Killing in War: A Reply to Walzer

Michael Walzer suggests that our common beliefs about individual responsibility and liability become largely irrelevant in the conduct of war. In conditions of war, everything is changed. Political realists have claimed that war eliminates morality; Walzer claims that war collectivizes it. I believe that conditions of war change nothing at all; they simply make it more difficult to ascertain relevant facts. This is not to say that the principles and laws that do or should govern the activity of war are identical to those governing relations among individuals. Just as domestic law cannot simply restate the principles of individual morality, because the declaration and enforcement of laws have effects that must be taken into account in the formulation of the law, so too the principles, conventions, and laws of war cannot simply restate the principles of individual or international morality. The rules of war have to accommodate our epistemic limitations and to be formulated with a regard for the ways in which their announcement is likely to affect people’s behavior. But they should otherwise reflect as closely as possible the same principles of justice and liability that govern conduct outside of war. Walzer offers various challenges to the elements of this individualist approach to war. He suggests, for example, that this position is really only a closet version of collectivism. When I claim that, during the Gulf War, Iraqi units composed of conscripts ought to have been treated differently from the Republican Guard, Walzer contends that I am thereby accepting the erasure of individual moral identity, though only at the divisional level, whereas the traditional view accepts the collectivization of moral identity at the less arbitrary level of the military as a whole. I do not, however, accept collectivization at any level. No Iraqi soldier’s moral status or liability was determined by his membership in the Republican Guard or by his being a conscript. The difference in treatment required by my position is instead grounded in the necessity of acting on the basis of reasonable presumptions. Just as I may reasonably presume that the person pointing a gun in my direction and shouting threats is a potential murderer, even if he is in fact an actor so deeply absorbed in rehearsing his role as a murderer that he has failed to notice my presence, so an American soldier in the Gulf War was entitled to presume that any member of the Republican Guard was culpably defending a wrongful aggression, even if he had in fact been coerced to join the Guard by his family and was privately resolved to fire over the heads of American soldiers, and so posed no threat at all. What should we say when, as in these cases, a reasonable presumption turns out to be mistaken? I think it is reasonable to accept an objective account of justification and therefore to conclude that I act wrongly, though perhaps with a fully exculpating excuse, if I kill the actor whom I reasonably believe to be a murderer. We should also conclude that if a just combatant uses force against unjust combatants that would be proportionate if they Philosophia (2006) 34:47–51 DOI 10.1007/s11406-006-9009-9