Impractical Ethics

...Throughout the book illustrations are given to show how countries have upheld or, as more often happens, violated the rights Walzer speaks of...

...Later on in the War, interestingly, a bombing was deemed necessary...

...Reviewed by Seth Cropsey Reporter/researcher, "Fortune" How do we tell when a war is just...

...blameless-ness is the goal...

...Theory ought at least to attempt to transcend mere partisanship, yet Walzer uses it to advance his own tendentious view of Vietnam—the criminality of the U.S...

...German freighters then used Norway's neutral waters to protect them on the long voyage home...

...And yet it cannot be escaped short of a universal order in which the existence of nations and peoples could never be threatened...

...Walzer contends that the Prime Minister was jumping the gun: The situation in England in 1940 was not an emergency and consequently not an excuse to override the rights of neutrals...

...Since it has always been difficult to fight without killing innocent people, and since the firepower and mobility of today's armies make civilian casualties more likely in greater numbers, Walzer concedes that such deaths will occur...

...we know this because if they "had no rights at all or were thought to have none, it would be a small benefit to hide among them...

...The trouble with this kind of selflessness is that the rights deferred to are essentially selfish—they begin in "self-preservation...

...Walzer grounds morality in something higher: respect for human rights, which in the case of political communities includes self-preservation...

...the German refusal to grant safe passage to Leningrad's civilian population at the outset of the horrible siege in September 1941...

...For Walzer, morality means respecting an enemy's "human rights" at great personal risk...

...His purpose, he declares, is to give intellectual justification to the antiwar movement...

...The right of civilians not to be attacked, for example, is crucial...

...bombardment of North Korean machine-gun positions...

...Philosophers, he says, "often miss the immediacies of political and moral controversy and provide little help to men and women faced with hard choices...

...The Athenian command justified their actions with the claim that necessity obliges everyone to look out for himself...

...Once the fighting is under way, however, all sorts of individual rights must be observed if the war is to be conducted justly...

...One instance of concern for nonparticipants was the Allied decision in 1943 to make a commando raid on the Nazi heavy water plant in occupied Norway, rather than bomb it, in order to spare civilian lives...

...Walzer allows that there may be something to this conception of humanity...

...In addition, he condemns Churchill and the British for bombing German cities and killing many civilians, arguing that "the supreme emergency passed long before the British bombing had reached its crescendo...

...Scholars are supposed to think first and act, if at all, later—not the reverse...

...To demonstrate his point, Walzer describes what he sees as the improper behavior of England in the early days of World War II...

...Furthermore, selflessness—always risky—is idiotic as foreign policy...

...But he maintains it should not be used as an excuse for what seems unfair—as he thinks Thucy-dides does in History of the Pelopen-nesian War...

...And, writes Walzer, "I want now to stress again, and finally, that it is the only reason...

...No leader can dare wait "until the heavens are (really) about to fall" before taking action that might harm an enemy's noncom-batants...

...War, Walzer concludes, is simply not "a morally satisfactory place...

...Just and Unjust Wars ends despairing that leaders will ever stop making decisions based on self-perceived necessity...

...War strips away our civilized adornments and reveals our nakedness...

...Decisions cannot be based on one antagonist's apprehension of its own justness, for, as the author points out, both sides usually think they are in the right...

...Michael Walzer's stumbling stone is turning a common presentiment of justice into a nearly rigid rule, and then equating it with morality...

...and the American treatment of Vietnamese villagers who, as Walzer puts it, were considered hostile "because they were not prepared to deny material support to the guerrillas or to reveal their whereabouts or the location of their mines or booby-traps...

...Even civilian supporters of guerrillas have rights...

...In other words, before choosing your own safety over an enemy's rights, you must not merely wait until there is danger, but until the threat actually materializes...

...The question is, how do we know when...

...From the participants' motives...

...participation...

...His answer is that everyone must "do justice until the heavens are (really) about to fall...

...Michael Walzer's approach to these classic questions is avowedly practical...

...The Greek historian describes how Athenian generals, from a clearly superior position, offered the Melians a choice of surrender with terms or siege...

...It was a bad bet...

...One may grant the reasonable point that in war both sides should always try to avoid hurting innocent civilians without conjuring up a fancy theory of rights to support this obvious expression of simple decency...

...Acting morally while endangering enemy civilians requires that "The intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims narrowly at the acceptable effect...

...Whether or not he is correct is still debatable, and it is hypocritical for him to inject a matter of opinion into what is intended to be a guide to morality...

...This is indeed the belief of Thomas Hobbes, the book's chief antagonist, who said the universal tendency of men was to "hold for honorable that which pleaseth them and for just, that which profiteth...

...Walzer, a professor of government at Harvard, begins by attacking the "realist" view that "what we conventionally call inhumanity [i.e., war] is simply humanity under pressure...

...They [the realists] describe that nakedness for us not without a certain relish: fearful, self-concerned, driven, murderous...

...Walzer wants to "recapture the just war for political and moral theory...

...The Germans' major supply of iron ore had to be sent from Sweden, where it was mined, to the Norwegian port of Narvik...

...Among the offenses cited are the unintended civilian deaths that resulted from U.S...

...Besides its illegitimate origin, Just and Unjust Wars suffers from weak theory and impractical guidelines...

...It follows that the citizens of a besieged city must be offered a chance to escape...

...When those rights are violated, there is a "reason for fighting...

...the evil effect [the death of a noncombatant] is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends, and, aware of the evil involved, he seeks to minimize it accepting costs to himself...

...Walzer states that what got him thinking about his subject was "the American intervention in Vietnam," and the fact that opponents of the war—under the pressures of partisanship and having been trained to believe moral discourse cannot be objective—were led to act on the basis of their feelings...

...Coming from a professor who was heavily engaged in the protest, that is startling...

...Winston Churchill, wanting to take some initiative against Germany during the sitzkrieg of early 1940, decided to mine the approaches to the Narvik harbor even though this was a violation of Norway's neutrality...

...Or is it a matter of who fires first and how the combatants behave in battle...

...He would be dead too soon...

...Walzer disagrees: If this were correct, he declares, there would be no freedom to make ethical choices and morality would be simply what each man saw as his own interest...

...Help was never sent, and the Melians were besieged and defeated...

...Banking on aid from their ally, Sparta, the Melians decided to hold out...

...Walzer admits there are times when its is necessary to violate the rights of participants and nonparticipants...

...But there must be an attempt to avoid them...

...One of the book's main problems is apparent at the outset...

...Claiming that we must reject partisan considerations for as long as possible, he nevertheless has written this entire volume to support his own partisanship...

...Any leader who followed such a guide would need to be indifferent to the increased casualties his troops would suffer, and would have to be a dictator to withstand the immense political pressures that would almost certainly be generated...

...And what does it mean to speak of justice between the nations of the world when they have never agreed on what justice is...

...If this were morality, no person could ever afford to be moral...