Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations

While soldiers are not responsible for the justice of the war, they are accountable for their own conduct: They “are bound to apply the criteria of usefulness and proportionality until they come up against the basic rights of the people they are threatening to kill or injure, and then they are bound not to kill or injure them” (304). There are two defenses for the failure to observe this responsibility. The first is a claim that the heat of the battle resulted in a soldier’s loss of sanity and prompted him to murder. Walzer rejects this as a blanket defense because most soldiers do not fall prey to this temptation. For soldiers to claim this defense, they must cite some convincing circumstance that is extenuating. Officers who encourage such behavior bear responsibility for such killings as well. However, that does not exonerate the individual soldier.

The second defense is one of coercion or that the soldier was following orders. Drawing upon the example of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Walzer notes that only the unit commander who issued the specific orders to kill civilians was held accountable but that soldiers who carried out this massacre also bore moral responsibility. They could not claim ignorance, as it was clear that they were murdering innocent civilians. Nor could they claim duress, as some soldiers refused to fire and did not suffer penalties. A soldier can claim duress if his own life is threatened, but it is not sufficient to cite a fear of demotion. However, Walzer acknowledges the difficult position of the soldier who depends on the solidarity of comrades. Disobedience creates a “moral separateness” (316) and challenges those comrades. There are other ways to subvert an immoral order short of disobedience, such as evasion and deliberate misunderstanding (315).

Officers bear more responsibility than soldiers. They decide strategy and tactics and must take positive steps to ensure that the war convention is followed. Specifically, they must ensure that unintended civilian deaths are minimized when planning campaigns. They must also ensure that the soldiers in their command are trained about the war convention and held to its standards. He uses two examples to explore the responsibilities of officers, General Bradley’s carpet-bombing in France in 1944 and the murder of unarmed civilians in the Philippines in 1945 by General Yamashita’s troops. Walzer faults Bradley for not attempting to warn French civilians of the surprise attack. Commanders who do not make minimal efforts to reduce civilian deaths can be held morally accountable. In contrast, Walzer does not hold Yamashita responsible for the actions of his troops, as he had not ordered the violence and was separated from his troops. Yamashita was executed nonetheless on the basis of strict liability, according to which he was responsible for the actions of his troops. Walzer maintains that this case left us “with no clear standards at all” (322).

Walzer last addresses those military commanders who kill innocent people in the case of a supreme emergency. He uses the case of Arthur Harris, who directed the strategic bombing of Germany during World War II, to highlight people’s moral discomfort with violations of the war convention. After the war, Harris was “slighted and snubbed” (324) as were the men he led. While Churchill was responsible for the campaign as well, his refusal to honor this group represents a step toward re-establishing the war convention. There are times when collective survival allows for the war convention to be overridden but there is still a sense of guilt for so doing.

When attacked by an aggressor, the only alternative to defensive war is a non-violent defense. While this form of defense fails to prevent military occupation, it transforms the struggle against aggression into a political one using weapons such as boycotts, disobedience, and general strikes (330). Such an approach is typically only invoked after military resistance has failed, and a non-violent resistance can possibly impose high costs on the invader and de-escalate the conflict. However, success is only possible if the invaders are committed to the war convention. If the invader is willing to kill civilian leaders, arrest and torture suspects, and exile large numbers of civilians (332), this strategy will fail. It relies upon the moral convictions of the enemy soldiers. If such convictions are absent, the strategy turns to a “disguised form of surrender or a minimalist way of upholding communal values after a military defeat” (333). In the latter circumstance, the community is expressing an important will to survive. Walzer emphasizes the crucial nature of adherence to the war convention to realize a transformation from war to political struggle. To do so successfully, soldiers must treat civilians as noncombatants and refrain from violence against them. Walzer notes, “The restraint of war is the beginning of peace” (334).

Walzer defends his theory in the face of a cohort of academics who believe the distinctiveness of just war theory is unnecessary. They believe the moral dilemmas of war are no different from those of ordinary life. Walzer disagrees. Before he wrote the first edition, he read extensively in the field of military history and soldiers’ memoirs. These contemporary critics fail to delve into that literature and mainly focus on academic works of philosophy. Walzer’s reading about war from different perspectives convinced him that it is “a long-standing human practice […], which represents a radical break with our ordinary social activities” (337). War is unique in at least three ways: First, the circumstances of war are extremely coercive in ways equaled nowhere else. Second, war is “an intensely collective and collectivizing experience” (340). Soldiers become members of a collective and fight for that cause. Such a collective is valuable for reasons of shared history, culture, beliefs, sense of place, and way of life. That shared community exaggerates the coercion as well, with people pressured into volunteering at the outset of wars. Third, war presents a world of radical and pervasive uncertainty. Not only are life chances hard to predict, but war brings with it a world where morality and authority are contested (344).

When academics compare the moral positions of soldiers with ordinary citizens, they question the equality of soldiers. In short, they want to conflate the questions of just war with just fighting and give more latitude to the soldiers on the side of justice. Walzer defends the moral equality of soldiers, noting that they have a right to be wrong or to defer to the judgment of political leaders and that even when they disagree with a war, they are bound to fight. States would not survive otherwise. Soldiers should have a right to refuse to fight in an unjust war, but to do so is “an act of heroism, and it can’t be morally required” (345). In almost all cases of war, the international community disagrees about its description and morality. Unless all soldiers are held to the same standards, rights, and obligations, there will be no constraints at all.