Morality and warfare

Throughout the ages discussions of war and morality have for the most part been formed within the concept of justice. For military officers the justice of war has traditionally focused on soldier's actions in the conduct of war. That is, soldiers are required to fight wars within the norms and values that their government and ultimately their society set; they must fight wars as justly as possible.

Western nations have gone to great lengths to identify the so-called rules of war, and institutions such as the Geneva Conventions have established many of these rules. Moreover, The Hague often attempts to prosecute those who break them. The basic argument states that no one can surrender their moral agency. Therefore a soldier is morally obligated to follow his ethical code and disobey illegal or unjust orders, i.e. shooting unarmed enemy prisoners of war. Furthermore, soldiers cannot simply say ‘I was following orders’ should they choose to execute an order they know to be unjust or illegal. They still remain responsible for their actions.

This situation leads soldiers and more specifically officers directly into a moral dilemma. If an officer is morally obligated to disobey an order he believes to be illegal or unjust in the conduct of war (jus in bello) is he then likewise morally obligated to disobey an order sending him to a war he believes to be illegal or unjust (jus ad bellum)? The moral conflict of fighting in an unjust war, even if the war is fought justly, rests somewhere between the officer's sworn duty to his profession and, in the case of an illegal war, his opposing duty to follow his own ethical standards. In each case the officer believes he has moral reasons to do each of the two actions, but to do both actions is not possible and to obey one is to disobey the other.

One obligation is to his nation, which has hired, trained and equipped him to defend them. Should he refuse to fight when called then he has violated that obligation to the citizens of his country. Second, and similar to the jus in bello argument, he is also obligated to his own ethical standards and the moral code generated from them; not to fight in a war he believes is unjust. If he follows the first obligation and fights in the war, then he violates his own moral code, likewise if he follows his moral code and refuses to fight, he then violates his obligation to his profession and nation.

The lines of what is just and unjust concerning jus in bello are clearly drawn and well known to most soldiers. So much so that it is common practice for many militaries to issue their soldiers ‘rules of engagement’ or ROE cards during deployments which clearly outline when a soldier may use deadly force and whom he may use that force against. Likewise, soldiers also know they will be held accountable for any violations of the ROE. The lines, however, concerning jus ad bellum are not so clear and there are no cards outlining the rules.

This moral dilemma of an unjust war is nothing new, and despite the significant weight given to the moral agency argument in jus in bello cases, it is arguable that the vast majority of officers in jus ad bellum cases have not sided with this moral code. Why have so many marched off to battle despite possible moral misgivings about the rightness of their cause?

Invincible ignorance

One explanation stems from pre-modern history where the realm of jus ad bellum was reserved for kings and princes. In fact the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria argued that a prince was not always able to or ought to give his subjects reasons for waging war, adding that if his subjects served in war if only after first being satisfied of its justice then the nation would no doubt fall into great peril. By keeping questions concerning the justice of war beyond the concern of his subjects, a prince need not inform his soldiers about the justice of war. In this way soldiers remain ignorant of the facts, so much so, that their ignorance presents an invincible argument. The soldier knows nothing of the cause or rightness of the war he is fighting. Therefore should the prince's cause be unjust, the soldier can still fight and morally accountable rests solely with the prince.

William Shakespeare's classic Henry V provides a rather clear example of such invincible ignorance. Prior to the battle of Agincourt in France, the king disguises himself as a common soldier and strikes up a conversation with a few foot soldiers. In an effort to judge their moral he says, ‘me thinks I could die anywhere so contented as in the king's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.’ One of the soldiers rebuts by saying, ‘that's more than we know,’ the other quickly adding, ‘ay, or more than we ought to seek after, for we know enough if we know we are the king's subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’

The moral equality of soldiers

In modern democracies the invincible ignorance argument is not quite as simple. Today in the western world we elect our leaders and those elected leaders are normally required by law to state what they are up to, particularly in the case of military deployments. Nonetheless, the issue here for the modern military officer still concerns the same essential problem that his predecessors faced in Vitoria's time; a lack of information. Often information is secret in nature and not everything a government knows is made public due to national security issues. The military officer called to fight a war is then often forced to make judgment based on incomplete information.

The argument of moral equality simply states that soldiers cannot know whether their cause is just. They must accept a certain amount of trust in the government which they serve, particularly in the case of democracies. If an officer's country says that another country is a threat because they have weapons of mass destruction, that officer most likely does not have the same information or is not able to confirm the information that his government is giving him.

Here the argument is also true for jus in bello. An infantry lieutenant who leads his platoon against the enemy on the battlefield is obligated to fight his enemy justly. In turn, the lieutenant on the other side of the battlefield is also obligated to fight justly. Both are morally equal in nature, and must serve their individual nations. In jus ad bellum cases these two lieutenants may take refuge in the argument that they truly do not know the justness of their cause and the discipline of the state is imposed upon them.

Who decides what is just?

War, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz so famously remarked, is an extension of policy. It is not merely an act of mindless violence for the sake of violence, and a state maintains its armed forces for the purpose of national defense. Responsibility for decisions concerning jus ad bellum remains with political leadership. In democratic governments, Paul Christopher argues, an officer is obligated to follow his profession and not his moral code based on an idea of formal and objective justice.

His argument states that it is rarely possible to know objectively with any degree of certainty if a war is just. Because we can rarely know objectively the justness of a war we must rely on a formal process to decide what is just. Once a national debate, whether public, parliamentary or congressional etc., has taken place, and it has followed proper legal procedures stipulated by that government, then any resulting decisions to use force are formally just. This is similar to a court of law where a judge or jury deliberates after evidence has been presented and then reaches a guilty or innocent verdict.

Because our governments are democratic, those making the formal debate are elected officials and thus represent the interests of the society as a whole. When a decision has been made and it follows all procedural and legal paths, then that decision is as close to objective justice as we can arrive. A military officer, the same as a civilian, must abide by the decision of the court. For a military officer to refuse to execute his orders is to essentially refuse the will of the very people who have called upon him to defend them. He is thus, obligated to follow orders sending him to what he may view as an unjust war.

Political and military knowledge

A final argument which also helps to explain why an officer may fight in a war he feels is unjust is based on knowledge. Unlike invincible ignorance and moral equality, here the case centres not on information, rather on what one is able to do with the information given to them. If, say it were possible, our infantry lieutenant had access to all the same information available to those at the highest levels of government, would he still be able to make a rational decision based on his experience and professional knowledge? As Samuel Huntington argued, ‘no commonly excepted political values exist by which the military officer can prove to reasonable men that his political judgement is preferable to that of the statesman.’

Here the essential argument is that military force is a means to a political end and officers are agents of that force. If we allow them to decide in which wars they want to fight then they are no longer true agents of the state, i.e. no longer obedient to civilian control. If individual officers can make decisions such as not going to war, they can also make decisions about going to war. It is highly improbable that our junior infantry lieutenant has the ability to start a war, but a senior general who commands the military certainly has the capacity to do so.

In our modern democratic governments it is almost unthinkable that a general or group of generals would step out of line from their civilian masters and start a war. It is very realistic, however, to think they could expand an ongoing war. During the Korean War General Macarthur's willingness to bomb mainland China with nuclear weapons may have been a rational military decision focused on defeating communist forces on the Korean peninsula, but it would have no doubt brought a significant response from the Soviet Union. Many argued in the form of a war in Europe, and thus President Truman was forced to exert executive (civilian) control and remove the general.

Iraq and some concluding thoughts

Today, officers sent to serve in Iraq are presented with a particularly difficult jus ad bellum decision. In 2003 when weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were given as the main reason for war, it was arguable that no officers apart for perhaps those few generals closest to the President or Prime Minister could have know with certainty the authenticity of the WMD evidence. Here many officers may have thought of the war as a classic case of invincible ignorance, ‘I simply do not know and therefore must trust that my government is telling me the truth.’ However, after 2004–05 when it was proven that the WMD threat never existed, the subsequent ignorance case no longer held and the jus ad bellum dilemma re-emerged.

I think for the vast majority of officers who have or are currently serving in Iraq their decision lies somewhere with Christopher's or Huntington's argument. In the case of the US military, the professional military ethic holds that the state is the supreme body and the military is a neutral servant tasked with defending the state. It must remain subordinate to elected civilian control and the decisions that the elected government makes. This is a key ethic among the officer corps and many officers may go to Iraq despite grievances, believing it is better to uphold the morals and ethics of a civilian controlled military than to break ranks and follow their own opinions about the war in question. Otherwise, many fear, this would set precedence for a future officer corps willing and able to do as it chooses, regardless of what elected officials demand of it.

Many may conversely argue that if an officer is allowed to refuse service in Iraq that does not necessarily mean the officer corps will go off and start a war. However, a scenario similar to the Korean War is not so unthinkable for Iraq. In the summer of 2007 many senior U.S. military officers presented evidence that Iran was sponsoring insurgent and terrorist organizations in Iraq with training and weapons. Moreover, during the same time period and quite alarming for this scenario, fifteen British sailors were captured by Iranian forces just off the coast of Iraq.

No doubt U.S. and British military forces have contingency plans for war with Iran and are waiting for orders to execute those plans. It is also not too unfeasible to think that at least a few senior officers would have been willing to use military force in response to these acts. I doubt many would argue that we want the generals making the decisions to go to war and not our elected leaders, particularly when it concerns war with a potential nuclear power, let alone the political fallout a war with Iran would bring.

In the end each officer and soldier facing such a dilemma must reach a decision. For many officers the belief in their profession and government may be so strong that there is no moral dilemma presented by an unjust war. For others the decision is an agonizing and emotionally draining search through one's self values. It demands serious reflection and painful choices counter to what one feels may be the right thing to do. No decision made will bring closure to such a dilemma, even long after the war is over.