Killing in War Book

War is a social disease, a show of mass insanity that one would perceive as absurd, were it not so uncomfortably common. It is a disease we should eradicate. The project to rid ourselves of this disease is a long-term project. It has come forward substantially over centuries, and will probably take generations yet. McMahan's work gives us important traction forward.

This book is moral philosophy, but McMahan is a practical realist. He rejects the brutal cynicism of a Hobbesian position that moral restraint cannot be applied in war. Nevertheless, he is fully understands our tortuous path to find a way out of the problems we have of armies and nations and wars. Improving human behavior in this realm will require careful thought, and McMahan is diligent. I have been aware of his work for years, and his earliest publication that I use is "The Limits of National Partiality," his chapter in The Morality of Nationalism, McKim and McMahan, eds. I have returned to it many times to try to understand how we are all, in our own way, nationalists, and what there is to do about it. I will be coming back to Killing in War for years also.

In this book, about war, McMahan is focused on analysis and moral evaluation of the behavior of individual soldiers in war. He is asking, "During war, when should killing be permitted?" He thoroughly lines out each practical concern a soldier faces, focusing on how the individual should act. He is a very organized philosopher, and sets up a clear system for studying, in detail, what is just and moral, within the constraints of what is practical and effective, for a soldier. The fields of what is moral, and what is legal, are necessarily separate matters; McMahan is knowledgeable in both fields, having spent decades studying and lecturing and writing about ethics in war.

The task that McMahan has set for himself is to deconstruct a set of concepts that have, up until now, been the standard model for understanding the moral responsibilities of a soldier during war. According to that standard model, it does not matter which side a soldier is fighting on; her/his moral responsibilities are the same. According to this model, even if it is overwhelmingly obvious that one side in a war is aggressive in clearly wrong ways, and the other side is clearly justifiably defending itself, the ethical rules for the soldiers on both sides should be exactly the same. For example, the Filipino soldiers resisting the brutal invasion and occupation of the Japanese would be expected to toe the line to the same permissions and restrictions that the Japanese soldiers would be expected to follow. Each soldier that followed those rules would be considered to be acting morally. McMahan singles out a specific author, Michael Walzer, whose work represents this tradition. He elaborates a withering critique of Walzer, and proposes that it is time to take apart the fundamentally illogical structure of the "tidy set of rules" that governments and armies and politicians and international bodies have so comfortably used to allow soldiers to rationalize their behavior in war.

The book is too painstakingly thorough to be comfortably summarized. For example, McMahan reviews and appreciates all of Walzer's reasoning, both practical and moral, prior to setting out his critique of that paradigm. The issues are complex; the individual soldier will often face moral ambivalence. However, there is one key point of disagreement between Walzer and McMahan that powerfully exemplifies McMahan's understanding of how it is that we must mature, as societies and individuals, to begin to cure the disease of war at the cellular level. Walzer's claim has been that the moral status of a soldier is unrelated to the issue of whether her/his side in a war is the just side or the unjust side. McMahan disagrees strongly, and argues convincingly that soldiers fighting for the unjust side in a war must be held to task for this.

In international treaties, it is recognized that the only just wars are those that are fought in self-defense. A country defending itself against an unjust invader is, generally, in the right. McMahan recognizes that there is seldom complete clarity, but says that most of the time it is quite clear which side is "just." The Iraqis were wrong and the Kuwaitis were right. McMahan is not a traditional pacifist. He treats self-defense against an unjust aggressor as a complete justification for killing someone, if necessary to save one's own life.

It is this very argument that McMahan brings to the individual level of the soldier. He is not at all insensitive to the plight of soldiers, from the draftee to the dupe. He understands the publicly impractical and individually grave consequences that will arise from labeling individual soldiers as blameworthy or liable for what they have done if they are fighting for an unjust cause. He covers all angles of every moral and legal defense, and the unconvincing and/or partial excuses that can be raised to rationalize the killing that is done by soldiers that are fighting for an unjust cause. Among other themes, he cycles constantly back to: 1. the practical problems, after a war, of prosecuting hundreds of thousands of soldiers, 2. the effects of war propaganda and youth on the ignorance of soldiers, and the resulting limitation in what they can know, 3. the duress and threats that the soldiers' own governments put them under, (which still do not relieve these soldiers from all responsibility for unjust killing), 4. a moral grading of the types of threats that a soldier can face, and an ongoing discussion of proportional response (e.g., it is not moral to obliterate an entire village because there was a bullet fired from one of the houses), 5. the special case of child soldiers, 6. the issue of who is a combatant and who is not, and 7. justifications of "lesser evils." He carefully dissects and deploys terms such as innocence, liability, culpability, permissibility, diminished responsibility, collateral damage, and civilian target.

This review is only giving the reader a light overview of McMahan's thoughtful organization and presentation of the moral elements involved in the dilemmas soldiers face in war. It is everyone's job to disseminate these ideas to the public, and especially to soldiers and the young people who are considering becoming soldiers.

McMahan is well aware that the world is not yet ready to start regularly prosecuting masses of unjust soldiers, or even soldiers who fight in an immoral way for the just side in a war, in criminal proceedings. He knows that we do not yet have the institutional framework for these undertakings. We can't even yet make institutionally authoritative judgments about the just and unjust side in most wars. Our efforts at this time are best put into trying to prevent wars, and especially unjust wars, wherein no self-defense is at play. If we were to begin prosecuting individual soldiers at this time, there is an understandable likelihood that the only result would be a sad "Victor's Justice." Yet McMahan has successfully revealed the weaknesses in Walzer's structures, and shown us a plausible way to work toward the prevention of unjust wars. If the availability of more ethical and historical information about the individual responsibility and culpability of soldiers fighting unjust wars were distributed widely, in combination with mechanisms, however lightly applied, putting blame where it belongs, on people who kill unjustly, many young people would be deterred from killing unjustly, or even being soldiers for governments that conduct unjust wars. A government that fears that it has the full support of its population and military for unjust wars might not risk the challenge to its authority.