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Existential Ethics: a New Start for Just War Theory? Cian O’Driscoll [email protected]

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Existential Ethics: a New Start for Just War Theory? Cian O’Driscoll Cian.Odriscoll@Anu.Edu.Au Existential Ethics: A New Start for Just War Theory? Cian O’Driscoll [email protected] Introduction There is no shortage of issues for the coming generation of just war theorists to fret about. From the spectre of killer robots to the profusion of drones and the weaponization of cyber-space, not to mention the appearance of cyborg warriors on the battlefields of the near future, sci-fi nightmares abound.1 These developments certainly demand attention. I want to submit here, however, that there is another—arguably more profound, if also more mundane—challenge on the horizon for just war theorists. The challenge I am referring to bears on the purpose of just war theory as a form of practical ethics. Contemporary just war theory risks losing contact with the very practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. Where once it was inter-twined with the martial codes of the fighting classes, there is little sign of this affinity today. Contemporary just war theory appears to be drifting toward an esoteric scholarly discourse propagated by philosophers, lawyers, and ethicists, with little regard for the boots-on-the-ground actualities of warfare. Absent is any concern for what John Keegan famously called ‘the face of battle’; in its place, intramural debates between so-called revisionists, Walzerians, and traditionalists.2 The worry therefore arises that just war theory is becoming a disconnected activity, one set apart from the experience of the very people whose lives it wagers. If this drift is not arrested, it will become all too easy for just war theorists to lose sight of what war actually entails, most notably, the violence it involves and the suffering it wreaks.3 More consequentially, it will make it even more difficult than it already is to persuade soldiers to engage in any serious way with the claims of just war theory. This, then, is the challenge I want to address in this essay. I will argue that it is disclosive of the need for a new starting-point for just war theorising—one that, informed by existentialist thought, is rooted, not in abstract universalisms, but in concrete human realities. 1 For an excellent survey of these issues: Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert (eds.), The Future of Just War: New Critical Essays (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2014). 2 John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme (London: Pimlico, 2004). 3 Michael Walzer is alert to this danger. Today’s just war scholarship, he has complained, is too often more focused on the ‘theory’ rather than the ‘war’ in ‘just war theory.’ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations—5th Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 335-46. What I mean by this will hopefully become clearer as the discussion proceeds. It will be divided into three main parts. Section One will examine how contemporary just war theory has become divorced from the practice it is designed to govern, warfare. Reflecting on the three modes of just war theorising that dominate the field today—the historical approach associated with James Turner Johnson; Michael Walzer’s efforts to re- capture the just war for political theory; and the revisionist school of thought advanced by Jeff McMahan and Cecile Fabre, among others—it will contend that just war theory can be characterised as a discourse detached from the lived experience of violent armed conflict. Building on the insight that there is much to be gained by relating how we think about the ethics of war to what we know about the experience of war, Section Two will survey the resources at our disposal to ground just war theory in the muddy, bloody realities of war. It will focus in particular on three bodies of thought that emphasise the situated character of knowledge: recent Critical Security Studies scholarship on vernacular discourses, feminist standpoint theory, and existentialism. This will open up a series of possible starting-points for thinking about what a more grounded just war theory might look like. Section Three will consider the third of these possibilities, existentialism, in more detail. It will do so by envisioning what a just war theory that starts, not with Saint Augustine, but with his fellow-Algerian, Albert Camus, would look like.4 Such an approach, I will argue, would bring to the fore the subjective, inward dimension of just war theorising that mainline accounts have foreclosed. This has the potential, the concluding remarks will suggest, to re-centre just war thinking as a ‘lived’ theory, and to thereby re-connect it to the experience of war.5 Recent reportage from war-zones indicates that this is badly needed.6 4 Albert Camus’ relationship with existentialism is vexed. Many people, including Camus himself, have argued that he should not be classified as an existentialist thinker. I will have more to say about this later. It will suffice for now, I hope, to indicate that I intend to treat him as part of what we might call the broad cultural movement of existentialism. 5 On the idea of ‘lived’ theory: Walter Kaufmann, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Kaufman (ed.), Existentialism: From Sartre to Dostoevsky (London: Plume, 1975), p. 51. On the idea of ‘connecting’ just war theory: Cian O’Driscoll et al, ‘How and Why to do Just War Theory’, Contemporary Political Theory XX: X (Firstview): XX-XXXX. 6 Foremost in my thoughts is the recently published Brereton Report on the conduct of the Australian Defence Forces in Afghanistan from 2005-2013. The Report exposes a litany of wrongdoing by Australian personnel, including 23 incidents in which non-combatants or persons hors-de-combat were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian service personnel. Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, Report of Inquiry: Questions of Unlawful Conduct concerning the Special Operations Task Group in Afghanistan (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2020). Available at: https://afghanistaninquiry.defence.gov.au. Accessed: 21 December, 2020. 2 1. Just War Theory Today ‘The rules of engagement harked back to my college classes on Saint Augustine and “just war” theory. I couldn’t control the justice of the declaration of war, but I could control the justice of its conduct within my tiny sphere of influence.’7 So wrote Nathaniel Fick, an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, in his memoir account of the 2003 Iraq war. Fick’s readiness to engage just war theory may be attributed to the privilege of his Ivy League education and officer status. A more representative example, perhaps, is Tim O’Brien, whose memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, interrogates the idea of just war from the perspective of an infantry conscript in the Vietnam War.8 A key moment in the text arises when O’Brien’s closest friend in the military, Erik, confides his misgivings about the justness of the war to their company drill sergeant—who duly laughs at him and disparages him as a ‘pansy’ and a ‘coward’.9 Thereafter, O’Brien writes, he and Erik kept their own counsel. Just war theory was evidently not a suitable topic of discussion for young soldiers. These vignettes are noteworthy because they are two of the very few first- hand accounts of war by soldiers to directly reference just war theory.10 While most war memoirs are likely to include a general endorsement of restraint in war, as well as plenty of discussion about what it means to be a good soldier, they seldom acknowledge, let alone engage, just war theory. Simply put, it is not a part of their standard repertoire. This disinterest is mutual. Just as soldiers rarely talk about just war theory in their memoirs, so just war theorists seldom engage soldiers in any systematic fashion in their writings. A few honourable exceptions notwithstanding, just war theorists have paid remarkably little attention to what military personnel have written about the experience of war.11 This oversight is not unique to one or other rival school of just war theorising, but instead is common across them. 7 Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (London: Phoenix, 2007), p. 182. 8 Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone (London: Fourth Estate, 2015), p. 53, 97-8. 9 O’Brien, If I Die, p. 43-4. 10 This claim is based on a survey reading of approximately sixty war memoirs from a variety of conflicts. 11 This observation has also been made by: Annika Bergman Rosamond and Annica Kronsell, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Individual Ethical Reflection—The Embodied Experiences of Swedish Veterans’, Critical Military Studies (Firstview). Exceptions include: Marcus Schulzke, Pursuing Moral Warfare: Ethics in American, British, and Israeli Counterinsurgency (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019); Shannon French, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Pauline Shanks Kaurin, On Obedience (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020); and Peter Lee, Reaper Force: Inside Britain’s Drone Wars (London: John Blake, 2018). Also: Valerie Morkevicius, ‘Looking Inward Together: Just War Thinking and Our Shared Moral Emotions’, Ethics & International Affairs 31:4 (2017): 441-51. 3 Discovery I have already alluded in the introduction to the internecine debates in which today’s just war theorists are embroiled. These debates hinge on the relative merits of the three rival approaches to just war theorising that dominate the field today. The first approach, usually labelled the historical approach, supposes that thinking ethically about war necessarily involves thinking historically about ethics.
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