Draper on War: When Is War Just?

by
David Gordon
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War and Individual Rights by Kai Draper; Oxford University Press, 2016, xii + 254 pp.

Many people make fun of analytic philosophy because of its use of imaginary cases, often elaborated with what seems perverse ingenuity. It is better, critics claim, to stick close to reality. While there is much to be said for this, the analytic method is frequently insightful, as I’ll try to show. War and Individual Rights is the best analytic discussion of the just war, both the justification for going to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello) that I have read, and it is all the more of interest in that Draper defends self-ownership and a Lockean account of property acquisition, albeit in a way that is less strict than the Rothbardian account. In addition, Draper makes very helpful comments about a wide variety of moral issues.

Let’s start with a criticism of utilitarianism that I haven’t seen before. Utilitarians—or as Draper calls them, “act consequentialists”—regard states of affairs as better or worse without regard to the identities of the people in these states of affairs. One life is as good or bad as another, and two lives are better than one, ceteris paribus. It follows that it’s not morally permissible for you to kill two people who are shooting at you in self-defense. If you kill them, two lives will be lost.

You might object that other things aren’t equal. If you can’t defend against aggressors, this would probably make people feel uneasy, and a utilitarian would have to take this into account. But he would still be committed to the wildly counterintuitive view that self-defense as such isn’t morally permissible. He would be denying common sense morality.

Draper raises another point against act consequentialism. The consequences of what you do usually depend on the consequences of what other people freely decide to do, and there are so many possible complications in tracing these out that you could never know what you should do, from a utilitarian standpoint. I’m not sure these two criticisms of act consequentialism are mutually consistent, but I’ll leave it as an exercise to my readers to sort this out.

Here is another example of a provocative argument Draper makes that I am not sure how to evaluate. Traditional just war theory requires that going to war must be done with a good intention. Elizabeth Anscombe, relying on the traditional theory, famously criticized Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939 on the ground that it was motivated by power politics. Draper rejects this part of just war theory. He says:

It is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. I might defend the victim of unjust aggression because I am a bloodthirsty lover of violence, for example, but it does not follow that my act of defense is unjustifiable. Similarly, war might, for example, be undertaken by a political leader because he or she is a bloodthirsty lover of violence (or, more realistically, a lover of the political advantage of pursuing war), but if the war prevents genocide at the cost of infringing upon the rights of a few innocent bystanders, it might well be justified.

Although Draper is not an absolutist about rights—his “moderate deontology” allows rights violations if the beneficial consequences of violating them are good enough—he thinks that, in practice, it is almost never justifiable to initiate war.

Those who recommend the horrors of war for the sake of regime change...often irrationally assume that the grass will be much greener on the other side of the hill. Sometimes, that is how it turns out, but it is also often the case that one bad regime is replaced by another bad one, and the costs of the change in terms of death and misery dwarf any benefits of the change. The benefits of war are often highly speculative whereas, at least typically, a large portion of the costs of war are virtually certain. In a trade-off between uncertain benefits and certain costs, the magnitude of the possible benefits must far exceed the possible costs in order for the expectable benefits to exceed, let alone far exceed, the expectable costs.

I have, in part, quoted this passage as it is written in order to make a snide comment about Draper’s style. His convoluted prose sometimes gets out of his control, leading him to fail to express what he obviously intends. His excellent point, however, is that the expected benefits must greatly exceed the expected costs for going to war to be justifiable; but, as it is written, the last sentence of the quotation is a tautology.

Draper limits even further the situations in which going to war is justifiable:

Political leaders need to be sensitive to the range of alternatives to war. If the resources war would require could be used for some peaceful pursuit with the consequence that equal or greater benefits would be produced, but less or no unjust harm would be inflicted, then a proper respect for the rights of the potential victims of war requires that war be abandoned, if necessary, for the sake of pursuing the peaceful alternative. Thus, even a war that would produce huge benefits and inflict relatively little unjust harm cannot justifiably be fought if an available alternative exists that produces at least as much good but inflicts less unjust harm.

I’ll conclude with one more very good point Draper makes. Sometimes people calculating the benefits of going to war include the expected benefits to future generations. For example, those who today continue to support the Gulf War often claim that Kuwaitis born in the 21st century are better off because of the invasion. Draper counters this by noting that the Kuwaitis who were in fact born in the 21st century are almost certainly different people from those who would have been born had there been no Gulf War; and, so long as the latter group of people “[would have] benefited substantially from life, they would have reason to be glad that there was no attempt to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.”

You can learn a great deal from reading Draper’s book, but you should weigh the expected benefits and costs carefully before doing so.