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Note: I'll be borrowing heavily from the framework illustrated in Post ID 20200121.
I've been thinking a fair amount about warfare lately.
Likely, it is due to the numerous run-ins I've had with anti-war sentiment. The typical drivel spewed forth by foreign, anti-American Neo-Marxists abroad. Naive 'concern' for fellow man with extremely questionable motive from people at home. Perhaps worse still, some louse with a cowardice so strong it must be masked with logical virtue and used to dispirit and disparage those brave enough to enlist in the armed forces. The subject is extremely relevant, given the heightened tensions taking place in the South Chinese Sea. By all indications the 2020s could prove to be a decade characterized by yet another war, with the US as one of the primary combatants. Is it something about the culture that makes us predisposed to fighting? Maybe. The answer here is uncertain simply because there does appear to be a clear divide between your so-called 'war hawks' and 'doves, with both camps possessing a massive constituency. Intuitively, war hawks are those that are for war; doves are those that are against.
Where do I stand on this? I've been disparagingly accused of being a war hawk before. Surprise, surprise.
People that are labeled as war hawks are made out to be hyper-aggressive, war-mongering brutes that favor violence and suffering over peace and stability. In the heat of polemics, this makes for great rhetoric and showmanship but once the smoke and sparks settle, it becomes painfully obvious that no reasonable, good person favors violence over peace. In actuality, it is a matter of difference in ideology and morals. To be perfectly honest, the dove's disposition, one of pacifism, doesn't make much sense to me at all. I don't see any alternative but to fight. Is war a terrible phenomenon? Yes of course, but in certain circumstances it can be entirely just and even necessary. And so the question reveals itself: can war be a moral good? We shall determine this by examining several pacifist arguments.
------- Argument 01: The taking of human life is absolutely evil -------
There is the pacifist standpoint that the killing of any and all human life, no matter the context, is an absolutely evil act. This standpoint is often touted as a moral axiom, a moral intuition if you will. If it were presented as a proof or from some source of authority, it could be argued with. The very proposition itself is untrue when examining the proof, for we can easily imagine a case where taking a human life is justified, such is the case with protection of those dearest to us or self-defense. Furthermore, we can see throughout history and literature that the attitude of mankind is that killing can be just. It is an attitude shared by the common man, as exemplified by the landmark court case Brown v. United States (1921) and also by the wisest of men, such as Aristotle or Cicero. To hold that the assertion remains true despite the attitude shared among the general population and the best among us is to suggest that one is more credible or perhaps even wiser than they. I highly doubt that is the case, especially given the limited, impoverished quality of existence most of us live through our daily lives. On what authority does the person who has likely never engaged in combat have to speak generalizations on the nature of violence?
With no support from logical proof or authority, there remains intuition. It is likely that this is not a proper moral intuition, but rather an opinion that is fueled by some sort of emotion for, as demonstrated, it is not an intuition shared by all good men. The person that claims and holds as self-evident truth that any and all taking of human life is evil is a person that is suggesting that the totality of mankind, including their best and their brightest, are moral idiots. In addition, this suggestion may be worsened by an overly simplistic and progressive worldview. This worldview carries with it the intuition that history is strictly monotonically increasing and linear, that each successive generation is improving upon the last. While this may hold generally true for the realm of technology, you cannot infer the same trend for every other facet of human civilization. It may very well be the case that, although humanity is improving in certain aspects, it is in decline in others (of which I think virtue is one of them). To someone that is willing to so readily disregard hard-learned wisdom from the past, I cannot argue. The arrogance and lack of historical awareness is far too great, and there is no arguing over that chasm.
------- Argument 02: Helping is good, harming is bad -------
The above notion, that of any and all taking of human life is evil, seems to be predicated upon the ostensible intuition that helping is good, harming is bad. We ought to examine if adopting this intuition for true leads via reasoning to the conclusion that any and all taking of human life is evil.
First, it is noteworthy that in order to 'help', one must select a target to assist. This may be a single person or a collection of persons to direct one's efforts towards helping. One simply cannot do 'help' without some kind of direction and purpose. As such, while you may do some good towards a subset of men, you're necessarily not doing good towards others. There is an exclusionary element towards doing good, if one is speaking of doing true, constructive, non-platitudinal good. Those that are of a more naive persuasion need not continue any further if they haven't the stomach for accepting this premise. Those of you that are taking a more serious stance of the matter and cite the sciences as a contradiction to this assertion, something like "Does not the invention of say, the polio vaccine benefit humanity as a whole?", are still incorrect; while the scientist that develops the polio vaccine is benefiting humanity in a more abstract, future sense, they are still only helping a subset of men everywhere: that is, those that would contract polio. Meanwhile, they are not serving those who might contract, say, HIV. The practical exclusionary principle still applies.
To help, to do good, is also subject to further constraints beyond the exclusionary principle. You ought to help those who you have personally promised to help and not those that you haven't. You ought to help your family over those who aren't. You ought to help your fellow countrymen over those belonging to a foreign power. Granted, these constraints are much more subjective and malleable in nature, but they are further constraints nonetheless that everyone possesses and necessarily operates within.
In so many words, it is highly conceivable that while helping one subset of humanity, another subset suffers and perhaps dies. To me this proposition seems painfully obvious, but one would be surprised at the number of those who hold in their strongest of convictions that it is possible to do good onto everyone, at all times, ad infinitum.
The more interesting scenario that arises are the cases in which, in order to help one person, one must actively harm another. This occurs most apparently in cases of physical violence in which an innocent bystander falls under attack by an aggressor. The correct moral intuition to be had here is to help the innocent bystander by incapacitating the aggressor. Incapacitation may be achieved by either non-lethal means, or by lethal means. Of course, if options for non-lethal means are available and are equally effective in subduing the aggressor as well as protecting the innocent, it ought to be employed. However, there are instances in which lethal means are the only option, in which case exercise of them would be considered lawful as they protect the safety of the innocent while reducing the influence of the evil. Moreover, there is a psychological effect exerted on society when lethality is exercised on wrongdoers: it highlights the severity of moral transgressions. In the example of murder, the price of taking a life if your life. This is part of the utility in the effectiveness of capital punishment; it serves not only as punishment but as a deterrence through reminder and fear of consequence.
At long last, we can now move on from scenarios that occur between individuals to scenarios that occur between nations. In the case of the individual aggressors, the taking of life can be justified to prevent harm towards another. Alternatively, the aggressor can be subdued by non-lethal means and subject to lifetime imprisonment in the most severe of cases. Now, when it comes to aggression on the part of nations, there are non-violent solutions to address it: economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure via international organizations, deterrence through occupation...there are several methods at disposal. However, just like in our treatment of the individual case, there are bound to be scenarios where war is an inevitable, where harm must be done in order to protect the safety of others. Multitudes of assets and men must be mobilized between the warring nations and the cost of human life must necessarily be incurred. I say necessarily here, for, once war is declared, there are no non-lethal means available to subdue the enemy nation, nor are there are options of lifetime imprisonment sentences for nations that have killed the men of another.
To return to the original point of this particular argument, we can now clearly see that, in order to help, to do good, one must sometimes inflict harm and perhaps kill. This principle can be applied from an individual level to that of nations.
------- Argument 03: The material and the transcendent -------
Thinking about the position a little more deeply, it also seems to me that the notion that war is absolutely evil is born from a materialist ethic. What I mean by this is essentially the pleasure principle: pain and death is to be avoided, pleasure is to be encouraged and propagated. Thus, to inflict death and pain is the highest evil one can achieve and from this premise lies the modernist take on ethics. I disagree with this notion entirely, as there are things worse than inflicting pain on people, such as the evil of elevating a false religion above a higher. This had been especially made clear with the rise of Nazi racial pantheism or Communist atheism over Christianity during the 20th century.
At first glance, this appears as bold rhetoric but let me assure you that it's not. Taking the above example in mind, war is simultaneously an awful and ennobling phenomenon. On one hand you have man killing man; considering that every man dies and that a lot of those deaths are gruesome, war seems to be a nasty mechanism that ensures that men die in the most horrific manner possible. However, and this is something one might label as beautiful and tragic at the very same time, for only in war do you have man truly at his most unselfish, fighting to protect something immaterial and transcendent; whether that be pride of country, race, religion, family, etc. With each of the combatants assuredly thinking themselves and their country to be in the right, they strike each other down. Of course, one of them has to be right and the other wrong; in our specific example the virtues of liberal democracy came to triumph over race-based or class-based authoritarianism. In a sense, Christian values proved themselves to be truer than any precepts Nazism or Communism had to offer, for in the end they emerged victorious while the others did not.
What I find the most ironic is that it is by these values that pacifists can even exist and make a theoretically great, if not outright practically infeasible suggestion: since war is so evil, we ought to abolish war. Let's work that one out quickly: suppose we have a society in which a minority subset of the population is pacifist. I maintain that this society has to necessarily be liberal democratic in nature--predicated among the Christian notion that every man is equal, has the capacity of free will, and is endowed with inalienable natural rights--for pacifism is only tolerated in liberal democratic societies. In order for the society to abolish war, that minority has to turn into the majority; else nothing is achieved. The moment that a society turns into a pacifist one and abolishes war, they are prone to be overrun by its authoritarian neighbor. Hence it seems obvious to me that the path towards the abolition of war is the quickest route to see a wholesale reduction of pacifism in the world.
------- Argument 04: Wars do much more harm than good -------
It is a fact that war is a miserable enterprise. Taking into proper consideration its great cost to human life and material, any reasonable person ought to agree that warfare is horrific. The pacifist therefore takes the position that wars are not worth their outcome, that in short they actualize more harm than their intended good. The problem with this argument is that it retrospectively examines the real consequences of instantiated action and compares it to hypothetical or imagined consequences. It suggests that, had the Ottomans not combat the Byzantines (1453 AD), the English Parliamentarians the Royalists (1642 AD), or the Americans the Iraqis (2003 AD), the course of history would've played out to some better future than our current, existing present. While the statement itself is not necessarily fallacious--as it is probable that a world in which Constantinople never fell to Mehmed II, the English monarchy was successfully defended, or Saddam Hussein remained in power could indeed be a better world--there are no conceivable means by which to prove this claim. It now becomes patently obvious that this claim made by pacifists is no fact but nothing more than a historical opinion, and is often used as a rhetorical strategy to cast a dim light on the current reality via comparison to an imaginary, idealized, and unrealized one.
There is also a similar claim, that war is ultimately useless because it doesn't effect the cure to the numerous ills of the world. Following a dialectical model of history, the new guard defeats the old guard, remains in power, only to eventually become the old guard soon overthrown by another new faction. The process repeats ad infinitum, with no meaningful change on a societal level. Poor people still remain poor, sickness and death still remain as constant reminders of our fragile mortality, and politicians remain as terribly useless and corrupt as ever. This position is absurdly reductionist as it is patently obvious from the historical data that wars do in fact effect meaningful change. One could easily turn to the examples of the American civil war of 1861 or the liberation of Europe at the end of WWII and see that these conflicts were largely conflicts of ideologies; the resolution of which exerted a tremendous shaping force on society in the following years soon after. I will grant that there does seem to be an inherent circularity to this process. We disagree and wage war, we find some resolution and make peace, we disagree over something else yet again and thus wage war yet again, etc. However, this circular process is much more akin to a spiral; indeed there is a circular component to it all, but the process being so complex in its very nature demands the consideration of another dimension that appears to me to be moving forward.
To those that make the claim that war is ultimately useless because it doesn't solve anything, I think half of their anxiety rises from the sort of naive expectation in the perfectibility of mankind. War is not suited to be a panacea to everything wrong with the world. There will still be poverty, sickness/death, corruption, and crime. These are qualities and realities intrinsic to mankind and his experience; they are not directly amenable to the outcomes of war. I'd rather not end on a miserable point here, by underscoring an obviously wretched nature, so to those who maintain that war never achieves half of it's purported good I offer the following counterpoint: perhaps it never achieves half of its purported evil as well?
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