Jus Ad Bellum and an Officer's Moral Obligations: Invincible Ignorance, the Constitution, and Iraq
Journal article by J. Joseph Miller; Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 30, 2004
Journal Article Excerpt
Jus Ad Bellum and an Officer's Moral Obligations: Invincible Ignorance, the Constitution, and Iraq. by J. Joseph Miller In his 1972 work, Applications of Moral Philosophy, R.M. Hare asks whether or not soldiers can be blamed for following orders. After an extended discussion on the is/ought problem, Hare argues that it cannot possibly follow from the fact that a soldier is given an order that he ought therefore to follow it. Hare thus concludes that The point must in the end come when a subordinate has to say, "Any policy which involves my doing this sort of thing (for example, slaughtering all these people in cold blood) must be a wicked policy, and anyone who has conceived it must be a wicked man; it cannot therefore be my duty to obey him. To decide just when this point has been reached is one of the most difficult problems in morals. But we must never banish from our minds the thought that it might be reached. (1) Hare is hardly alone in reaching such a conclusion; in discussing soldiers' responsibilities in war, Robert Nozick maintains that "some bucks stop with each of us." (2) Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, devotes most of that work to "trying to say which ones those are." (3) For the majority of just war theorists, the line at which a soldier's individual responsibility stops is drawn at the distinction between jus in bello (justice in war) and jus ad bellum (justice of war). Soldiers are held to be responsible for the actions that they commit during a war; politicians are held to be responsible for the justice of the war itself. Arguments for drawing the line at this point rather than elsewhere usually rest upon the view that soldiers are moral equals. Accepting that soldiers are moral equals commits us to holding that the fanatical Nazi commanding a Panzer tank battalion and the Southern slave-holding plantation owner are morally equivalent to a Polish peasant defending his home or an abolitionist private in the Union army. That consequence might by itself be regarded as a reductio of the moral equality thesis. In following up on that intuition, I will argue here that (many) soldiers are indeed responsible for the justice of the wars they fight. My argument will proceed in three stages. In section 1, I shall offer some arguments for rejecting the moral equality of soldiers. The moral equality doctrine rests largely upon the claim that soldiers are ignorant (perhaps invincibly, or perhaps just presumptively) of the justice of their wars. I will argue that the arguments for holding soldiers to be either invincibly or presumptively ignorant apply equally well to non-soldiers; thus, accepting the invincible ignorance of soldiers is tantamount to rejecting deliberative democracy. In section 2, I will offer a positive argument for holding soldiers morally accountable for the justice of their wars. Here I will argue that American officers are morally obligated to obey the Constitution, an obligation that, in turn, requires that they fight only those wars that are in compliance with the United Nations Charter. Finally, in section 3, I will apply my argument to the most recent Gulf War, showing that American officers may well have had a moral obligation to refuse to invade Iraq. 1. The Moral Equality of Soldiers?Talk of war and morality has traditionally been divided into two branches, jus ad helium and jus in hello. This division has raised puzzling questions regarding the individual soldier's moral responsibility; specifically, is the individual soldier responsible for determining the justice of the war itself, or is the soldier responsible only for determining that he fights his war justly? Answers to this question, as might be expected, run the gamut of possible responses. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that soldiers fighting in an unjust war ought not to fight, even to the point of sitting by passively while being attacked. (4) But the bulk of just war theorists take a very different line from Nozick's. Paul Christopher argues that "soldiers [should] go where and when they are told to go, provided that the telling is done by legally elected officials imbued with the power to make such decisions." (5) Maxwell Taylor agrees with Christopher, arguing that because officers lack "authoritative means to identify an unjust war in time to avoid participation" they have "little choice but to assume the rightness of a governmental decision involving the country in war." (6) Michael Walzer adopts a similar position, arguing ... |
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