Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War by William H. Shaw

Author:William H. Shaw [Shaw, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Political Science, International Relations
ISBN: 9781135969066
Google: 5VCFCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-15T01:44:58+00:00

The case against preventive war

Within the community of nations, all this was seen as settled and uncontroversial doctrine until 2002 when the Bush administration developed a new national security policy as a prelude to launching war against Iraq (Crawford 2007; Frowe 2011: 74–5). Depending on how one interprets it, that document either redefines “preemptive” military action to include what had previously been considered “preventive” war or makes a case for preventive war when the stakes are high enough. Although the Bush doctrine may not have represented as much of a departure from past U.S. policy as is sometimes thought (Nathanson 2013: 146–7), under either interpretation it clearly challenges established international norms. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—the main casus belli among several shifting rationales for the war—has, of course, greatly reduced the appeal of the new doctrine. On the other hand, it has forced scholars to clarify the conditions that must be met for military action to be considered genuinely preemptive and to restate the case against preventive war.

Consequentialist in character, that case rests on two lines of argument. First, it emphasizes the profound epistemological obstacles confronting any state that is considering preventive war. In particular, its intelligence must be accurate, reliable, and correctly interpreted, and the danger must be grave and the situation urgent, with no non-military options available and little time for delay. However, because of bias, emotion, ignorance, short-sighted thinking, and various ideological or other blind spots, to which even intelligent people can succumb, the risk of error is high. Because of this and because of the grim consequences of miscalculation, the state contemplating war faces a burden of proof that it is, in practice, unlikely to be able to meet. The second argument points to the bad consequences of general acceptance of a principle licensing preventive war—a point, as intimated above, that has long been acknowledged—because it promotes international insecurity and increases the likelihood of war by creating a spiral of fear and mistrust. Even a state that harbors no aggressive intent may feel obliged to attack its rival because it fears that fear will lead the other state to attack it first.

In response to the first argument, Buchanan and Keohane (2004) have proposed setting up a multilateral accountability tribunal that would review any state’s case for preventive war. This could bring some degree of objectivity to the decision, though the tribunal would have to be free from the politics and self-serving that now makes the UN Security Council unable reliably to fill this role. The tribunal would also, of course, have to be accepted as a legitimate epistemological authority by a critical mass of states. In any case, though, the point still holds that a state is extremely unlikely to have compelling grounds for believing that it is justified in waging preventive war. But it might possibly be the case, nevertheless, that such a war would in fact satisfy UWP and that the state in question knows it. It cannot be maintained that this could never happen.

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