Just War as Political Theory
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591715621505 |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
| Author | Anthony F. Lang |
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
research-article2015
Review Essay
Political Theory
2016, Vol. 44(2) 289 –303
Just War as Political
© 2015 SAGE Publications
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and Authority
In Defence of War, by Nigel Biggar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Cosmopolitan War, by Cecile Fabre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Morality and War: Can War be Just in the 21st Century?, by David Fisher. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Reviewed by: Anthony F. Lang Jr., University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK
DOI: 10.1177/0090591715621505
The just war tradition has many origins, which range from the classical writ-
ers of Ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Christendom to modern liberal
philosophy. This diversity of origins means that just war theorists do not only
disagree on their judgments about war, they disagree about the nature of
moral deliberation as it relates to warfare. This more fundamental disagree-
ment underlies not only moral evaluations of war and peace but moral life
more broadly.1 If this is the case, are we left without resources to critically
reflect upon war and organized violence? Theorists of the just war tradition
certainly do not think this is the case as evidenced by the quantity of books
on the ethics of warfare that have appeared in the last 50 years. Contributors
to the tradition include Christian theologians, political theorists, moral phi-
losophers, political activists, military officers, and policy makers. This is to
say nothing of those who reflect on such questions outside of the just war
tradition, such as international lawyers, critical theorists, feminists, and real-
ist theorists of international relations.
Normally in academic life, we welcome a plurality of voices; they demon-
strate the importance of a topic, enable a diversity of voices to participate, and
create space for new ideas to develop. Yet plurality and diversity can compli-
cate matters as well especially when it takes place at more fundamental levels
concerning the nature of political life, epistemological assumptions, and the
very stuff of reality. Debates about the ethics of war exemplify both the posi-
tive and negative sides of scholarly plurality; the multiplicity of voices ensure
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many perspectives are taken into account, but that multiplicity can result less
in a conversation and more in a cacophonous argument.
One might suggest that what unites these conversations is the practice of
warfare itself; there is a grim reality to weapons and dead bodies that ensures
such debates do not stray too far from actual political life. Yet even this unify-
ing potential has been undermined in recent years by the emergence of new
wars,2 terrorism, and humanitarian intervention. Military forces no longer face
each other across large plains where civilians have no place; instead, warfare
takes place in cities where competing authority structures prevent command
and control structures from ensuring “normal” warfare and where rules seem
to have no purchase. The plural forms of violence in the modern world, then,
hinder the creation of a stable ground on which moral debate might take place.
The modern debate about the ethics of warfare, however, is not the first
time a diversity of theoretical perspectives required some form of reconcilia-
tion. In the European context, one can find an effort at creating intellectual
coherence in the grand synthesis provided by Thomas Aquinas in the thir-
teenth century, when he brought together the newly translated writings of
Aristotle with the Christian theological tradition. Another synthesis, this one
more directly related to just war, can be found in the efforts of the seven-
teenth-century Dutch theologian, lawyer, and philosopher Hugo Grotius,
whose De Jure Belli ac Pacis combined a new hermeneutics of Christian
scholarship, moral philosophy, and a historical and geopolitical sensibility
enabled by the Dutch trading empire. Through his scholarship, Grotius cre-
ated a bridge from medieval natural law to modernist positivist law. In the
background of these efforts at synthesis, warfare was also changing, whether
in the medieval era when the crusades were challenging narratives of knightly
behavior or the early modern period when the age of colonial empires was
forcing reconsiderations of what it meant to be a human being.
So conversation and synthesis across different traditions is possible, albeit
difficult. The books reviewed here about just war point to both the drawbacks
and benefits of such efforts. The professional and disciplinary backgrounds
of the authors embody this diversity of approaches: Cecile Fabre, an analytic
philosopher who draws on the idea of cosmopolitanism to orient her reflec-
tions; David Fisher, a British civil servant who draws on his philosophical
background to develop a virtue based assessment of warfare; and Nigel
Biggar, an Anglican priest and theologian whose critical reflections on just
war locate it squarely within the Christian just war tradition. While these
three come from very different backgrounds, they engage each other in some
important ways, suggesting how the tradition of just war might continue to
create a conversation of sorts. At the same time, being aware of the limits of
this conversation is helpful in how we read these reflections (and others).
Review Essay
291
Three issues within the tradition demonstrate how their starting points
lead to very different understandings of what we might see as easily compre-
hensible concepts: intentionality, cause, and authority. What emerges from a
consideration of these three aspects is a lack of attention to a central element
of the just war tradition—that it is ultimately about politics rather than ethics.
The waging of war, no matter in what context or for what reasons, is a politi-
cal act, one that is constituted by and simultaneously constitutes a particular
configuration of order, authority, and rule. When we evaluate war, we are
primarily evaluating political life rather than individual behavior (though this
must include, of course, reflection on individual behavior as well). If we can
keep this political dimension of the just war tradition at the forefront, conver-
sations across different approaches might find a point of connection not on
the bases of their individual starting points nor on some overlapping consen-
sus of what constitutes war, but as part of a global conversation about how
war and violence constitute our shared global political life—and how we
might lessen the role of violence in that constitutional process.
Intentionality
Public debates about the justness of war often revolve around the issue of
intentionality. When it is discovered that a war may have been undertaken for
reasons that are not morally pure, the use of military force becomes sullied.
This particular form of criticism results, in part, from a confusion about the
difference between motives and intentions.3 This point is not simply one of
semantics, for an excessive focus on motives blinds us to the political dimen-
sion of intentionality, making explanations and evaluations about war a mat-
ter of individual behavior rather than political structures and institutions.
Terry Nardin points out the difference between motives and intentions in his
essay on humanitarian intervention:
The intention of an act is the state of affairs it seeks to bring about. A motive,
in contrast, is the frame of mind in which the agent acts—the desires and other
passions that propel him. Motives are a necessary element in judgments of
responsibility, or praise and blame, culpability and excuse, but are often
incidental to judgments of the justification, the objective rightness or
wrongness, or an act.4
Nardin uses this distinction to emphasize that while motives should play a
role in the moral evaluation of international affairs, intentions are just as, if
not more, important in determining the moral justification of interventions, a
determination that would play a role in whether or not an intervention should
be called humanitarian.
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Nardin is concerned with the moral evaluation of intervention, but his
careful distinction can be read differently to help us understand the political
nature of war rather than its purely moral basis. Intentions as publicly declared
reasons for action play a crucial role in constructing our world. For one thing,
intentions only make sense in communities where certain assumptions and
ideas are shared; if I state that my intention for waging a war is to convert a
heathen population to the truth, it would be less likely to be accepted than if
I stated my reason for waging a war is to create a democracy. This is not
because converting individuals to a new religious belief system does not
make sense in an abstract way, for we can...
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