Bringing the Myth to Life: Threeprima Facie Optional Wars
Bringing the myth to life: Threeprima facie optional wars
Ben Davies – Unfinished draft, please do not cite without permission
Can wars be morally optional? That is, are there wars that states[1] are permitted, but not obligated, to fight? In ‘The Myth of the Optional War’, Kieran Oberman argues that – at least under “real-world conditions” – there is no such thing as an optional war.[2]Let us say that a war is optional when it is permissible, but not obligatory. Oberman’ssubstantive claim, then, is that all permissible wars are obligatory.
His case, while complex, can be roughly summarised with the following claim: since wars take a great deal to justify, any value (V) that justifies a war which will come with some particular level of costs (C) must be so significant that it will be non-optional to go towar. Given the typical costs associated with war, if V really does make war permissible in the face of C, V must be something of overwhelming importance. As such, we cannot then appeal to C to explain why we are not obligated to go to war. For we have already said that V is sufficiently important to override C.
One might think, for instance, that inter-state war is only justified in cases of extreme violation by one state of their fundamental obligations either to other states (e.g. by invasion) or to their own people (e.g. by gross abuse of human rights).[3]What is at stake in these cases is either the sovereignty of the defending state, or some people’s basic human rights (or both). These values are sufficiently serious to justify war, at least given some particular level of cost; in this case, the importance of V outweighs C, rendering it not merely permissible, but also obligatory. It might be that there are cases where even these values do not justify war. Perhaps, for instance, the death toll will simply be too high. But these latter cases must be such that if the costsoverride the value of national self-defence, or humanitarian intervention, those costs must be so weighty as to render war impermissible. In such cases, C outweighs V. But as well as rendering war non-obligatory, this also renders it impermissible.
Oberman considers two kinds of case that have been offered to support the idea of an optional war, applying the above reasoning to each in various ways. The first case is a war of humanitarian intervention, where the prospective costs to citizens (qua taxpayers and soldiers) is taken to potentially render war non-obligatory, even while the humanitarian ground renders it permissible.[4] The second case is a war of self-defence, where the right of a state to defend itself is taken to imply an equivalent right to refuse to defend itself. Since defence is thus optional, so too are defensive wars.[5]
In the humanitarian case, Oberman says, states may not impose costs in the name of humanitarian assistance on their citizens that those citizens do not have an individual humanitarian obligation to bear.[6] In the case of self-defence, Oberman argues that if a state is justified in waging a defensive war to uphold either its own citizens’ rights, or a more general international norm of non-aggression, it is obligated to do so. The first justification, defending citizens’ basic rights, is a “core state function”.[7] Similarly, a global norm of non-aggression is justified by a more general protection of rights. Again, if states are permitted to do something to protect such an important value, they must.[8]
To summarise the message of this article, I agree with Oberman that the case for optional war has not been convincing so far. I will not, therefore, aim to offer a defence of this traditional case. However, I suggest that his claim that this renders optional wars a “myth” is unconvincing; there are alternative arguments for optional wars, even if we grant much of what Oberman argues.
My response focuses on the first kind of case, of humanitarian intervention. It may be that parallel arguments can be constructed with respect to self-defence; but their most obvious variations are to be found in the realm of humanitarian assistance.I agree with Oberman to a significant degree that mostwars of humanitarian intervention are non-optional; hence, I argue only for alimiteddefence of optionality. Nonetheless, there are threeplausible casesin which humanitarian war may be optional. While none of these cases is conclusive, I aim to show that Oberman must make considerable further assumptions or arguments in order to sustain his claim that the optional war is a myth. None of these assumptions is outlandish, but all are contestable.
- The Cost Principle
Why think that a war that is justified on humanitarian grounds, and hence permissible, might be non-obligatory? The standard story, says Oberman, is that such a war might be excessively costly to civilians, both in terms of taxpayer resources, and the more specific cost of combatant death and injury. States are thereby permitted to avoid war by citing the cost to their own civilians.[9]
Oberman responds to this case by invoking what he calls the Cost Principle. The Cost Principle is that “those in power should not force people to render humanitarian assistance to those in dire need if the costs exceed that which people have a humanitarian obligation to bear”. We can think of the Cost Principle as positing two conceptually separate thresholds (though their conceptual separateness does not preclude their actual overlap). The first threshold is that above which individual citizens do not have humanitarian obligations. That there is such a thresholdis a plausible assumption for two reasons. First, it is simply a necessary assumption of the case for optional humanitarian wars: if there are no limits to the costs citizens ought to bear in the name of humanitarian ends, then wars cannot be rendered non-obligatory by appeal to the cost borne by citizens. Second, Oberman suggests that it is independently plausible that individuals have a right to have a “certain space left to their own interests”.[10] We may all have (fairly demanding) obligations to those who are worse off than we are. But those obligations are not absolute. We have the right to pursue projects of our own, to engage in partiality towards those we love, and to have a break from moral demands.[11]
The second threshold of cost is that above which states cannot permissibly impose burdens on us. Just as we cannot be expected by generic morality to give up everything, we also cannot tolerate a state that coercively forces us to give up everything.
Finally, Oberman establishes formally that these thresholds are at the same point. When I say that this is a ‘formal’ argument, I mean simply that he does not specify any particular content of either threshold, such as 80% of income, or what is necessary to complete certain kinds of projects. The claim is simply that wherever the personal limit lies, so too does the coercive limit. It is particularly important, therefore, to note that this is not a generalclaim about the rights of states to impose costs on us that we otherwise have no obligation to bear. I have no obligation – let’s assume – to donate money to English National Opera. But it might nonetheless be permissible for the state to coercively extract tax money from me, some of which goes towards ENO. What justifies the difference is that ENO is not sufficiently important for me to have a moral obligation to donate, but that the relevant costs extracted are sufficiently low that they do not impinge on my space of private interests.[12]
- The VoluntaryWar
Oberman considers one possible response to this idea, which is the concept of a privately funded humanitarian war. In this case, the Cost Principle is not violated because no costs are imposed on citizens, even though they are going beyond their humanitarian obligations: we may assume that the financial costs are all privately raised, and troops all volunteers, with the government playing a merely co-ordinating role. This might seem to be an optional war because although the costs are not obligatory (being higher than those required by the humanitarian situation) they are not imposed.
Oberman rejects this as an optional case, however, because he suggests that in such a case the government could not appeal to the cost to citizens to explain why the war was non-obligatory.[13] After all, these costs are all borne voluntarily. If the humanitarian situation is serious enough to justify going to war, and the imposition of costs was the only barrier, how can it be that (once the costs are met) the war is not obligatory?
But this, at the very least, raises a puzzle about the obligations of the state. According to Oberman, as soon as the money (and troops) are secured voluntarily, the state is obligated to coordinate the war so long as the humanitarian goal is not outweighed by any additional costs (e.g. foreseeable casualties among the innocent domestic population of the state in which the rights violations are occurring). Now, clearly the war was optional from at least one perspective: that of the citizens who voluntarily raise the money and volunteer to fight. By definition, this is a war whose costs go beyond humanitarian obligation. So although the relevant citizens are willing to fund and fight this war, it is morally optional whether they do so. Their acts are, it seems, supererogatory.
But I suggest, what I hope will be uncontroversial, that the state hasno obligation to co-ordinate all supererogatory acts for which its citizens might be willing to bear costs. It cannot be, then, that the state is obligated to co-ordinate a war simply because its citizens have voluntarily funded it. So the claim that the state is obligated to wage war must derive from the importance of the humanitarian goal. Oberman might point to an additional weighty obstacle against war, which is the sovereignty of the rights-violating state. If war is justified, the problem must be sufficiently bad to overrule the (considerable) importance of not violating sovereignty.
Call the time at which citizens have voluntarily pulled together sufficientresources, and amassed sufficient numbers of (trained) volunteer soldiers to wage war, t. What is the status of the state’s obligations with regard to such a war prior to t? Remember that according to Oberman, the only obstacles to war being obligatory in such a case are the sovereignty of the rights-violating state, and the rights of citizens not to have excessive costs imposed on them.
In this case, by stipulation, the humanitarian situation is sufficiently serious to override the first concern. A state that egregiously violates its citizens’ rights loses its absolute right against violations of its sovereignty. The only moral obstacle to war, then, is that the costs would have to be imposed on citizens. This is overridden in the case where citizens volunteer those costs. At t, then, the state is obligated to go to war if it is permitted to do so.
What should state actors do prior to there being sufficient volunteers? According to Oberman’s argument, it seems the answer must be that they should solicit voluntary recruits, and financial backers, for a war. We have already said that there is no sufficient sovereignty objection, and while the cost-imposition objection applies to going to war until enough volunteers exist, it is not an undue imposition of costs to try to persuade people to go to war. It seems, then, that Oberman should also argue that states have a pre-t obligation to try to solicit voluntary funds and troops.
However, I suggest, the state is not obligated, prior to t, to persuadepeople that they ought to voluntarily contribute to a war. Even though the moral good is significant, it is not an obligatory job of the state to persuade people to perform supererogatory acts, even when the good realised is significant. On the other hand, it is not at all obvious that it would be impermissible of the state to, say, use some funds to try to persuade people to support a just war effort. Only if we take the idea of the neutral state to an extreme will this be ruled out; but then so will a great many other things that modern states do.
I grant that this is not a case where we can straightforwardly say that war is optional for the state. We can accept, at least for the sake of argument, that it is not optional after t. It is optional for non-state actors at all times. But we can conclude thatestablishing the conditions for a permissible (and obligatory) waris an act that is itself optional. Can we not say that, at this stage, war remains ‘an option’ for the state? The state can either choose to go down the route that will likely lead to war (drumming up support to a stage where war would no longer be optional for the state), or it can decide not to do so. Either option seems permissible. So, albeit in a somewhat weak sense, this war seems optional for the state.
This case can be challenged on two grounds. First, we might doubt my move from the claim that ‘setting up the conditions for war’ is optional, to the claim that ‘war is optional, at least at this preliminary stage’. Oberman may simply stick to his guns and insist that war is impermissible before t (though soliciting support for a voluntary war is not), and obligatory after t. Second, Oberman might well argue either that the state has no right to solicit private donations from its citizens, or that it must solicit such donations if the averted harm is serious enough.Neither claim follows necessarily from the Cost Principle, but either could be plausibly argued for.
To take the latter, for instance, consider Oberman’s analogy with a police force.[14] He suggests that though the state may not force people to be police officers, it cannot fail to form a police force if people are willing to take the burden. The analogous claim must be that if nobody is willing, the state has an obligation (rather than a strong, non-obligatory reason) to persuade people to take on that burden, for instance by offering high financial bonuses for new recruits. Perhaps that is true, and so perhaps is the analogous claim about humanitarian protection. If so, this might be a surprising conclusion about state’s obligations; but that does not render it false. Nonetheless, it does not follow from the Cost Principle, and so requires further argument. The Voluntary War, then, is the first prima facie case for the existence of optional war.
- The Forever War
Although Oberman explicitly considers the idea of the Voluntary War it is, I admit, stretching the limits of his ‘real-world’ stipulation considerably. Although it is possible that such a thing might occur, it is extremely unlikely. My second and third prima facie cases, however, aim to fall more squarely within this criterion.
The second case concerns epistemic uncertainty. Oberman’s argument ignores the possibility that we may be in a situation where we are not sure whether the cost of a war will go above the relevant cost threshold. A war might last for a few months, costing several million pounds, or it might go on for years, stretching into the billions.[15] It might be easily won, involving only minor risk of casualty or mortality for combatants, or it might devolve into a guerrilla campaign that involves many deaths.
A reasonable initial response to all this is to insist that the relevant criteria are criteria of reasonable evidence. Although we cannot be certain how a war will go, we can presumably have some basis for belief one way or another, and apply a probabilistic cost-benefit analysis. The Cost Principle will thus have to be reformulated in terms of expected costs and humanitarian benefits, but that seems unlikely to fundamentally change its content or force.
But once we acknowledge the reality of epistemic limitation, we can see that there could be cases that are on the borderline. That is, there could be cases where the evidence does not conclusively tell us whether overall costs will lie above or below the boundary outlined by the Cost Principle. What should we do in such a case? This is an issue of risk. On the one hand, we risk imposing costs on citizens that are unjustified (though perhaps excusable). On the other, we risk ignoring a humanitarian crisis that, as it turns out, we could have legitimately prevented, and therefore ought to have prevented.
We might look first to some standard approaches to decisions under ignorance to help us decide what to do in such cases. Surprisingly, though, many of the standard approaches don’t help. Consider, for instance, the following claim:
It was (or would have been) subjectively wrong for a subject S to have ϕ-ed if S didn't know that her ϕ-ing would not constitute a constraint-violation, and thus didn't know that her ϕ-ing would be objectively permissible.[16]
A constraint, in this sense, is a deontological limit on certain kinds of acts (e.g. that we may not kill unnecessarily). Oberman’s case may be described in the following way: states face constraints on imposing humanitarian costs on their citizens above what their citizens have individual humanitarian obligations to incur. But states also face constraints on refusing to provide humanitarian aid if the costs will fall below the relevant threshold. It should be clear that the case of uncertainty I describe above is a case where state representatives do not know that going to war will not constitute a constraint-violation, but also do not know that refraining from war will not constitute a constraint violation. Isaacs view implausibly claims that whatever a state does in this situation is wrong.