIntyre on historicaltradition and meaning. Whatever commonality there is probably traces to theinterest both of us have in medieval thought and the use of Aristotle there.MacIntyre’s After Virtue appeared the same year (1981) as my second bookon just war tradition, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, and in thatbook I was already deeply engaged in giving voice to my understanding of theimportance of history for ethical reflection and particularly for the ethics ofwar. I didn’t read MacIntyre’s work till somewhat later and was delighted tofind that we seemed to be speaking different dialects of a common language.In subsequent work I have tried to use his thinking to sharpen my own on
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certain points, but whatever methodological faults lie in my work are my own,not MacIntyre’s.
The case of Edmund Burke is rather different. I read some in Burke thirty-odd years ago in the process of educating myself to teach a course I waswoefully unprepared for, but I have never consciously thought of my work asBurkean. It was not an unpleasant surprise, though, to have O’Driscoll pointto the likeness. In O’Driscoll’s words, Burke’s view was that ‘historicalexperience, embodied in tradition, provides the best tutor for politicalpractice’ (O’Driscoll 2009: 171). I not only agree, but would add ‘and ethicalreflection and practice.’
To what conscious influences would I trace my approach to the ethics ofwar? There were three particular individuals whose work on just war led meinto my focus on this topic as the major theme of my scholarship: PaulRamsey, Michael Walzer, and William V. O’Brien. Ramsey was my doctoralmentor at Princeton, and while I wrote my dissertation on an entirelydifferent topic, his two seminal books from the 1960s (Ramsey 1961, 1968)introduced me to the idea of just war as a conception of Christian ethics. Butalong with many positive influences, there was an important negative one:Ramsey wrote as a theologian, developing his particular understanding ofjust war as an extrapolation of the Christian norm of love of neighbor; he didnot engage the historical tradition of just war in its own particulars but liftedout themes from thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas as they fitted histheological purposes. My first just war book (1975) was quite consciously aneffort to engage the historical tradition, to uncover and follow howAugustine, Aquinas, and others were actually used there. Walzer’s Just andUnjust Wars (1977) appeared between my first and second just war books; Ifound his use of history engaging and provocative and discussed it in achapter in my 1981 book; but again, he was not interested in engaging ordrawing out the historical tradition, and I was. O’Brien, who drew me closelyinto the debates (theological, military, and academic) surrounding the writingof the United States Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace(National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983), in important waysincorporated the idea of just war in his personal life: a retired Army colonel,a professor of government deeply involved in understanding the meaning ofinternational law and its implications for international relations and the useof military force, a deeply committed Catholic convinced of the importance oftradition, and a serious and substantive scholar of ethics, law, and war (seeO’Brien 1981, 1991). He brought a real-world experience and a level ofcommon sense to thinking about the ethics of war that remains rare amongacademics writing on just war. My long-time engagement with militarythinkers, particularly in the war colleges and the service academies, as well asmy long-running debate with Catholic thinkers on war (I’m not myselfCatholic) is a result of O’Brien’s influence and example.
For my convictions about the importance of historical tradition as the basisfor finding meaning and guiding that meaning the most important influencewas definitely my coursework in the history of Christian thought while I wasa divinity student in my early twenties. This experience is also the ultimate
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root of my impatience with contemporary Christian thought on the ethics ofwar that misunderstands, misuses, or sometimes completely ignores thehistorical Christian tradition on just war and its placement in theology, moralteaching, and the interrelation between religion and its social context. Justwar tradition is not simply a tradition of Christian thought and practice, butwithin the broader tradition there is a specifically Christian one, and I believecontemporary Christian moral reflection on the ethics of war is not keepingfaith with those who went before when their work and its implications aredisregarded, misunderstood, or misused. At the same time, like Burke andMacIntyre, I think it essential to take account of historical experience andtraditions encapsulating that experience in politics and ethics.
Let me now turn more explicitly to the papers above. Both O’Driscoll andZehr note my emphasis on what I call the ‘classic’ expression of the just waridea, and both find a tension between this emphasis and my earlier argumentfor viewing just war tradition as a ‘rolling story that reflects the sum of itsown historical development’ (O’Driscoll 2009: 171). Zehr (2009: 200) istroubled by this, arguing as follows in her conclusion:
Johnson’s ‘classic’ just war category suggests an essentialist account of just war thinking.However, such a position is difficult to maintain, as moral communities are alwaysengaged in the task of giving reasons for their values. With changing historicalcircumstances, these reasons, and consequently these values, are likely to change.
O’Driscoll, by contrast, reads the tension between the two themes in mywriting more positively, arguing that this is where the distinction betweenreading me as a hedgehog and reading me as a fox breaks down andjudging the result to be ‘not a failing but a strength’ (O’Driscoll 2009: 176).It is perhaps merely human that I prefer O’Driscoll to Zehr on this matter.
O’Driscoll very engagingly and usefully employs the hedgehog�foxcategories, as well as his own slightly expanded categories of conservatism,progressivism, and reflectivism, as lenses through which to view my work.These are specially ground lenses, to be sure, as each one brings differentdetails into focus. Or maybe ‘perspectives’ would be a better word for thesefive categories, as this word suggests looking at the subjects I have treatedfrom different vantage points, seeing different elements of the whole as moreor less prominent from each perspective. I confess O’Driscoll’s fine-grainedand nuanced analysis has led me to thinking about my own thought in waysthat had not occurred to me before (e.g., my similarity to Burke notedearlier). But more often his categories serve to raise to light elements in mythinking which I recognize and acknowledge and which are important,though I have not always stressed them. A case in point is O’Driscoll’s (2009:172) argument that my ‘historical hermeneutics reflects a project that isdriven by a desire to learn from the past, not just for its own sake, but so thatwe might build a better future’. Hear, hear! It is because of this that I regardit as so utterly and sinfully wrong to forget � as far too much that passes forjust war reasoning in contemporary debate does by accident, emphasis, ordesign � that just war is about seeking to achieve the end of peace.
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But perhaps O’Driscoll’s approach does not entirely satisfy Zehr’s concern.Accordingly, I would add that I admit to having stressed particular matters indifferent contexts. We speak, after all, of discussion of the ethics of war as a‘debate’, and in a debate one needs to identify, meet, and refute theshortcomings of one’s opponent’s position. Especially in my earlier writingsI was heavily concerned to make the case for historically based reasoning inethics as opposed to various other prominent forms of ethical reasoning. Thisdebate is still going on, of course; recently I had to argue the importance of abroader account of history in the development of just war thinking aboutnoncombatant immunity against another writer on ethics who argues that thedevelopment of noncombatant immunity is simply a logical working out ofideas already found in Aquinas. Different readers will gravitate to one or theother of these positions, but my point here is that the nature of the questionbeing debated shapes how one argues, and it has shaped what I have stressedat different times with regard to the idea of just war. My emphasis on theclassic form of the conception of just war, the form given it by the medievalcanonist Gratian and his successors and stated pithily in Aquinas’s SummaTheologica II/II, Q. 40, has developed as a quite conscious response to what Isee as a grievously wrong conception of just war, its purpose and its use putforward by the United States Catholic bishops in their 1983 pastoral letter(National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983) and since advanced byspokespeople of the bishops and taken over as the normative statement onjust war by others. I have elsewhere given my reasons for this negativejudgment on the Catholic bishops’ version of just war (most fully in Johnson2005), but my point here is simply to note that I began to stress the classicform of the just war idea as a way of reminding the bishops and theirsupporters that the deep tradition of just war shows us a conceptionfundamentally different from theirs. I have also made much the same pointin arguing against the unhistorical conception of just war put forward inrecent Anglo-American philosophy. This is not a ‘golden age’ conception buta way to insist that just war tradition provides both a content and a form, sothat if one wants to describe one’s position by use of the term ‘just war’ oneshould pay attention to what this term actually was understood to be and tobe about when it was first coherently pulled together.
In this connection I should acknowledge that Zehr is accurate to observethat my own listing of the just war categories has shifted as I have given moreemphasis to the classic idea of just war. In my early work I wasn’t particularlyinterested in describing just war in terms of categories; this was becauseethical reasoning from categories, as practiced then, was very different fromthe historically based method I wished to emphasize. When I did decide todescribe just war in terms of categories, I simply adopted what was at the timea widespread consensus as to what these were. I used this listing for some timeand continue to refer to it from time to time, in various contexts. It has realadvantages for linking just war thinking to international law, a major runningconcern of mine. But reflecting on the elements of the classic idea of just warhas led me to see matters somewhat differently, especially in two particularways: to recognize the systematic links between Aquinas’s formulation of the
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three necessities for just war (sovereign authority, just cause, and rightintention including the end of peace) and the three goals of politics assumedin the Augustinian tradition (order, justice, and peace), and to acknowledgemore forthrightly a lesson I had learned from Ramsey: that the decisionwhether to resort to use of armed force is properly the responsibility and rightof those in positions of supreme political authority in a society, not that ofmoralists � or even bishops! In Chapters 1 and 2 of Morality and ContemporaryWarfare (Johnson 1999) I employ both ways of describing the content of thejust war idea and develop each way to its particular purposes; those interestedin more on the subject should look there.
Let me now turn to John Kelsay’s paper, which I have postponed becauseof the common issues raised by O’Driscoll and Zehr. Kelsay and I have beenfriends and sometime collaborators for almost 30 years, and I owe to him myintroduction to the tradition of Islamic thought on war. This essay of his,though, treats a different matter. I like the way he begins, by outlining thedifference between my way of thinking and the different versions of ethicalreasoning as proceeding from principles exemplified in the thought of JamesChildress and Paul Ramsey. As Kelsay makes very clear, I was engaged inthinking about the meaning of history for ethical reflection from the first. ButI especially like his placing my approach over against Childress’s methodbecause it applies so well to my ongoing argument with the official position ofthe US Catholic bishops and their supporters in the academic debates overthe use of armed force. For the bishops’ foundational statement, their 1983pastoral letter, directly employs Childress’s mode of describing just war andadopts it as the bishops’ position, asserting that this is what Catholic just warthinking is and has been. My argument with this position has sought toidentify the real and substantial differences between the bishops’ idea of justwar and that of the actual tradition as found in what I call ‘benchmark’thinkers � especially people like Gratian in the twelfth century, Aquinas in thethirteenth, and the Spanish Neo-Scholastics in the sixteenth and earlyseventeenth. Here is where we find what I call the ‘classic’ concept of justwar, and that is very different from the ‘presumption against war’ doctrine ofthe US bishops, which is a barely disguised version of Childress’s argumentthat the just war idea proceeds from the principle of non-maleficence (seefurther Childress 1982: Chapter 3).
I think it is fair to say that my efforts at defining ethical reflection aboutwar through definition and engagement with historical tradition have largelyfailed in my own home field of religious ethics (Kelsay and a few othersnotable, and much appreciated, exceptions). This field is and has long beendominated by people who because of their own inclinations or because of theinfluence of their teachers seek to reduce it to reasoning from principles,whether the principle of love of neighbor (as in Ramsey) or versions ofphilosophical principles (as in Childress and his teacher James Gustafson).
I know from my publishers that more political scientists have bought mybooks than people from other academic fields. For political scientists, andespecially perhaps those in international relations, the matter is different: herehistorical patterns and modes of thinking matter, and the ability to draw
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practical results either for the purpose of analysis or for that of policy isvalued. Similarly, for military professionals reflection on history as well asconsideration of how it matters for practical decision-making lies at the coreof how they think about who they are and what they do. Increasingly I havecome to feel a kinship with both.
Much of my argumentation aimed at showing that just war tradition is notnarrowly Christian, especially not narrowly a strand in Christian theology,has been quite explicitly aimed at showing its relevance for policy-making andspecific decisions in secular contexts, including the exercise of governmentand military service. I like to describe just war tradition as a stream thatmoves through history like a river, remaining the same yet putting down someelements and picking up others as it flows, from time to time dividing intodifferent channels and then, perhaps, recombining. As I have conceived mytask, it is to describe this flow and try to make sense of it, while trying to keepthe various sub-streams in contact with one another and with the motherstream.
I think Kelsay is absolutely on target to find resonance between how I havethought about just war tradition and its implications both for uses of forceand also, more broadly, for responsible exercise of governance, and the modelof practical reasoning found in Islamic jurisprudence or reasoning aboutshari‘a. Both aim at a continuing dialogue with the community’s historicalexperience and reflection, and both aim to, in Kelsay’s (2009: 186) words,‘articulate a ‘‘fit’’ between precedent and current circumstance’. But there arealso important differences: most notably, shari‘a considers itself based in aninherently immutable law handed down directly from God, while just wartradition, even insofar as it relies on the idea of an underlying natural law,depends on human experience, on discovering the right as one goes along. Mymodel of moral reasoning conceives moral reflection as a continuing dialoguewith historical experience and prior moral reflection. The tradition of shari‘areasoning proceeds differently.
Yet some of the same practical problems arise both in contemporary shari‘areasoning and in contemporary just war reasoning, notably the tendenciesto reductionism found in both. For radical Islamists this takes the formof a narrow and doctrinaire reading of the shari‘a tradition often termed‘fundamentalist’, after the model of a biblical fundamentalist. One of itsresults is to use the idea of the jihad of individual duty to argue for a kind ofHobbesian war of all against all, except that it is the war of every Muslimagainst everyone else. In contemporary just war tradition, by contrast, thereductionism has moved the opposite way: to define the use of force asinherently morally wrong, as in the Catholic bishops’ notion of a ‘presump-tion against war’ and arguments drawn from this. The remedy I have offeredfor these different forms of reductionism is fundamentally the same: to showwhat the historical tradition actually says and to draw out what it implies.Just as one gets a very different picture of the just war idea from readingAquinas, say, than from reading The Challenge of Peace (National Con-ference of Catholic Bishops 1983), one gets a very different picture of the ideaof the jihad of individual duty when one moves beyond the radicals’ own
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statements and those of their favorite authority, Ibn Taymiyya, to people likethe twelfth-century Syrian author Al-Sulami, treated by Kelsay (2006) in hisbook Arguing the Just War in Islam, or earlier authorities including IbnRushd (Averroes) or the thinkers who originally defined the juristic idea ofjihad, al-Shaybani and al-Shafi‘i. It is important for people who want to befaithful to their moral traditions to know what those traditions actuallycontain, in fullness and complexity.
As I read Lang’s paper I had the sense that to an important extent hedescribes a conflict that isn’t there, or at least one I don’t want to be there. Hisdistinction between someone who is ‘in authority’ and someone who is ‘anauthority’ is useful, and I agree with him that I belong in the latter category,not the former. But I reject Lang’s categorizing my work as describing justwar tradition only in its political role. I think rather that I have worked out ofall the roles he identifies at various times, in various contexts. The criticismthat appears in Bellamy’s paper above is, after all, aimed at aspects of mywork that are ‘prophetic’ according to Lang’s categories, and I would arguethat my argument with the position enunciated in The Challenge of Peace(National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983) is also an example of such‘prophetic’ use of just war tradition. As for what he calls the ‘pastoral’ role, ashe notes himself, I have had a significant amount of interaction, bothpersonal and through things I have written, with professional military people.Perhaps my interaction with people in the civilian policy community fits thiscategory as well, though perhaps it also bleeds into the category of the‘political’; I’ll leave it to others to sort that out. As for the ‘philosophical’ roleof my approach to just war tradition, I think John Kelsay’s paper answers forme. As I read through Lang’s paper, I found myself writing in the margincomments like ‘this is my view’ and ‘right’ and ‘good’. So I’m not sure he andI have much of an argument in the end.
This extends in principle to what seems to be Lang’s major concern: thatthose ‘in authority’ in various Christian churches have the right to define theirown understanding of the ethics of war. So far so good, though I think wehave considerable differences over the actual scope of this authority and theway it is employed in particular Christian bodies. It is not just, as Langsuggests, that my background is in a ‘free church’, one without hierarchy.Clearly even in churches in which there are bishops, their ecclesiological rolediffers from church to church; not all are understood as having the teachingauthority claimed for its bishops by the Roman Catholic Church. And thereare more issues persons interested in ecclesiology would need to debate;Ramsey’s book cited by Lang offers a good place to begin identifying therelevant questions.
But we do have a real difference over what bishops exercising their teachingauthority owe to the tradition out of which that authority comes. Lang wouldgive them far more latitude in defining their own position of just war than Iwould. Thus he writes, ‘Rather than seeing them as leaving the stream of justwar, the Christian churches as a whole have turned the tradition in a newdirection’ (Lang 2009: 209). I’m not at all sure about the category of ‘theChristian churches as a whole.’ In the United States the churches of the old
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Protestant mainline in recent years have turned to language other than that ofjust war to advance their arguments about ethics and warfare, speaking of theneed to ‘move beyond just war tradition’ or to substitute a ‘just peace’theology for one of ‘just war’. The case of Catholicism is more varied, but thereal issue is the position of the US Catholic bishops. They have clearly turnedthe idea of just war in a ‘new direction’, but Lang and I differ as to whetherthis legitimate or not, or a good thing or not.
I think that anyone � church hierarch or not, one ‘in authority’ or only ‘anauthority’ � who sets out to use the idea of just war has a debt to the traditionand a responsibility to understand what that tradition actually is and how itcame to be what it is, and to use the tradition in ways that fit with this.Specifically, since the tradition of just war is quite broad and includes diverseelements, this implies an engagement with those elements of the traditionclosest to what one does oneself, as well as seeking to understand the relationbetween those particular elements of the tradition and the larger body oftradition of which it is a part. I have understood my work as an effort toprovide both examples of doing this and raw material for others to do it. Incarrying this through, ideally people taking up this task will refine the methodand add to the raw material. If the obligation to engage the tradition in such away is denied, either by defining and using the just war idea in a wayfundamentally inconsistent with the tradition or by explicitly walling thattradition off as not mattering, then I question whether what is going on oughtto be called just war reasoning at all. I consider it my obligation to try to talkacross such divides, but in the end that effort may be rejected.
Two final points. First, toward the end of his paper Lang characterizes therole of the US Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter in and around the year it wasadopted, 1983, as ‘much more of a prophetic one than a policy advocacy one’(Lang 2009: 212). I know from experience, though, that this was not at allhow the process of producing the letter, or the letter itself, was understood inmilitary and public policy circles in the United States. Rather, it was viewed ashaving clear and immediate policy implications. That the second draft of theletter was published in both The New York Times and The Washington Post,with front-page lead stories in both, testifies to its being understood asbearing seriously on policy. The letter also frequently takes the tone of apolicy document. Lang is correct to insist that those with teaching authorityin a church have the right to state that church’s views; yet when they enter thefield of debate over public policy, then that authority gives them no particularprecedence over those who are ‘an authority’ but not ‘in authority’. Second, Iconfess I think Lang oversteps when he accuses me of ‘contesting theauthority of scripture’ by ‘claiming that [Jesus] did not understand how histeaching related to a wider political context’, an idea that he traces toAugustine (2009). This wasn’t at all Augustine’s point in developing the ideathat love of neighbor may require violence; nor was it Ramsey’s, whose wholeidea of just war is based on the idea of love of neighbor; nor was it mine intaking note of this.
I turn now to Serena Sharma’s paper, which is exactly on target in finding‘echoes of pacifism in contemporary just war thought’ and drawing attention
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to my efforts to combat this. In fact one of the reasons I am so unhappy withmuch that has been placed under the rubric of ‘just war’ in recent years is thatit really is a functional pacifism. Sharma makes use of a term that hasappeared in the literature for this pacifist presence under the guise of just warthinking: jus contra bellum. She traces it to the conception of just waradvanced by Paul Ramsey, particularly his overwhelming stress on the jus inbello and his comparative neglect of the questions of jus ad bellum. A resultnot intended by Ramsey was to open the door for opponents of any use ofarmed force at all to argue that in the age of total war and of nuclearweapons, no war can ever be just because the jus in bello standards cannot bemet. Elements of this argument appear in the United States Catholic bishops’1983 pastoral and subsequent statements, as Sharma shows. As for my ownargument, I have numerous times pointed out that the ‘presumption againstwar’ idea on which the Catholic bishops founded their idea of just war is notonly at odds with classic just war thinking, but it in fact smuggles a pacifistprescription into just war thinking: for just war tradition, the evil is injusticeand the use of force is a possible remedy, whereas for the US Catholicbishops, the evil is the use of military force itself. But more radical versions ofthe pacifist takeover of just war thinking can be found than the example ofthe US Catholic bishops. And indeed, Ramsey himself, rather early on, wrotedecidedly strong refutations of this reading of the implications of his thought,perhaps the strongest of which he entitled ‘Can a Pacifist Tell a Just War?’(Ramsey 1968: Chapter 12). His answer was, in present-day language, NOWAY!
Sharma doesn’t think I have gone far enough in opposing this creepingtakeover of the just war idea by pacifism. Maybe she is right; I don’t know.After all, just as contemporary functional pacifists insist that the just warcriterion of last resort means that resort to force cannot be justified becausethere is always something else that could be done instead, perhaps there is infact something more I might do. But I think my opposition to making justwar over into a form of pacifism has been consistent and clear. I neveraccepted Ramsey’s understanding of the primacy of the jus in bello; indeed(and this is perhaps a rejection of Sharma’s argument about my own use ofthe jus ad bellum/jus in bello distinction near the end of her paper), I knowthat the jus ad bellum (though not the term) came first, and I definitely regardit as addressing the issues that are morally prior. The fact that pacifists whowant to use the jus in bello to undermine it is also wrong, though, becausethey have dirty hands: there are no conditions ever under which they couldaccept the justified use of force, and what they want is to find whateverlanguage is convenient to advance their own opposition to the use of armedforce for whatever reason. In any case, the creeping influence of pacifism incontemporary just war thinking is a real problem, and Sharma’s essay castsimportant light on it.
Finally I turn to Alex Bellamy’s paper. When I began to read it I was almostimmediately reminded of the problem of having a scholarly career that extendsover several decades: what you say early on may come back to haunt you manyyears later. Bellamy is deeply unhappy with an argument I first laid out in the
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Epilogue to my 1975 book and which I briefly repeated in my 1981 book,where I criticized the ‘aggressor-defender’ conception of the right to resort toforce in international law, argued for its modification so as to restore justice tothe jus ad bellum, and also criticized the United Nations for its role inenforcing the aggressor-defender model. These were early themes in my work,but as stated there they were not major ones; in the 1975 book the pages inquestion amount to no more than about 5% of the whole book, and thediscussion in the 1981 book is an even briefer segment of a longer work. Afterthis I did not discuss the issues involved until almost two decades later, in my1999 book, and subsequently in some other places, including my 2005 bookand several articles. One of these articles (Johnson 2006) appeared in a specialissue of JME on humanitarian intervention. That Bellamy doesn’t take note ofit is a bit odd, since he served as guest editor of that issue and solicited the piecefrom me. But in any case, the discussions in 1981 and before reflect a differentcontext from the more recent one, and context matters.
The reason I focused so heavily in my earlier work on the aggressor-defender concept as defining the right of resort to military force ininternational law is that this was central to the international discussion ofright to use force in that period. I make this plain in the 1975 book, showinghow the aggressor-defender trope was used in United Nations debatesregarding the definition of aggression and the international arguments overthe legality of Israel’s preemptive use of force at the start of the 1967 war. So Ireject Bellamy’s claim that this is not what the international law jus ad bellumis about. In the context in which I was writing, it most certainly was, as anyreview of the debates I have mentioned will show. I stand by my position thatthis takes justice out of the jus ad bellum, because it made everything hinge onfirst vs. second resort to force, allowing broad latitude in the use of meansother than cross-border military force for subversion of a state, but denyingeffective response if the only such response needed to be cross-borderprojection of force.
By the time I wrote my 1999 book the context had decisively changed. TheSoviet Union had collapsed, and with it the model of conflict that nourishedthe attention given to outlawing any cross-border uses of armed force. In themid-1990s this made possible a serious debate over humanitarian interventionto respond to gross violations of fundamental human rights � cross-borderuses of force not justified by the aggressor-defender model, and in factdirectly opposed to its assumptions. This shift in thinking was nourished bythe vigorous growth of international human rights law. In 2001 TheResponsibility To Protect (International Commission on Intervention andState Sovereignty 2001) appeared, using (without identifying it) a just warframework to justify actions that override state sovereignty in the name offundamental justice. In this context, as I saw the matter, the question hadshifted: justice was again on the agenda in thinking about resort to armedforce, and the pressing questions had to do with who might act in cases ofgross violations of fundamental rights, what means might be allowed, andwhat degree of international approval would be needed. By this time too theUnited Nations had amassed a woeful history of management of armed force
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in peacekeeping operations (including the debacle of the ‘sanctuary’ cities inBosnia and the abdication of the peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time ofthe genocide), and still (contrary to Bellamy) the Security Council washamstrung in applying Chapter VII rules by the politics of member states.
Bellamy and I see the world, and the United Nations, very differently. But Ithink I have been right to raise the question of the responsibility and rights ofindividual states as opposed to those represented by the United Nations. Thereasons are in my books and articles, and I will not rehearse them here, butreaders are invited to look at them and reflect on the reasoning I offer there �and the view of international affairs I offer there � by contrast to the oneBellamy sets out in his paper.
Incidentally, I would observe that in the effort to show the UN is not as badas he thinks I make it, at one point Bellamy provides a list of Security Councilauthorizations of force that, he argues, didn’t simply police the aggressor-defender distinction: Korea, Iraq�Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and ondown to East Timor and Afghanistan. Historically minded people mayobserve that only the case of Korea antedates my 1975 and 1981 books andthat the Security Council authorization of the use of force there was possibleonly because of the temporary absence of the Soviet Union; and as I havepointed out above, the ground had shifted significantly by the time of theother cases mentioned. My problem with the UN as a vehicle for protectionof international justice is that it has not proven able to do what its mostenthusiastically positive supporters (and Bellamy seems to be one of these)want to reserve to it alone. The presence of the UN does not negate that theresponsibility of individual states is still another matter in its own right, onedeserving serious consideration.
A final point: I am genuinely concerned at the ‘mutual antipathy’ Bellamyargues to exist between moral thinkers using just war arguments andinternational lawyers. Perhaps it is the circles I have moved in, includingconferences involving both ethicists and international lawyers from variouscountries, but I have not found anything like a pervasive ‘mutual antipathy’in our discussions and relations. Moreover, in my own work I havethroughout my professional life sought to emphasize the commonalitiesand connections between these two modes of discourse, which are bothhistorical and thematic. There are clearly sharp differences between myposition and that of those (not only international lawyers) who understandinternational law as a form of universally binding positive law. Thinking ofthis, I recalled the Hart�Fuller debates of not many decades ago. My ownthinking on the relation of moral valuations and law has been influenced byLon Fuller and, in the specific arena of international law, Michael Reisman.This leads me to emphasize a conception of international law based in acommon-law conception of customary international law. Legal positivistsand political realists, each for their own reasons, want there to be a wallbetween what they do and what those of us engaged in moral discourse do.But I believe I have consistently worked to show that this wall ought not toexist. Happily, I have found that there are many in both law and ethics whoagree.
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Again, my thanks to all who have given their energy, time, and intellectualefforts to this special issue. I hope this discussion continues and spreads.
References
Bellamy, A. J. (2009) When is it Right to Fight? International Law and Jus ad Bellum, Journal of Military
Ethics, 8(3), pp. 231�245.
Childress, J. F. (1982) Moral Responsibility in Conflicts (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State
University Press).
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) The Responsibility to Protect
(Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre).
Johnson, J. T. (1975) Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton and London: Princeton
University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1981) Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton and Guildford: Princeton
University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1984) Can Modern War be Just? (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1987) The Quest for Peace (Princeton and Guildford: Princeton University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1993) The Just War Idea and the Ethics of Intervention (Monograph; United States Air Force
Academy, CO: USAF).
Johnson, J. T. (1997) The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions (University Park, PA, and
London: Pennsylvania State University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1999) Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press).
Johnson, J. T. (2005) Just War, as It Was and Is, First Things, 149, pp. 14�24.
Johnson, J. T. (2006) Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq, Journal of Military Ethics, 5(2), pp. 114�127.
Johnson, J. T. & Kelsay, J. (1990) Cross, Crescent, and Sword (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).
Johnson, J. T. & Weigel, G. (1991) Just War and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy
Center).
Kelsay, J. (2006) Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press).
Kelsay, J. (2009) James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition, and Forms of Practical Reasoning, Journal of
Military Ethics, 8(3), pp. 179�189.
Kelsay, J. & Johnson, J. T. (1991) Just War and Jihad (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).
Lang, A. F. Jr. (2009) The Just War Tradition and the Question of Authority, Journal of Military Ethics,
8(3), pp. 202�216.
MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue (London: Duckworth).
National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1983) The Challenge of Peace (Washington, DC: United States
Catholic Conference).
O’Brien, W. V. (1981) The Conduct of Just and Limited War (New York: Praeger Publishers).
O’Brien, W. V. (1991) Law and Morality in Israel’s War with the PLO (New York: Routledge, Chapman,
and Hall).
O’Driscoll, C. (2009) Hedgehog or Fox? An Essay on James Turner Johnson’s View of History, Journal of
Military Ethics, 8(3), pp. 165�178.
Ramsey, P. (1961) War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Ramsey, P. (1968) The Just War (New York: Scribners).
Sharma, S. K. (2009) The Legacy of Jus Contra Bellum: Echoes of Pacifism in Contemporary Just War
Thought, Journal of Military Ethics, 8(3), pp. 217�230.
Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books).
Zehr, N. A. (2009) James Turner Johnson and the ‘Classic’ Just War Tradition, Journal of Military Ethics,
8(3), pp. 190�201.
Biography
James Turner Johnson (PhD, Princeton 1968) is Professor of Religionand Associate of the Graduate Program in Political Science at Rutgers, TheState University of New Jersey, where he has been on the faculty since 1969.
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His research and teaching have focused principally on the historicaldevelopment and application of moral traditions related to war, peace, andthe practice of statecraft.
Johnson has received Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and National Endow-ment for the Humanities fellowships and various other research grants andhas directed two NEH summer seminars for college teachers. His most recentbooks are The War to Oust Saddam Hussein (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005),Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Yale, 1999), and The Holy War Idea inWestern and Islamic Tradition (Penn State, 1997). Other books includeIdeology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton, 1975), Just WarTradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton, 1981), Can Modern War beJust? (Yale, 1984), The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in WesternCultural History (Princeton, 1987), and (edited with John Kelsay) Cross,Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western andIslamic Tradition (Greenwood, 1990) and Just War and Jihad: Historical andTheoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions(Greenwood, 1991).
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