Abstract
Just wars are supposed to be proportional responses to aggression: the costs of war must not greatly exceed the benefits. This proportionality principle raises a corresponding ‘interpretation problem’: what are the costs and benefits of war, how are they to be determined, and a ‘measurement problem’: how are costs and benefits to be balanced? And it raises a problem about scope: how far into the future do the states of affairs to be measured stretch? It is argued here that weapons innovation always introduces costs, and that these costs cannot be determined in advance of going to war. Three examples, the atomic bomb, the AK-47 and the ancient Greek catapult, are given as examples. It is therefore argued that the proportionality principle is inapplicable prospectively. Some replies to the argument are discussed and rejected. Some more general defences of the proportionality principle are considered and also rejected. Finally, the significance of the argument for Just War Theory as a whole is discussed.
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Notes
Realism is a position in international relations that (roughly) sees relations between states as unconstrained by any binding laws or moral principle; self-interest rules.
Orend and Fotion are two good recent accounts, while Walzer and Ramsey are classics. Hurka and McMahan and KcKim focus on proportionality and give good sensible analyses. As a theory, JWT has something in common with theories in the natural and social sciences in that it can provide descriptions, and perhaps explanations, for instance of given wars as just or unjust. But it must also be normative insofar as it codifies principles that must be satisfied before a war can be just in the moral sense.
Recently the idea of ‘justice after the war’ or jus post bellum, has come into prominence—Orend has two chapters on the topic. What I shall have to say about proportionality does stretch into the aftermath of war, though I do not think falls directly under jus post bellum considerations.
I will not give a complete list of these conditions here. Orend list is as good as any, in fact his book is mostly a clarification and commentary on these. For an alternative, more traditional (even canonical) formulation, see [19, pp. 98–102].
And this is made even more difficult for the Catholic Bishops who say, in common with the received interpretation, “…proportionality means that the damage to be inflicted and the costs incurred by war must be proportionate to the good expected…” but then add “Nor should the damage be limited to the temporal order without regard to a spiritual dimension in terms of ‘damage’, ‘cost’, etc.….” [19, p. 101].
Which in fairness, I believe, is what Orend, Fotion and other textbook authors do. Walzer himself engages in considerable hand-wringing over P but clearly does not believe that the matters he considers in that regard should lead us to give up JWT. Moreover, as Hurka points out, P can be formulated in such a way as to incorporate other ad bellum conditions about consequences, such as likelihood of success and last resort [9, p. 37].
Even this may seem not specific enough. We could however single out work that has been inspired and influenced by Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, works such as Orend and Fotion mentioned here and the many papers that have appeared in the literature since the book was published in 1977.
See James Johnston’s exposition of Ramsey’s position [10]. Johnston substantiates the claim that Ramsey is responsible for the recovery of the idea of JWT in recent times.
Orend prefaces this passage with a comment that ad bellum proportionality is codified in the third Hague Convention on war. This reference is wrong, as Orend conceded to me in private correspondence, saying that he meant the second Hague Convention. On my reading, the early (1899, 1907) Hague Conventions say nothing about ad bellum proportionality, though they have a lot to say about the in bello variety.
This distinction has been much discussed in the literature on cause. To take a simple and familiar example that is supposed to capture the difference, striking the match is the cause of its igniting while the presence of oxygen is a (mere) causal condition. This approach to the costs to be included in P is due to [16, pp. 510–511]. In view of the passage just quoted, Hurka appears to disagree.
One difficulty here is that costs seem to involve matters of degree, limits, etc., in ways in which benefits do not. If part of the cost of war is the actual number of people killed and if that number must not be too big or bigger than a given number, then this will be hard to guarantee, to say the least.
Hiram Maxim the maker of the first ‘true’ machine gun would have also provided a good example, though his original work did not take place during wartime. His was the first true machine gun because it utilised the recoil from the chambered round to load the next round and reset the firing pin, one of the two main ways an automatic weapons works—the other is gas actuation, the principle used by Kalashnikov. The Maxim gun was sold to many different armies, it was licensed for manufacture in several different countries and it was widely copied. It evolved into the Vickers machine gun which was used up to the end of World War 2. Maxim filed his first patent in 1883, so the point remains that his gun was used in wars that he could not have foreseen.
To point out that more civilians were killed in the bombing of Tokyo neither puts these acts into some kind of perspective—they were done with a single weapon—nor serves to justify them. The bombing of Tokyo was also a terrible crime.
To the objection that nuclear weapons actually kept the peace during the Cold War and that the Soviets would have overrun Europe with conventional forces, it can be said that now this old excuse for building nuclear forces has been shown to be a myth. The evidence now available after the fall of the Soviet Union shows that its conventional and nuclear forces in Europe were intended for defensive not offensive operations.
Or some justificationary principle equivalent to P. I say this because P is strictly a condition of JWT and weapons can be used in engagements below the level of wars. But for such uses to be acceptable they must be justified by compensating benefits.
I don’t know if these were numerically the same cruise missiles that were in place during the Cold War, fitted with non-nuclear warheads, but I do know that they did not need to be. New missiles could have been made from the designs worked out in the Cold War.
In a provocatively titled book, We All Lost the Cold War [14], Lebow and Stein argue that the US policy of nuclear deterrence prolonged the Cold War and made the relations between the superpowers far more dangerous that it needed to be.
Gunpowder was not invented in Europe, but the first effective gunpowder weapons were European. The reason, one might suppose, is that the European states were aggressive and hegemonic. For an account of the Gunpowder Revolution, see [1].
Here I seem to be agreeing with Fotion who, having noted what he calls ‘looseness’ in JWT conditions like P, nevertheless argues that the theory is applicable because it gets it right sometimes, for instance with respect to WW2 and the Korean War [7, p. 147], namely wars in the past. I think we need more time to make judgements about these conflicts. For a refutation of the idea that the Korean War was just, see [8].
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I am most grateful to this journal's referees, whose comments have helped me to improve this paper considerably.
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Forge, J. Proportionality, Just War Theory and Weapons Innovation. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 25–38 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9088-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9088-z