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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 August 2018
Just war theory − as advanced by Michael Walzer, among others − fails to take war seriously enough. This is because it proposes that we regulate war with systematic rules that are comparable to those of a game. Three types of claims are advanced. The first is phenomenological: that the theory's abstract nature interferes with our judgment of what is, and should be, going on. The second is meta-ethical: that the theory's rules are not, in fact, systematic after all, there being inherent contradictions between them. And the third is practical: that by getting people to view war as like a game, the theory promotes its ‘aestheticization’ (play being a central mode of the aesthetic) such that those who fight are encouraged to act in dangerous ways. And war, it goes without saying, is already dangerous enough.
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13 See my ‘Taking Politics Seriously – But Not Too Seriously’ (forthcoming).
14 See my ‘On the Minimal Global Ethic’, in Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
15 I first distinguished between ‘expressive’ rules and those that I call ‘regulative’ in my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), chs 1–2Google Scholar.
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22 Walzer, op. cit. note 6, 36. Walzer is even more explicit in a later article where he writes that in a just war it is, from a strictly moral perspective, only ‘the civilian deaths that should bother us’. Walzer, , ‘Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars’, Parameters 39(1) (Spring 2009): 40–52, 51Google Scholar.
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29 Grossman, op. cit. note 24, 156–57.
30 For some comments from soldiers expressing their feelings of guilt about killing, see Grossman, op. cit. note 24, 88–89.
31 Walzer, op. cit. note 6, 143.
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38 Mégret, Frédéric would disagree: ‘War and the Vanishing Battlefield’, Loyola University of Chicago International Law Review 9(1) (Fall/Winter 2011): 131–55Google Scholar. Unsurprisingly, at 133, Mégret welcomes the idea that ‘there is more than a passing analogy between the battlefield and the fields on which sports are played’.
39 Margalit and Walzer, op. cit. note 17, 22.
40 Walzer, op. cit. note 6, 296–97.
41 Jeff McMahan has presented a different argument against the possibility of keeping jus in bello separate from jus ad bellum in his ‘The Ethics of Killing in War’, in Kasher, Asa (ed.) Ethics of War and Conflict, vol. 2: Just War Doctrine (New York: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar. Essentially, McMahan's claim is that combatants who fight justly in the sense of targeting only other soldiers nevertheless cannot be described as fighting defensively, and so justly, if they do so as part of an unjust surprise attack on another country.
42 See Grossman, op. cit. note 24, 169. He quotes an Israeli tank gunner: ‘You see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen… It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don't see people, that's one good thing about it.’ Grossman, op. cit. note 24, 170.
43 See Grossman, op. cit. note 24, 164–67.
44 Berlin, , ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (ed.) Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berlin is quoting Joseph Schumpeter.
45 See Walzer, ‘The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)’, in Arguing about War, op. cit. note 7, 12.
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51 The latter has been described thus: ‘Football is about making your opponent think you are going to pass rather than run, run here rather than there, throw to this receiver rather than that one. Receivers develop moves to fake out defenders.’ Miller, William Ian, ‘Deceit in War and Trade’, in Martin, Clancy (ed.) The Philosophy of Deception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50Google Scholar.
52 Bruce Dowbiggen has even suggested that there's something hypocritical about Canadians celebrating our country's invention of peacekeeping (peacekeepers are often portrayed on Canadian currency) and yet continuing to support violence in hockey. See Dowbiggen, , The Meaning of Puck: How Hockey Explains Modern Canada (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008), 22, 102Google Scholar.
53 Hedges, Chris, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 3Google Scholar. Evidently, Hedges finds war meaningful in an aesthetic, because sublime, sense. Kant would agree: ‘Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it.’ Critique of the Power of Judgment (ed.) Guyer, Paul, trans. Guyer, and Matthews, Eric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:263Google Scholar.
54 David Shields even identifies ‘playground’ as one of the themes adhered to by New York Times war photographers. See his War Is Beautiful: The Times, New York Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict (New York: powerHouse Books, 2015)Google Scholar.
55 Hedges, op. cit. note 53, 171–72.
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57 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (ed.) W.B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), bk. 5, ch. 3.
58 Not that there is anything new about the attractions of spectacular violence. See, for example, Fagan, Garrett G., The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. More generally, see Goldstein, Jeffrey (ed.) Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
59 Baudrillard's, Whence Jean complaint that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Patton, Paul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
60 As I have tried to do regarding the conflict between Israel and its neighbours in my ‘Going Rabin One Further’, in Patriotic Elaborations, op. cit. note 14.
61 See, for example, Noam Chomsky, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, New York Review of Books, 23 February 1967.
62 My thanks to Asa Kasher, Françis Douville Vigeant, and Michael Walzer for comments on previous versions of this paper.
