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Individual Responsibility, Nuclear Deterrence, and Excusing Political Inaction*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
‘The circle of responsibility is drawn around all who have or should have knowledge of the illegal and immoral character of the war.’
--Richard Falk
Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, is in a large part an earnest, aphoristic essay on individual responsibility in these times. Consider a representative passage: ‘With the generation that has never known a world unmenaced by nuclear weapons, a new order of the generation begins. In it, each person alive is called on to assume his share of the responsibility for guaranteeing the existence of all future generations.’ I have no doubt that many people in most countries — citizens of representative democracies in particular — know this call and feel in some dim and tentative way that there must be special individual responsibilities that have evolved with that defensive, strategic and political doctrine we know as nuclear deterrence. And how could we expect otherwise?
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- Copyright © The Authors 1986
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*
This article was accepted for publication by the editors of Praxis International and is published here with their kind permission.
References
1 Schell, Jonathan, The Fate of the Earth (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf 1983), 173Google Scholar
2 At least this is the familiar historical claim. For an insightful critical account see Govier, Trudy, ‘Nuclear Illusion and Individual Obligations,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1983), 475ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 John Sommerville puts forward a gripping picture of the role of patriotism in the period following the Cuban missile crisis in ‘Patriotism and War,’ Ethics 91 (1981), 568-78.
4 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books 1977), 301f.;Google Scholar the idea of the realistic view is a normative notion, not an epistemological one. The suggestion of the realistic view is that we should be realistic -i.e. not severe- in judging the political acts of individuals when their government is at war.
5 Ibid., 301
6 Schell, 95, my emphasis
7 Ibid., 221
8 Ibid., 226
9 I was reminded of this point in another context by Trudy Govier.
10 Carnesale, Albert, Doty, Paul, Hoffman, Stanley, Huntington, Samuel P., Nye, Joseph S. Jr., Sagan, Scott D., Living With Nuclear Weapons (New York, NY: Bantam Books 1983)Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 247-8
12 For criticism of attempts to establish a moral difference on the basis of this knowingly/intentionally distinction in other contexts, see Patten, Steven C., ‘The Case That Milgram Makes,’ Philosophical Review 86 (1977), 359-60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Rachels, James, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia,’ The New England Journal of Medicine 292 (1975), 78–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
13 I have in mind, for example, unilateral modifications of alliance doctrine such as denial of first use and large scale partial disarmament such as that suggested as a unilateral step in the writings of George F. Kennan.
14 In ‘Moral Issues of the Nuclear Arms Race,’ unpublished manuscript, presented at a conference on Philosophy and Nuclear Deterrence at the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, Fall 1983. See ‘War, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Deterrence: Some Conceptual and Moral Issues,’ Ethics 95 (1985), 424-44.
15 ‘Moral Issues…’, 16
16 Ibid., 14
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 16
19 Ibid., 20
20 Ibid., 16
21 This formulation is due to Cheryl Misak.
22 I follow others, especially Trudy Govier in ‘Nuclear Illusion and Individual Obligations,’ 484, in taking it to be obvious that a nuclear war would be immoral, irrespective of what we might say about threats and intentions to engage in such a conflict.
23 The idea of the ‘strong case’ is explained below.
24 This way of talking about certain forms of collective responsibility comes from French, Peter A., ‘Morally Blaming Whole Populations,’ in Held, V., Morgenbesser, S. and Nagel, T., eds., Philosophy, Morality and International Affairs (London: Oxford University Press 1974), 282f.Google Scholar
25 Quoted by Levinson, Sanford, ‘Responsibility for Crimes of War,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973), 254Google Scholar.
26 Ibid.
27 What I refer to here as political innocence is the fourth sense of innocence outlined by Richard Wasserstrom in ‘On the Morality of War: A Preliminary Inquiry,’ Stanford Law Review 21 (1968), 1652. It is a notion of innocence that is’ … concerned with culpability rather than causality per se’ (1652).
28 This is the sort of view that motivates this kind of claim: ‘The Government leaders who are now talking about and planning for nuclear war are violating the principles of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals. Is there a way to try them as “war criminals“?’ Panel Discussion in Perry, T.L., Jr., ed., The Prevention of Nuclear War (Vancouver, B.C.: Physicians for Social Responsibility, B.C. Chapter 1983), 159;Google Scholar see also Schell, 229-30.
29 Cheryl Misak pointed this out to me.
30 Albert Carnesale, et al., 245
31 Earlier versions of this essay were read at the University of Prince Edward Island in August 1984; at the Conference on Philosophy and Nuclear Arms, University of Waterloo, September, 1984; and at An International Conference on Issues in Nuclear Deterrence, Inter-University Centre for Post Graduate Studies, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, June, 1985. Work on this paper was completed while assisted by a research fellowship to the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary. I have learned from the comments and criticisms of Maryann Ayim, David Copp, Philip Koch, Cheryl Misak, Robert Ware and Ron Yoshida. Trudy Govier, Leslie Wilson and Anne Williams patiently introduced me to the topic of individual responsibility for deterrence planning some time back. I am grateful to Sharon Prusky for a timely reminder about the importance of thinking about deterrence and especially to Mark Patten who was acting long before many of us were thinking about whether it was responsible to do so.