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RODIN:WAR & SELF-DEFENSE PAPER
When is it right to go to war? The most persuasive answer to this question has always been 'in self-defense'. In a penetrating new analysis, bringing together moral philosophy, political science, and law, David Rodin shows what's wrong with this answer. He proposes a comprehensive new theory of the right of self-defense which resolves many of the perplexing questions that have dogged both jurists and philosophers.
- GenresPhilosophy
229 pages, Paperback
First published October 17, 2002
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February 17, 2021
This book is rich moral philosophy about war. The author extensively addresses practical, ethical concerns about how nations can develop confidence in rules / habits to address and resolve conflict with a minimum of mass killing.
Rodin says that most moral, legal, and political / rhetorical justifications offered to justify wars use the notion of national defense. Arguments for ‘national defense’ often state or imply that it is analogous to personal self-defense. This awkward but well-researched book demonstrates that this very old and widely employed analogy is fatally flawed. Rodin shows that for the world to develop conflict resolution methods that do not sink into the unpredictable and costly horrors of war, we should move to other ways of thinking about how to justify military action.
The book has two main sections. It first investigates our understanding of the ‘right’ of personal self-defense, and then investigates whether what we know about the ‘right’ of personal self-defense applies to moral and practical decisions about ‘national defense’. He comes to say that equating national defense with self defense has ethically / legally practical flaws we cannot correct.
In the part on personal self-defense, Rodin outlines clear moral norms about which which most people / cultures can agree. In working from this locus of ‘clear moral norms,’ he often distinguishes between ‘central cases’ - where rights and duties are clear, and ‘marginal cases’ - where important principles clash and moral dilemmas arise. Working from here, he first defines what a ‘right’ is, and seeks where it overlaps or is identical with a power, or a liberty, or an immunity. Then he shows these ‘rights’ to be related to ‘duties,’ and especially one’s duty to not be an unjust aggressor.
Rodin now outlines the limits that society puts on self-defense, noting that the ‘right’ that a victim has to fight back can only be directed toward a specific ‘unjust’ aggressor. Both law and morality recognize three conditions of limitation to be considered in judging a response: (1) Is it necessary, i.e., without this response, will the victim suffer further harm? (2) Is the danger imminent; must the aggression (however it is defined) be repelled immediately? (3) Is the response proportionate? For example, is it wrong to shoot someone who threw an egg at you?
Since this is a book about war, the key question about personal self-defense centers on when a victim has the ‘right to kill’ an unjust aggressor. Rodin says it is impossible to exhaustively list the exclusive criteria that give someone a ‘license to kill,’ and avoids any absolutist position against killing; sometimes people can and must kill. The question is: when is it justified (and sometimes when is it ‘excused’, though not ‘justified’)? A human life is lost, and the killer is profoundly changed.
This last factor, of the effects on the ‘justified’ killer, is substantial and important. Rodin does bring this up, though he doesn’t dwell on it enough. Rodin believes that individuals and nations must adhere to basic norms of justice; moral agency is possible, and not everything is predetermined by outside forces that act upon us or by ‘human nature.’ He treats seriously ‘the realm of moral personality’ (p. 95), for individuals and nations. Though he does not reject all consequentialist arguments (e.g., ‘lesser evil’ arguments) for how we should judge self-defense and national defense, he focuses on actors (individuals/nations) who have both duties to be fulfilled and rights to be defined and limited. He states that consequentialist arguments, for example the argument that armed conflict should be avoided to save lives, even though one group might have to submit to injustices, often fail. I have examined his stance on this issue. I remain unconvinced. In decisions about war and peace, the lives of masses of young and relatively manipulable soldiers are at stake. The consequences, the sheer numbers of deaths and the extent of the suffering, should always have a primary, powerful voice where decisions about wars are made. The powerful make the decisions, and the pawns may be slaughtered. These consequentialist arguments must be presented to the entire society, to the general public, in the clearest way, on the most available stage, where every citizen hears it.
The second half of the book is about national ‘self-defense’. Here, sometimes awkwardly, Rodin mixes moral/legal issues of what is ‘just’ with practical questions about where, and by whom, this will be judged. At present, ‘national defense’ is the strongest / most accepted justification for military action, world-wide. It is conceived of as a ‘right’ that nations possess, often argued in the UN.
Rodin credits the importance of the UN, not dwelling on its limitations, but instead recognizing it as our most widely accepted international forum for resolution of international conflict. The years since WWII have seen enormous development in international treaty law, and arguments for military action often include defense against economic aggression, protection of citizens abroad, and pre-emption or prevention. The rhetoric addressed to international and domestic audiences has addressed the same factors discussed in personal self-defense: necessity, imminence of threat, and proportionality of the response. Thus, nations argue for the ‘right’ of ‘self-defense,’ and sometimes achieve an internationally accepted legitimacy for this claim; e.g., the claim of ‘national self-defense’ provides solid moral ground for justifying military action by nations facing the threat of being turned into colonies, or parts of an empire. Further, small neighbors of great powers may believably employ this justification.
Yet, Rodin shows in general how poorly this has gone - having nations base their moral reasonings in ‘self-defense’ ; the arguments have rung hollow, or fallen on deaf ears. Rodin examines what a nation is in order to see where the self-defense analogy holds up and where it doesn’t. He constantly references (and often rejects) the arguments of Locke (e.g., that we may kill the thief), and of Hobbes (e.g., that the moral authority to enforce ‘security’ must reign uppermost in justifying what the state does.) Usefully, he looks at what the state is ‘defending’, whether it is (1) the collective lives of the nation’s citizens (a limited claim, except in cases of genocide); (2) the sovereignty of the nation’s government to make decisions within national borders (a protean, complex concept, difficult to evaluate, especially where nations treat their own inhabitants poorly); (3) the value that inhabitants of a nation place upon their common life, the community, the culture, and the order (even non-democratic and oppressive order) that any specific nation has, even temporarily, established within its boundaries. (Rodin shows the limitations of this concept by (a) pointing out the overwhelming discontinuities between cultures and national borders, some of which even result in civil wars where ‘national defense’ is inapplicable, and (b) noting that it is not worthwhile to preserve all cultural / political communities.)
Philosophers make a strong distinction between the moral reasoning about committing a nation to war (jus ad bellum) and the morals of how to conduct war (jus in bello). Both questions are addressed here, but Rodin mainly is focusing on jus ad bellum. The moral reasoning in these two fields of ethical decision making are separable, but linked. He does spend time on ‘jus in bello’, to link it to ‘jus ad bellum’. Many powerful institutions, from government to church, have supported the idea that individual soldiers are excused for whatever they do during war, but this idea has become evermore threadbare. It originated in the medieval chivalric code, wherein the warriors regulated themselves, and two foes on a battlefield could hold themselves up to be great and noble men. Further, warriors could consider themselves justified, or at least excused, for how they behaved by saying, “I was following orders,” a position supported by powerful ethical figures from Augustine (died AD 430) to Aquinas (died 1274). Governments and philosophers claimed absolute authority, granted by god, to conduct war. Even if what their country was doing was wrong, soldiers were absolved of guilt. Change has come, and is coming, but slowly.
Part of the corrosion in the moral authority of the sovereign state has arisen with legitimized dissent in the ranks. In the last 500 years, e.g., with the writing of Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic moral philosopher who advised the Spanish royalty about the conquest of the Americas, and even sometimes effectively advocated for indigenous rights, explicit ideas about right and wrong in how to conduct war were articulated. Soon after Vitoria, the Dutch philosopher Grotius developed Protestant reasoning in the same field. Throughout the 20th century, rules were negotiated, codified, and elaborated, such as with the League of Nations, Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and a great deal of treaty law. The US Dept. of Defense even recently published its Law of War Manual - 1,204 pages. Thus neither soldiers nor citizens are as ill-informed or manipulable as they once were. The world’s citizens and citizens are less likely to grant broad, unquestioning authority over war to their governments. Yet, given a constant drumbeat of nationalist sentiment, politicians may not feel responsible to anyone other than their own citizens, and may want to just grab what they can.
Rodin goes on the say that if governments are completely sovereign, and do not have to answer to any higher authority, there is no presently sufficient rule of law - countries simply can attack other countries as they will, with no one country more “in the right” than the other. Rodin rejects that this Hobbesian sort of end-state of international relations is acceptable. He says there is a way forward. We now have 75 years of experience where nations make their case in very imperfect international forums such as the UN Security Council or the World Court. This is a start; we have much experience with real cases, involving issues such as pre-emption, defense of borders, humanitarian intervention, the age-old struggle for resources, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. International forums were involved in the oversight of the end of colonialism in the late 40s and 50s, and now most nations are ashamed to militarily conquer a foreign land in order to dominate its resources.
Rodin’s main arguments against an over-dependence on calling on the necessity of ‘national self-defense’ to justify military action are these: (1) history and context often clouds the contrast as to who is the unjust aggressor and who is the innocent victim; (2) when the entire relationship between two nations is deeply influenced by mutual mistrust, ungoverned competition, and preparation for conflict, both will be concerned with balance of power / comparative strength. Any move by one party to alter the balance might be perceived as the single decisive moment of unlawful aggression that triggers a war. Opposing nations in this pattern often stupidly engage in rounds of brinksmanship that can stumble into catastrophe; (3) a justification of ‘national self-defense’ is completely inapplicable where the international community considers a foreign military intervention to be justifiable, e.g., where there is a humanitarian crisis or a campaign of genocide, yet this flies in the face of the sort of rigid respect for national sovereignty that ‘national self-defense’ tells us to honor; (4) finally, Rodin has provided many examples of where the idea of ‘national self-defense’ has come to be twisted so badly out of shape as to be unrecognizable - anticipatory attacks, interventions in foreign internal/civil wars, and reprisals.
Rodin has now provided evidence that progress in reducing wars can’t be made either by exclusively depending on the concept of ‘national defense’, nor within a world where national governments retain absolute sovereignty. A future he outlines as effective, practical, and doable involves individual nations surrendering a minimal slice of their sovereignty, over jus ad bellum and jus in bello. He fully recognizes the flaws of (1) the UN, (2) other international institutions in which power is shared, and (3) the web of treaties, all of which emit, in one fashion or another, regulations and judgements (always with limited impact) about the military behavior of nations. Rodin doesn’t fool himself into thinking that these institutions are impartial but notes that UN-authorized wars already have far more legitimacy, world-wide, than other wars.
Rodin posits that only in a model in which nations explicitly surrender a limited though crucial slice of their sovereignty to a ‘universal punisher’ will we advance in creating legitimate international law of war. He comments that, in an broad range of societal institutions, “justice is often defined in opposition to the partisan,” and that it is, “always (my italics, CS) unjust for a participant in a dispute to administer or determine justice.” (p. 176) Otherwise, authority will always be deeply doubted, and considered illegitimate, often for decades or centuries. Punishment will smell of revenge. (In reference to how most cultures perceive the relationship between justice and impartiality, Rodin carves out one special case, wherein many cultures recognize an authority that parents have over children - although the parents are clearly interested parties in intra-familiar disputes, they retain legitimate authority to enforce punishments. Rodin comments that, in the present poorly-organized arrangement of international law, certain nations, with the power to exercise hegemony over others, often arrogate this power to themselves.)
Rodin would not walk blindly into universal government. He recognizes the dangers, and cites Kant’s objections. Yet, he points to the further maturing of international bodies, such at the World Court or the UN, as the functional route that can best lead to reduction of the chaotic horrors of war. He considers this in one way to be a simple extension of Hobbesian contract theory. Just as Hobbes conceives that individuals have surrendered liberty (to be aggressive) to the sovereign so that the sovereign will impose order amongst contending individuals, Rodin proposes that nations must surrender limited liberties, or rights, to an impartial authority. He considers this to be a ‘law enforcement’ model of judging and managing international conflict. He does not expect the world to be able to construct this model quickly, but concludes with pointing out that if we are going to continue to pursue a moral course, internationally, we must openly recognize that as we fight, we must not assume we are right, or just.
Rodin says that most moral, legal, and political / rhetorical justifications offered to justify wars use the notion of national defense. Arguments for ‘national defense’ often state or imply that it is analogous to personal self-defense. This awkward but well-researched book demonstrates that this very old and widely employed analogy is fatally flawed. Rodin shows that for the world to develop conflict resolution methods that do not sink into the unpredictable and costly horrors of war, we should move to other ways of thinking about how to justify military action.
The book has two main sections. It first investigates our understanding of the ‘right’ of personal self-defense, and then investigates whether what we know about the ‘right’ of personal self-defense applies to moral and practical decisions about ‘national defense’. He comes to say that equating national defense with self defense has ethically / legally practical flaws we cannot correct.
In the part on personal self-defense, Rodin outlines clear moral norms about which which most people / cultures can agree. In working from this locus of ‘clear moral norms,’ he often distinguishes between ‘central cases’ - where rights and duties are clear, and ‘marginal cases’ - where important principles clash and moral dilemmas arise. Working from here, he first defines what a ‘right’ is, and seeks where it overlaps or is identical with a power, or a liberty, or an immunity. Then he shows these ‘rights’ to be related to ‘duties,’ and especially one’s duty to not be an unjust aggressor.
Rodin now outlines the limits that society puts on self-defense, noting that the ‘right’ that a victim has to fight back can only be directed toward a specific ‘unjust’ aggressor. Both law and morality recognize three conditions of limitation to be considered in judging a response: (1) Is it necessary, i.e., without this response, will the victim suffer further harm? (2) Is the danger imminent; must the aggression (however it is defined) be repelled immediately? (3) Is the response proportionate? For example, is it wrong to shoot someone who threw an egg at you?
Since this is a book about war, the key question about personal self-defense centers on when a victim has the ‘right to kill’ an unjust aggressor. Rodin says it is impossible to exhaustively list the exclusive criteria that give someone a ‘license to kill,’ and avoids any absolutist position against killing; sometimes people can and must kill. The question is: when is it justified (and sometimes when is it ‘excused’, though not ‘justified’)? A human life is lost, and the killer is profoundly changed.
This last factor, of the effects on the ‘justified’ killer, is substantial and important. Rodin does bring this up, though he doesn’t dwell on it enough. Rodin believes that individuals and nations must adhere to basic norms of justice; moral agency is possible, and not everything is predetermined by outside forces that act upon us or by ‘human nature.’ He treats seriously ‘the realm of moral personality’ (p. 95), for individuals and nations. Though he does not reject all consequentialist arguments (e.g., ‘lesser evil’ arguments) for how we should judge self-defense and national defense, he focuses on actors (individuals/nations) who have both duties to be fulfilled and rights to be defined and limited. He states that consequentialist arguments, for example the argument that armed conflict should be avoided to save lives, even though one group might have to submit to injustices, often fail. I have examined his stance on this issue. I remain unconvinced. In decisions about war and peace, the lives of masses of young and relatively manipulable soldiers are at stake. The consequences, the sheer numbers of deaths and the extent of the suffering, should always have a primary, powerful voice where decisions about wars are made. The powerful make the decisions, and the pawns may be slaughtered. These consequentialist arguments must be presented to the entire society, to the general public, in the clearest way, on the most available stage, where every citizen hears it.
The second half of the book is about national ‘self-defense’. Here, sometimes awkwardly, Rodin mixes moral/legal issues of what is ‘just’ with practical questions about where, and by whom, this will be judged. At present, ‘national defense’ is the strongest / most accepted justification for military action, world-wide. It is conceived of as a ‘right’ that nations possess, often argued in the UN.
Rodin credits the importance of the UN, not dwelling on its limitations, but instead recognizing it as our most widely accepted international forum for resolution of international conflict. The years since WWII have seen enormous development in international treaty law, and arguments for military action often include defense against economic aggression, protection of citizens abroad, and pre-emption or prevention. The rhetoric addressed to international and domestic audiences has addressed the same factors discussed in personal self-defense: necessity, imminence of threat, and proportionality of the response. Thus, nations argue for the ‘right’ of ‘self-defense,’ and sometimes achieve an internationally accepted legitimacy for this claim; e.g., the claim of ‘national self-defense’ provides solid moral ground for justifying military action by nations facing the threat of being turned into colonies, or parts of an empire. Further, small neighbors of great powers may believably employ this justification.
Yet, Rodin shows in general how poorly this has gone - having nations base their moral reasonings in ‘self-defense’ ; the arguments have rung hollow, or fallen on deaf ears. Rodin examines what a nation is in order to see where the self-defense analogy holds up and where it doesn’t. He constantly references (and often rejects) the arguments of Locke (e.g., that we may kill the thief), and of Hobbes (e.g., that the moral authority to enforce ‘security’ must reign uppermost in justifying what the state does.) Usefully, he looks at what the state is ‘defending’, whether it is (1) the collective lives of the nation’s citizens (a limited claim, except in cases of genocide); (2) the sovereignty of the nation’s government to make decisions within national borders (a protean, complex concept, difficult to evaluate, especially where nations treat their own inhabitants poorly); (3) the value that inhabitants of a nation place upon their common life, the community, the culture, and the order (even non-democratic and oppressive order) that any specific nation has, even temporarily, established within its boundaries. (Rodin shows the limitations of this concept by (a) pointing out the overwhelming discontinuities between cultures and national borders, some of which even result in civil wars where ‘national defense’ is inapplicable, and (b) noting that it is not worthwhile to preserve all cultural / political communities.)
Philosophers make a strong distinction between the moral reasoning about committing a nation to war (jus ad bellum) and the morals of how to conduct war (jus in bello). Both questions are addressed here, but Rodin mainly is focusing on jus ad bellum. The moral reasoning in these two fields of ethical decision making are separable, but linked. He does spend time on ‘jus in bello’, to link it to ‘jus ad bellum’. Many powerful institutions, from government to church, have supported the idea that individual soldiers are excused for whatever they do during war, but this idea has become evermore threadbare. It originated in the medieval chivalric code, wherein the warriors regulated themselves, and two foes on a battlefield could hold themselves up to be great and noble men. Further, warriors could consider themselves justified, or at least excused, for how they behaved by saying, “I was following orders,” a position supported by powerful ethical figures from Augustine (died AD 430) to Aquinas (died 1274). Governments and philosophers claimed absolute authority, granted by god, to conduct war. Even if what their country was doing was wrong, soldiers were absolved of guilt. Change has come, and is coming, but slowly.
Part of the corrosion in the moral authority of the sovereign state has arisen with legitimized dissent in the ranks. In the last 500 years, e.g., with the writing of Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic moral philosopher who advised the Spanish royalty about the conquest of the Americas, and even sometimes effectively advocated for indigenous rights, explicit ideas about right and wrong in how to conduct war were articulated. Soon after Vitoria, the Dutch philosopher Grotius developed Protestant reasoning in the same field. Throughout the 20th century, rules were negotiated, codified, and elaborated, such as with the League of Nations, Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and a great deal of treaty law. The US Dept. of Defense even recently published its Law of War Manual - 1,204 pages. Thus neither soldiers nor citizens are as ill-informed or manipulable as they once were. The world’s citizens and citizens are less likely to grant broad, unquestioning authority over war to their governments. Yet, given a constant drumbeat of nationalist sentiment, politicians may not feel responsible to anyone other than their own citizens, and may want to just grab what they can.
Rodin goes on the say that if governments are completely sovereign, and do not have to answer to any higher authority, there is no presently sufficient rule of law - countries simply can attack other countries as they will, with no one country more “in the right” than the other. Rodin rejects that this Hobbesian sort of end-state of international relations is acceptable. He says there is a way forward. We now have 75 years of experience where nations make their case in very imperfect international forums such as the UN Security Council or the World Court. This is a start; we have much experience with real cases, involving issues such as pre-emption, defense of borders, humanitarian intervention, the age-old struggle for resources, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. International forums were involved in the oversight of the end of colonialism in the late 40s and 50s, and now most nations are ashamed to militarily conquer a foreign land in order to dominate its resources.
Rodin’s main arguments against an over-dependence on calling on the necessity of ‘national self-defense’ to justify military action are these: (1) history and context often clouds the contrast as to who is the unjust aggressor and who is the innocent victim; (2) when the entire relationship between two nations is deeply influenced by mutual mistrust, ungoverned competition, and preparation for conflict, both will be concerned with balance of power / comparative strength. Any move by one party to alter the balance might be perceived as the single decisive moment of unlawful aggression that triggers a war. Opposing nations in this pattern often stupidly engage in rounds of brinksmanship that can stumble into catastrophe; (3) a justification of ‘national self-defense’ is completely inapplicable where the international community considers a foreign military intervention to be justifiable, e.g., where there is a humanitarian crisis or a campaign of genocide, yet this flies in the face of the sort of rigid respect for national sovereignty that ‘national self-defense’ tells us to honor; (4) finally, Rodin has provided many examples of where the idea of ‘national self-defense’ has come to be twisted so badly out of shape as to be unrecognizable - anticipatory attacks, interventions in foreign internal/civil wars, and reprisals.
Rodin has now provided evidence that progress in reducing wars can’t be made either by exclusively depending on the concept of ‘national defense’, nor within a world where national governments retain absolute sovereignty. A future he outlines as effective, practical, and doable involves individual nations surrendering a minimal slice of their sovereignty, over jus ad bellum and jus in bello. He fully recognizes the flaws of (1) the UN, (2) other international institutions in which power is shared, and (3) the web of treaties, all of which emit, in one fashion or another, regulations and judgements (always with limited impact) about the military behavior of nations. Rodin doesn’t fool himself into thinking that these institutions are impartial but notes that UN-authorized wars already have far more legitimacy, world-wide, than other wars.
Rodin posits that only in a model in which nations explicitly surrender a limited though crucial slice of their sovereignty to a ‘universal punisher’ will we advance in creating legitimate international law of war. He comments that, in an broad range of societal institutions, “justice is often defined in opposition to the partisan,” and that it is, “always (my italics, CS) unjust for a participant in a dispute to administer or determine justice.” (p. 176) Otherwise, authority will always be deeply doubted, and considered illegitimate, often for decades or centuries. Punishment will smell of revenge. (In reference to how most cultures perceive the relationship between justice and impartiality, Rodin carves out one special case, wherein many cultures recognize an authority that parents have over children - although the parents are clearly interested parties in intra-familiar disputes, they retain legitimate authority to enforce punishments. Rodin comments that, in the present poorly-organized arrangement of international law, certain nations, with the power to exercise hegemony over others, often arrogate this power to themselves.)
Rodin would not walk blindly into universal government. He recognizes the dangers, and cites Kant’s objections. Yet, he points to the further maturing of international bodies, such at the World Court or the UN, as the functional route that can best lead to reduction of the chaotic horrors of war. He considers this in one way to be a simple extension of Hobbesian contract theory. Just as Hobbes conceives that individuals have surrendered liberty (to be aggressive) to the sovereign so that the sovereign will impose order amongst contending individuals, Rodin proposes that nations must surrender limited liberties, or rights, to an impartial authority. He considers this to be a ‘law enforcement’ model of judging and managing international conflict. He does not expect the world to be able to construct this model quickly, but concludes with pointing out that if we are going to continue to pursue a moral course, internationally, we must openly recognize that as we fight, we must not assume we are right, or just.
April 17, 2017
Read the First half of the book on self defense.
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