From rights to realism: Incoherence in walzer's conception of jus in bello

Abstract

There is little doubt that Michael Walzer made a significant attempt in Just and Unjust Wars1 to strengthen the moral rules of the war convention. He put forth two major considerations that effectively made the justification of killing in warfare significantly more difficult than had been generally thought. One is a sharpened distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello that allows each to be judged independently, so that the having of just cause does not in itself slant the judgment of whether war is being waged justly. The other is an amplification of the principle of discrimination between combatants and noncombatants and the making of noncombatant immunity a focal requirement. As a result, the moral bar is set rather high for just warfare, as evidenced in Walzer's survey of historical examples where we find an abundance of military decisions and actions that fail the moral tests. Nonetheless, I will argue that there is a systematic tension in Walzer's conception of just warfare that allows for a significant compromising of his fundamental principle of noncombatant immunity. Moreover, I will suggest that, in particular areas where he attempts to provide moral justification for limiting or overriding this principle, he displays an incoherence in tilting toward realism, an ironic result to be sure given his explicit rejection of realism in the very first chapter of his book. It may be that moving into a realm of action that, so to speak, is beyond good and evil is necessary in order to avoid taking moral idealism to the point where the practical burdens of acting justly become unbearable. However, it is the conceptual and moral incoherence of this move within Walzer's conception of just war that I am interested in exploring, not the issue of whether realism itself is acceptable or inevitable. In this chapter I will explore specifically Walzer's articulation of the principle of noncombatant immunity, his account of the moral obligations and their limits regarding collateral damage to noncombatants, and the justification for the lifting of immunity for noncombatants under a supreme emergency. © 2007 Springer.