There is a thin man inside every fat man

Endeavouring to detach itself from just war's theological heritage, Walzer positions his theory as the middle ground between, what he deems, ineffective passivism and morally redundant realism. Walzer's seminal work on war, Just and Unjust Wars, was primarily a response to what he perceived to be an ethical debasement of the subject spearheaded by Realist thinkers. What is perhaps most interesting about Walzer's response is that it fundamentally challenged Realism on its own terms. Forgoing the traditional liberal stance that morality was something that needed to be worked into the mechanics of war, Walzer argued that morality was already, and always had been, a tangible component of the reality of warfare. In this way, Walzer challenged Realism, not with what could simply be dismissed as moral naivety or good intentions, but with reality itself, claiming that the reality espoused by Realism constituted a crude fiction used to justify immoral actions, ‘we don't have to translate moral talk into interest talk in order to understand it; morality refers in its own way to the real world’.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast to the deceptive language of Realism, Walzer describes the language of just war theory, at various junctures, as the ordinary language of war,Footnote ¹⁵ a common heritage,Footnote ¹⁶ the most available common moral languageFootnote ¹⁷ and a moral doctrine that everyone knows.Footnote ¹⁸ The underlying argument is that, when we discuss the issue of war, we ‘talk the same language’ and only the wicked or the simple would reject this language.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Walzer states his intention to defend the business of arguing about war, he quite literally wants to fix the terms of this debate, ‘it is in applying the agreed-upon terms to actual cases that we come to disagree’.Footnote ²⁰ To summarise Walzer's linguistic theory, he presents us with the necessity for an agreed-upon common language that allows us to critically engage with the moral reality of war, and this language is embodied by the terminology of just war theory.Footnote ²¹ At bottom Walzer poses an ontological argument; just war's moral vocabulary allows us to engage with the moral reality of war.

Walzer's conceptualisation of moral language proves more complex than it initially appears, for in his linguistic theory there are two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, languages of morality: what Walzer terms thick and thin moralities. For Walzer this dichotomy represents a dual affirmation of both particularism and universalism, ‘I want to endorse the politics of difference and, at the same time, to describe and defend a certain sort of universalism.’Footnote ²² Thick or maximal moral language constitutes the shared meanings of a singular political community, and represents their collective conscience and common life.Footnote ²³ In essence, maximal morality defines a set of values shared within a community; Walzer's conception of particularism. Morality is negotiated thickly within specific communities between its members, ultimately creating a common social vocabulary. Through this common vocabulary members define their laws, ideals, values, and institutions. Yet, crucially, for this article, thick morality cannot be universalised. Walzer assures us that the authority of maximal morality is rooted in the singular community and any attempt to enforce thick moral standards in another community (by an outside party) violates that community'sFootnote ²⁴ right to territorial integrity and political sovereignty.Footnote ²⁵ However, Walzer's rules of war are designed to be enforced across, rather than within, communities. Therefore, we must turn our attention to the language of thin or minimal morality, the universal moral vocabulary, and therefore, the non-colloquial dialect of war.Footnote ²⁶

Walzer quickly asserts that minimalism, in relation to his just war theory, is best understood as an effort to recognise and respect a doctrine of rights.Footnote ²⁷ With the rights of life and liberty standing as more than simply minimal; what Walzer describes as a form of ultra minimalism.Footnote ²⁸ For Walzer the rights of life and liberty ‘underlie the most important judgements that we can make about war’,Footnote ²⁹ and we can only justly send armed men and women across a border on behalf of ‘life’ and ‘liberty’.Footnote ³⁰ While Walzer is unsure where rights derive from or if they are natural or invented, nevertheless, he assures us that they are entailed by our sense of what it means to be human and constitute a palpable feature of our moral world.Footnote ³¹ In addition, although Walzer recognises that rights are a form of Western maximal language, he assumes they are translatable.Footnote ³² Ultimately Walzer argues that justice in war can be derived from the protection of life and liberty; ‘For the theory of justice in war can indeed be generated from the two most basic and widely recognised rights of human beings – and in their simplest (negative) form not to be robbed of life and liberty.’Footnote ³³ In this sense, the rights of life and liberty are fundamental components of minimal morality as applied to Walzer's theory of just war. In fact, life and liberty, are to be considered as absolute values; ‘At every point the judgements we make (the lies we tell) are best accounted for if we regard life and liberty as something like absolute values.’Footnote ³⁴ The status of life and liberty subsequently transforms Walzer's rules of war, and indeed its terminology, into a set of rigid maxims; ‘The war convention [Walzer's codification of the rules of war] is written in absolutist terms: one violates its provisions at one's moral, as at one's physical peril.’Footnote ³⁵

However, Walzer's conception of rights is not as straightforward as that espoused by classical rights theorists. For, in Walzer's theory, morality is not grounded upon the universal bedrock of rights. Rather rights themselves emerge from the jagged bedrock of particularism. Walzer argues, ‘Morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on special occasions.’Footnote ³⁶ By this, Walzer performs a clever linguistic movement, rather than offering a singular source of universal morality, he creates the image of numerous and diverse maximal moralities dovetailing into a set of universal guidelines. In this regard, Walzer claims that minimal morality represents a catalogue of common responses that can perhaps form a set of standards to which all societies can be held.Footnote ³⁷ As such, Walzer's universalism resembles the intersection of a vast Venn Diagram and symbolises the production of an agreed upon minimal code rather than the enforcement of a singular set of universal values. This image is directly applicable to Walzer's conception of the war convention, and its absolutist terms, which are the product of centuries of arguing and debate over the morality of warfare.Footnote ³⁸ In this way, Walzer illustrates his interpretation of the Orwellian metaphor of the thin man inside the fat man: minimalism emerges from maximal moralities, universalism is founded by particularism. Yet, there are silences within Walzer's depiction of morality. Silences related to the structures through which maximalism emerges that threaten the saliency of this moral chronology.

Structuring maximal morality: community and interpretation

Walzer's depiction of the emergence of universal morality performs an important function for his overall theory of morality and warfare. By arguing that universalism stems from particularism, Walzer maintains the primacy of maximal morality while simultaneously protecting the universalism necessary for his rules of war. Walzer creates the image of a universalism achieved through negotiation between communities rather than a singular code enforced from outside communities. Walzer astutely diverts our attention away from what would be an abstract minimal origin toward a concrete maximal reality. In short, morality is negotiated thickly within communities, which subsequently invests these communities with the possibility of negotiating minimal rules when necessary. However, this leads us to two pressing questions: what constitutes a community and how exactly is morality produced within a community?

Community is of fundamental importance to Walzer's conception of morality, for without the community neither maximal nor minimal morality could possibly exist. Indeed, for Walzer, the sanctity of communal life is a moral imperative;

Walzer primarily bases his theory of community on a Rousseauian model of social contract; ‘over a long period of time, shared experiences and cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a common life. “Contract” is the metaphor for a process of association and mutuality.’Footnote ⁴⁰ For Walzer, community forms the crux of maximal morality; ‘the political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language history and culture come together to produce a collective conscience.’Footnote ⁴¹ In this sense, community is, for Walzer, the unit through which maximal morality germinates; shared meanings and common values can only flourish within the bounds of community. In turn, the boundaries of Walzer's conception of community are themselves constituted by a simple binary: the member/stranger distinction.Footnote ⁴² In Walzer's understanding of community members are those within a community. Members share a common life, have mutual values, and produce a maximal morality; in short Walzer's picture of particularism. At the opposite side of the binary are strangers, those outside the community who are excluded from participation in the production of a community's maximal life. As such, the member/stranger distinction marks a foundational structure for Walzer's morality. Without this distinction there could be no inside-of-community from which maximalism could arise, and no outside-of-community from which maximalism could be threatened by replacement. At bottom, the absence of the member/stranger distinction would signify the impossibility of both maximal and minimal morality as described by Walzer.

Yet, it is in the foundation of this minimal requirement for the production of morality that Walzer's theory falls back upon abstraction. On the outset it appears that membership, for Walzer, is something that passes genealogically. He describes community as a contract between ‘those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born!’Footnote ⁴³ However, membership is also something that can be endowed upon a stranger. Walzer summaries the process by arguing that those who already possess membership decide who can and cannot become members;

In this sense, Walzer describes membership as pre-existing. You are either born into membership or you are granted membership by those who are already members of a community. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, this depiction of membership displays strange logic. On the one hand, shared values and maximal morality are only possible within a community, while on the other hand, membership can only be granted via members deciding on the basis of what membership means to them, that is, on the basis of a robust maximalism. Ultimately Walzer's community is founded on a pre-existing membership that has always existed; ‘it presupposes the very thing it is supposed to account for. In other words, Walzer's account of membership (by which he can then go on to provide an account of the constitution of the political community) relies on a pre-existing membership.’Footnote ⁴⁵ While Walzer requires the member/stranger distinction to found his conception of community, and the maximal and minimal moralities that it subsequently produces. He can only do so by appealing to a pre-existing conception of membership that, in turn, requires a community to exist in the first place. As such, Walzer falls back upon a non-origin of membership; membership must both found and presuppose community. In short, Walzer implies that humans always already exist within a community; we are never outside of community and the member/stranger distinction, and that is how the world really is. Not only is this depiction of community without origin an abstraction, it is also an implicitly minimal view; all communities are structured this way irrespective of time and place. In this way, Walzer describes a universal structure of community and presents it as the only means through which maximal morality can emerge. Although Walzer wants to present the real world as a social construct, he does so by presupposing an immemorial communal structure.

In addition, we must also ask how maximal morality emerges within a community. In Walzer's theory of morality, maximal moralities must firstly be produced within communities before minimal morality can be negotiated between communities. In this respect, Walzer assures us that the production of maximal morality revolves around a process of interpretation. To stress his argument Walzer critiques the theological underpinnings of what he describes as the two alternative moral schemas of discovery and invention. Moral discovery is disregarded as it requires God to reveal the moral language to us, ‘someone must climb the mountain, go to the desert, seek out the God-who-reveals, and bring back his word’.Footnote ⁴⁶ While moral invention is disqualified as the inventor assumes the role of God, ‘they create what God would have created if they were a God’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ultimately, Walzer asserts that we do not need discovery or invention as we already have what they pretend to provide, ‘what we do when we argue is to give an account of the actually existing morality’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Once again Walzer argues on the basis of reality. The mystical world of discovery and the mythical world of invention are unnecessary in the face of interpretation, our experience of actually existing real world morality. Nonetheless, an interpretative real is also a contested real. How then do we recognise the genuine moral interpretation amongst a sea of competing fraudulent interpretations? How do we know if a maximal morality genuinely represents a community?

Walzer's personal preference for resolving this problematic consists of an endorsement of a democratically ordained rule of reason. In this system everyone is allowed to speak and the most persuasive interpretation is adhered to, ‘ideally, the citizen who makes the most persuasive argument – that is, the argument that actually persuades the largest number of citizens – gets his way … all the other citizens must talk, too, or at least have a chance to talk’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, he dismisses the possibility of universalising democratic structures, like this, as they represent a form of maximalism; ‘The minimal morality prescribed by these theories is simply abstracted from, and not very far from, contemporary democratic culture. If no such culture existed, this particular version of minimal morality would not even be possible to us … no particular maximum is the sole source of the moral minimum.’Footnote ⁵⁰ How then does Walzer reconcile his dual necessity to show that maximal morality genuinely embodies a community's collective conscience and to refrain from universalising a form of maximalism? For example, how does maximal morality emerge in a community where some people are denied the possibility of speaking? In this instance Walzer cannot simply argue that such a community cannot produce a genuine maximal morality as to do so would be to imply that the democratic rule of reason is a minimal rule. Instead Walzer defers to what he refers to as the self-help test; the ability of a government ‘to help itself against internal enemies’.Footnote ⁵¹ Walzer's conception of the self-help test is relatively straightforward: if a government doesn't represent the true values of a community, then the people will seek to overthrow it, both resistance to the government and the punishment of this resistance are legitimate.Footnote ⁵² Ultimately, the side that can gather the most support for their cause represents the genuine maximal values.Footnote ⁵³ Not only does this conception position war as the supreme adjudicator of maximal legitimacy, it also universalises this structure throughout all communities. While language and reason are desirable, ultimately, a ‘legitimate government’ is simply ‘one that can fight its own internal wars’.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Walzer, might may not be right, but it can determine collective meanings. At bottom Walzer presents an image in which the minimal rules necessary for his just war theory are generated through the coalescing of maximal moralities. Yet, these maximal moralities are themselves founded upon dual minimal foundations. To emerge, maximalism requires a universal conception of community (itself presupposing the member/stranger distinction) with war installed as the minimal arbiter of its authenticity.

Revelation and being

Despite these difficulties in the formulation of Walzer's moral schema, he could quite possibly dismiss this critique as irrelevant to his moral project. Indeed, ultimately we must assume that, for Walzer, it doesn't necessarily matter where morality comes from. What is important is that this is the moral world that we are currently living in; this morality is a palpable feature of the real world. As such, it is crucial that we examine how minimalism comes to us within this assumed real world structure. Walzer unveils minimalism by presenting us with the image of protesters in Prague during the Velvet Revolution of 1989 carrying signs demanding ‘truth’ and ‘justice’:

In this sense, Walzer describes minimalism as a form of temporal revelation; moral language reveals itself thinly on special occasions.Footnote ⁵⁶ In short, we know the minimal language when we see it on distinctive occasions like the Velvet Revolution. However, this is not an unproblematic concept in Walzer's linguistic theory, for minimal morality can never be actually revealed minimally, it can only be stated maximally. We can only express minimalism through a maximal dialect;

Walzer's exposition of minimalism is, in one sense, a restatement of his belief that minimalism comes from maximalism. However, in this case the emergence of minimalism does not revolve around the negotiation of common values between communities, as there is no dialogue between the protesters and the audience. Rather minimalism, here, constitutes an intimate, passive, and spontaneous recognition of minimal values through a foreign maximal language. The most striking example of this form of minimal manifestation is Walzer's conception of acts ‘that shock the moral conscience of mankind’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This depiction represents a shift in Walzer's conception of morality. No longer are we solely talking about the maximal morality that embodies a community's collective conscience. We are now discussing the possibility of universal conscience attentive to particular minimal values in specific instances. This image is unsurprising given Walzer's belief that the values underlying minimalism are attached to our sense of what it means to be human.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, minimalism does not represent a full bodied universal morality, however close to the bone. Instead what Walzer presents us with is a minimalism that is recognised within a particular maximalist expression and subsequently interpreted through an individual's own maximalist vocabulary. The second we recognise minimalism we have already begun to interpret it maximally. We may briefly join the minimal parade but we soon find ourselves back in our own maximalist one. As such, Walzer's theory presents us with a minimal morality inherent to the essence of mankind that, although silent and essentially unsayable, can be innately recognised in a myriad of maximal moral languages. Minimalism is a spark embedded in, and recognised through, maximalism that is instantly lost to a subsequent maximal morality as soon as we attempt to interpret it. In this sense, the war convention represents a form of maximalism that Walzer assumes to contain minimalism that is recognisable to others. If the assumed minimalism of just war theory was not recognisable to others then it could no longer be depicted as an enforceable set of rules between communities, thereby nullifying its salience as a common morality of war.

Ultimately, for Walzer, what is universal is not a minimal language but our ability to recognise minimal values, and this recognition is possible because we are all human beings. Therefore, to understand the revelation of minimal morality we must investigate his conception of the individual consciences that comprise the collective through his analysis of being. Walzer describes being as an ordered self and signals his intention to challenge religious conceptions of self, which suggest God has placed a singular conscience in all of humanity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Walzer conceives this ordered self to be, what he calls, a complex maximalist whole, internally divided in interests but not utterly fragmented.Footnote ⁶¹ Walzer describes being as a thickly populated circle with a core ‘I’ surrounded by its self-critics. This ‘I’ is characterised as a newly elected president, capable of summoning advisors, forming a cabinet, and manoeuvring between its constituent parts.Footnote ⁶² Although Walzer is keen to stress the maximalist character of being, Pin-Fat is quick to remind us that the structure of Walzer's being is universal; all human beings are like this.Footnote ⁶³ In short, every being is comprised by a president and its circle of self-critics. While Walzer wants to assure us that difference defines the heart of being, how this difference is structured is the same in every human. Walzer's being may be maximally constituted but its structure is minimally distributed. The structure of Walzer's being is, as Pin-Fat argues, sociohistorically pre-existent, it ‘is not dependent on time and place though its shape may be’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Walzer's universal structure of being mirrors his image of community. Although it is shaped by its internal critics (divided interests and specific sociocultural contexts), its organising principle is the same in all cases. Being's structure is dictated, a priori, in a minimal way. Being may be constituted by different presidents and different critics, but it is always already organised in this way. In Walzer's argument the maximally divided self is contingent upon a universal internal structure. In fact, Walzer's ordered self strikingly resembles his image of democracy: a group of particular interests bounded within secure space that are all afforded an equal opportunity to convince the community (in this case the sovereign ‘I’) that their interests should be adhered to. In this sense, Walzer's universal conception of being is endowed with a thoroughly maximalist character when judged by his own standards. Importantly, we must assume that this structure makes temporal revelation possible, as this structure is the common element inherent in mankind that signifies the possibility of Walzer's collective conscience.

Différance and secular theology

Walzer's account of the minimal/maximal dichotomy brings us toward Derrida's conception of différance and the logic of the supplement. Différance is a play on the French word différer and its dual meaning, to differ and defer. Derrida argues that différance constitutes both a differing between meanings and a deferral of ultimate meaning; the delay inherent in signification and the difference that founds oppositional concepts. Derrida asserts that self-present meaning is the ideal of Western metaphysics, however, it proves impossible because différance inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and present.Footnote ⁶⁵ He contends that, in language, the sign, which is a representation of the thing, stands in place of the thing to preserve the thing's presence, but in doing so heralds the disappearance of the thing's natural presence, ‘that what opens up meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For instance, in Walzer's model we can only recognise minimal morality through maximal morality, yet, the second we try to interpret minimal morality it is always already transformed into maximalism. As such, Derrida insists that every search for an origin, like our search for the origins of maximalism and minimalism, will find a non-origin; invariably what we will discover is not a singular starting point but a chain of supplements with meaning already contested at its roots.Footnote ⁶⁷

In Walzer's case the thick and thin worlds are supplements for each other. In the first instance we are told that minimalism is only possible through the existence of maximalism. However, as highlighted in our discussion on the origin of maximalism, the only way a maximal morality is possible is via the pre-existence of minimal structures. Yet, in the second instance, when we looked at the process of minimal revelation, we found that, not only was maximal expression necessary for the recognition of minimalism, but the universal way that being interprets the moral world also relies on a form of internal maximalism. Walzer wants to present a theory in which maximal morality allows for the emergence of minimal morality. Yet, as has been demonstrated, Walzer's maximalism cannot be founded without the bedrock of minimal structures. Although minimal structures threaten to usurp the primacy of maximalism in Walzer's theory, they remain necessary for maximalism to emerge ‘a terrifying menace, the supplement is also the first and surest protection against this very menace. This is why it cannot be given up.’Footnote ⁶⁸ And, in turn, the revelation of minimalism is itself dependent on both external and internal forms of maximalism.

Not only does Walzer's conception of minimal morality display logical inconsistencies, it is also displays, in certain ways, the characteristics of a theological model. In Walzer's depiction of minimal morality, minimal values are unveiled to us as a spark of recognition from within maximal expression that is subsequently inexpressible as minimal morality. As such, minimalism is eternally silent without the possibility of language or expression. Minimalism, in this sense, represents a secret revelation within being that can never be outwardly expressed in its authentic form. Derrida expands on this theme when discussing Kierkegaard's image of subjectivity; ‘God is in me, he is the absolute “me” or “self”, he is the structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity.’Footnote ⁶⁹

This structure is of seminal importance to Walzer's conception of being. We never see being's internal mechanics, the presidential ‘I’, how it calls its cabinet together and how it recognises minimalism in maximal language. As Walzer himself acknowledges, ‘the production and reproduction of selves, and even self-critics is a great mystery’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The recognition of minimalism in maximal expression is not simply a mechanic of translating a foreign maximalism to a domestic one as Walzer maintains in regard to rights discourse. Whereas translation requires a competent understanding of both languages, minimalism does not. In fact, the identification of minimal morality requires something that exists outside language to enable translation. It requires the recognition of something common to both languages but inexpressible in either. It is only by assuming that the minimal value is recognised by everyone, both members and strangers, that maximal translation becomes possible. Walzer's inside-of-being, that can enforce the minimal standard of morality,Footnote ⁷¹ can only do so in secret. Walzer's theory is predicated upon faith in our ability to recognise unavowable minimal values, internally and in secret. Faith, Derrida argues, signifies ‘acquiescing to the testimony of the other – of the utterly other who is inaccessible in its absolute source’, and, as such, acts of faith exceed all proof of knowledge.Footnote ⁷² In Walzer's case, minimalism is this other that is inaccessible in its absolute source, and, as such, faith that minimalism is authentically recognised in maximal expression exceeds all ontological proof. Without this faith, minimalism could not possibly exist.

This takes us to the crux of what I call Walzer's secular theology. Walzer requires minimalism in order to defend the type of universalism necessary for his theory of just war. However, minimalism, as described by Walzer, is only possible through a movement of faith; faith that minimal values can be recognised, and indeed are recognisable, within maximal expression. In short, Walzer once again argues that the real world is this way, and therefore, must be this way. He weaves an onto-theological narrative that installs the language of just war as a universalised moral code and grounds this code on the presumed presence of minimal morality in just war's maximal codifications. And yet, this discourse cannot appear in the minimal dialect that Walzer requires, and is, as such, a groundless foundation. Walzer recounts the myth that minimal morality is grounded upon maximal moralities, nonetheless, we never see or hear minimalism, which, in truth, exists nowhere. Furthermore, we never see the internal mechanics of being that reveal the minimal spark in the maximal word. Walzer's minimal morality shares the characteristics of différance: its meaning is constantly differing across maximal moralities with its authentic meaning perpetually deferred. Therefore, it is only through a movement of faith that Walzer can claim that inarticulate minimal morality is authentically present in the mediating language of just war. To make sense Walzer must declare that minimal morality can be, and is, present in the maximal language of just war. As such, Walzer's theory requires us to have faith that minimal morality exists, and faith that it is authentically expressed in the war convention.

How then does this theology posit Walzer's absolute values: life and liberty? How does he expound such fundamental tenets of the just war creed? When pushed, Walzer declares that these values should be treated as negative prohibitions, for example, prohibiting murder and enslavement.Footnote ⁷³ However, these are the very prohibitions that are placed at risk during wartime; lives are placed on the line and freedom comes into question. Indeed, Walzer argues that the fundamental crime of war is that it forces men and women to risk their lives in defence of their rights.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this sense, war must necessarily risk sacrificing that which Walzer's theory holds as absolute. The purpose of the next section will be to address the prefix of ‘something like’ that Walzer affixes to his description of life and liberty. This prefix designates the possibility that absolute prohibitions can be revoked, or in his terms forfeited.

Sacrificing the other

As outlined, Walzer's conception of ethical responsibility in war is predicated upon on the risk of absolute sacrifice. In short, during wartime the rights of life and liberty must be risked; minimal morality must be risked in its own defence. For Derrida, ethical responsibility articulates a sacrificial relation between the self and the other. This relation is unpacked within the context of death and singularity and, specifically, Derrida's conceptualisation of Se Donner la Mort [The Gift of Death];

Expanding upon Heideggerean themes of death and being, Derrida argues that death signifies the locus of singularity; death is ‘the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Responsibility, in Derrida's analysis, stems from the Levinasian contestation of Heidegger's conception of the Dasein.Footnote ⁷⁷ While Heidegger's Dasein receives the call to responsibility from nowhere but itself, Levinas maintains that it is because the other is mortal, that my responsibility is singular and irreducible. Essentially, Levinas is arguing that without the visible mortality of the other, the singularity of the Dasein would remain hidden. In this way, the mortality of the self can only be known through the death of the other; ‘Death, source of all myths, is present only in the Other, and only in him does it summon me urgently to my final essence, to my responsibility.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Without witnessing the other's death, the imminence of my own death would remain unknown. As such, the call of the other is simultaneously the call to responsibility. For Derrida, freedom and responsibility reside in my ability to offer the gift of what is absolutely mine, my death, to the other.Footnote ⁷⁹ In this conception of responsibility the relation with death is no longer conceived as the simple passage of being into nothingness, but the possibility of dying for the other in the ethical dimension of sacrifice.Footnote ⁸⁰ Being does not exist as a singularity-in-itself-unto-death, being exists as singularity only by virtue of the singular mortality of the other. This relation is what Nancy defines as comperance, a being-in-common of singularities, that appear together as finite beings, mutually co-dependent, and, therefore, mutually responsible for each other's survival.Footnote ⁸¹

Reinscribing being's relation to death as a principle of ethical sacrifice adds a supplementary role to the concept of the gift of death; ‘Se Donner la Mort also means to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it.’Footnote ⁸² In other words, the gift of death is a sacrificial operation in which one singularity offers its singular irreducible property, its death, in the name of another singularity. The ethical sacrifice provides meaning for death in terms of a gift; I give what is irrevocably mine in the name of an-other. However, it is precisely because of this dimension of sacrifice that ethical responsibility risks being touched by irresponsibility. In Derrida's terms it ‘propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice’.Footnote ⁸³ This is because there are other others, an infinite number of them, and, as such, the same general or universal responsibility that binds me to the other in the singular sense, binds me absolutely to all the others. As Derrida states;

Here Derrida is drawing recourse to Kierkegaard's reading of the biblical tale of the Binding of Isaac.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Kierkegaard's understanding of the story, Abraham is commanded by God (the absolute) to sacrifice his only legitimate male heir, Isaac, for a reason that God keeps secret from Abraham. In this sense, the moral, and indeed morality, of Kierkegaard's reading is that an individual cannot be absolutely responsible without sacrificing his responsibility to the ethical.Footnote ⁸⁶ Essentially, Abraham must commit the barbaric murder of the person he loves most in the name of the secret command of the absolute. He must sacrifice his ethical bond in order to prove his absolute fidelity.

Derrida's understanding of ethics transforms this relation with the absolute. Because the other is absolutely singular, my responsibility to the singular other is also absolute. However, because my responsibility is conditioned solely by the fact that the other is mortal, my responsibility to the generality of others is unlimited. Nevertheless, I can only act in the singular sense, for example, to intervene or respond on behalf of this individual or these individuals. Therefore, I cannot respond to this singular other or these particular others without sacrificing my duty to respond to every-other in similar or differential positions of peril at the same instant. In this way, the generality of responsibility is complicated by the singularity of action; ethical responsibility entails a necessary dimension of irresponsibility, a dimension of sacrifice.

Recalling Walzer's conception of ethical responsibility in war, we can note that there are a number of similarities to the Abrahamic paradox. Walzer argues that in war we must necessarily risk lives in the defence of rights. However, the right to life is itself absolute (ultra-minimal) in Walzer's conception of rights. As such, the absolute as ultra-minimal rights must be risked in their own defence. Yet, in juxtaposition to Derrida and Kierkegaard's understandings of sacrifice, Walzer is adamant that the paradoxical sacrifice is justified; justice in war can be guaranteed by upholding the rights of life and liberty.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this sense, the purpose of the following analysis is to examine how Walzer demonstrates that certain killings within war can take place without constituting the sacrifice of the absolute right to life. Our purpose is to understand how Walzer attempts to construct the sacrifices demanded by just war as ethical.

Life and liberty during wartime

Walzer argues that war can be distinguished from murder and massacre only when restrictions are placed on its reach;Footnote ⁸⁹

The war convention, then, is premised upon the notion that the ‘innocent’ cannot become the legitimate targets of acts of war. This premise is fundamentally intertwined with the combatant/noncombatant distinction, which founds Walzer's rules of war;

In Derrida's terms our responsibility to protect the rights of non-combatants can only be achieved by neglecting our responsibility to protect the lives of combatants. However, for Walzer, this sacrifice is deemed to occur outside the boundaries of rights; we can kill combatants without sacrificing their rights. As such, we must investigate how this sacrifice is justified, and what combatants have done to lose their rights. In Walzer's terms, we must clarify the meaning of this forfeiture.Footnote ⁹²

Walzer contends that the term innocent describes people ‘that have done nothing, and are doing nothing, that entails the loss of their rights’.Footnote ⁹³ Walzer argues that non-combatants are to be considered immune from targeting during war because ‘they are not currently engaged in the business of war … connecting immunity from attack with military disengagement’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The link between non-innocenceFootnote ⁹⁵ and action is clear. It is only when an individual actively engages in the military effort that they can be legitimately killed during wartime. Ultimately, for Walzer, the war convention ‘rests more deeply on a certain view of noncombatants, which holds that they are men and women with rights and that they cannot be used for some military purpose’.Footnote ⁹⁶ As such, conventional warsFootnote ⁹⁷ can only be justified if the innocent are protected against harm and we refuse to make them into legitimate instruments of attack.

On the opposite side of this spectrum, the right of combatants to kill and be killed is enshrined in the war convention; ‘The immediate problem is that the soldiers who do the fighting, though they can rarely said to have chosen to fight, lose the rights they are supposedly defending.’Footnote ⁹⁸ However, the withdrawal of combatants' rights is simultaneously supplemented by a new set of rights and obligations, primarily the equal right to kill.Footnote ⁹⁹ Walzer argues that soldiers gain war rights that are grounded on moral equality; ‘Neither man is a criminal, and so both can act in self-defence. We call them murderers only when they take aim at non-combatants, innocent bystanders (civilians), wounded or disarmed soldiers.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This conception of combatant rights is essential for Walzer's separation of jus in bello (just recourse to war) from jus ad bellum (just fighting in war). It is only by arguing that the crime of war is the specific crime of the political leaders of the aggressor state,Footnote ¹⁰¹ that Walzer can absolve aggressor combatants of any criminal wrongdoing in the crime of aggression.Footnote ¹⁰² As such, both aggressor combatants and resisting combatants face each other as mutually innocent of the crime of war, and therefore, morally equal. Yet, this presents us with an interesting problem: combatants, although exempt from the crime of war, cannot be wholly innocent or else their rights could not be forfeit. Hence, we must ask how Walzer justifies the loss of soldiers' rights.

Walzer offers two primary justifications for combatants' loss of rights:Footnote ¹⁰³

It is important to analyse these two justifications in turn paying specific attention to the acts committed by combatants that have resulted in their loss of rights. For if soldiers are destined for dangerous places,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and their slaughter is to be presented as moral,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ then Walzer must offer clear and distinct evidence of the acts through which soldiers surrender their rights.

The first justification revolves around the act of fighting. Because combatants are in the business of fighting, they can legitimately be attacked in self defence. However, this justification is almost immediately placed in a precarious position when Walzer asserts that soldiers do not regain their rights simply by not fighting.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This justification proves more problematic still when considered in conjunction with Walzer's stipulation that soldiers cannot be attacked if they are captured. Under this stipulation, although the combatant regains their right to life (in the strict sense that they cannot be directly killed), their right to liberty is fundamentally curtailed. Walzer's accompanying argument that soldiers are immune from attack if they are wounded implies that the soldier can be legitimately targeted once more, when they return to active duty. Immunity (and the associated return to rights), in this sense, is only a temporary duress between sacrificial deployments. As such, combatants are liable for attack whenever they are present on the battlefield. However, they can permanently regain their immunity against attack when they are definitively decommissioned.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As such, Walzer's first justification needs to be re-read as ‘Simply by fighting in the first instance … they have lost their title to life and liberty so long as they remain on the battlefield.’ This brings us to the question of how soldiers come to fight in the first instance, a question that will be addressed shortly.

The second justification rests on the assertion that the combatant is a ‘dangerous man’, and further, still that he has allowed himself to be made into a dangerous man.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bracketing off the question of the allowed for a moment, a question that is implicitly linked to the soldier fighting in the first instance, let us turn our attention to Walzer's understanding of threat. Walzer's argument hinges on the threat posed by the soldier. The soldier is a fighter and is, therefore, to be treated as a menacing instrument of war; a legitimate target of attack. In fact, Walzer very clearly asserts that the threat posed by the enemy conditions our response.Footnote ¹¹² Walzer links the right to life to non-threatening activities arguing that it is only when the soldier tries to kill me that he alienates himself from me and our common humanity.Footnote ¹¹³ However, Walzer refuses to elaborate further on what it means to be threatened in relation to combatants, simply asserting that ‘the threatening character of soldier's activities is a matter of fact’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ While it may seem unsatisfactory for Walzer to base such an important component of his theory on what remains, for all practical purposes, a tacit assumption. Nevertheless, Walzer does provide an in-depth discussion of the question of threat in relation to the concept of pre-emptive war. Although, it must be noted that linking the ad bellum rights of states in this regard to the in bello rights of combatants is a deviation from the strict separation Walzer seeks to employ. The fact that the rights of states, for Walzer, ultimately derive from the rights of the individuals that comprise a state,Footnote ¹¹⁵ allow us some scope for transference in the absence of an exposition of individual threat. In short: if states' rights derive from individual rights, then surely individuals must be afforded the same protections of these rights?Footnote ¹¹⁶

Understanding that claims of threat can be employed fallaciously for strategic ends, Walzer signals his intention to define the non-arbitrary standards of what it means to be threatened.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Walzer argues that there is an objective standard of ‘just fear’;

Walzer expands upon this definition by arguing that threat must be offered in some material sense; that we must wait for some wilful act of the adversary.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He concludes this discussion on threat by stressing that ‘the idea of being under threat focuses on what we had best call simply the present’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Walzer argues that this conception of threat helps us to distinguish between those who can be described as present instruments of an aggressive intention, and those who may represent a distant danger.Footnote ¹²¹ To summarise, threat is when a material offering of injury is declared and intended in the present. How then does this conception of threat relate to the danger posed by combatants?

Following from Walzer's objective definition of threat we would assume that a soldier can only be attacked if he is presently offering a clear and intentional declaration to injure his adversary. However, this is a principle that Walzer adamantly rejects when he presents us with the figure of the naked soldier, as recounted by Robert Graves;

Although Walzer stresses the moral dilemmas involved in killing such soldiers, he concludes by definitively asserting that the killing of the naked soldier is justified; ‘Yet it [killing the naked soldier] is justified, as most of the soldiers in the five stories understand.’Footnote ¹²³ As such, the definition of threat applicable to combatants is detached from their present action. It is based upon their past actions, that they became soldiers, and their assumed future actions, that they will injure (or at least aim to injure) their adversaries in the future. The assumption that combatants will act dangerously in the future belies Walzer's depiction of a material offering of threat. Further to this an assumed future threat could be applied to any number of non-combatants, and Walzer is highly critical of such forward thinking for this reason.Footnote ¹²⁴

Fighting in the first instance

Ultimately combatants are seen as fundamentally different from other individuals in Walzer's theory; in Bulls terms Walzer refuses to conceive them simply as human.Footnote ¹²⁵ It is only because of this crucial distinction between the limited threat posed by the identifiable actions of non-combatants in the present, and the matter of fact, threat posed by combatants in the present and future of a given war, that allow soldiers to be ethically sacrificed. It is not the activity of the soldier that constitutes a threat worthy of the forfeiture of rights. It is because the soldier is a soldier that his threat is illimitable within a particular war;

Because it is the combatant's class that sets them apart from the innocent, transforms the nature of their threat, and places them into a position where they fight in the first instance, it is crucial that we investigate how a civilian becomes a combatant and thereby forfeits their rights in war. The act of becoming a combatant takes us to the crux of the Abrahamic sacrifice. It is an important point at which Walzer's desire to justify war, and to guarantee justice within war, bump against each other. As previously stated, Walzer's justification for the loss of rights is dependent on an individual's actions, in this case the soldier allowing himself to be made into a dangerous man. It is therefore surprising that Walzer begins his discussion on war by asserting that soldiers do not fight freely; ‘we assume that his commitment is to the safety of his country, that he fights only when it is threatened, and that he has to fight (he has been ‘put to it’): it is his duty and not a free choice’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Walzer argues that soldiers do not choose to fight, and ‘this is equally true whether the army is raised by voluntary enlistment or conscription’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed, he even maintains that mercenaries do not fight freely if they fight due to economic necessity.Footnote ¹²⁹ Walzer sums up the tyranny in stark terms;

Paying particular attention to Walzer's choice of terms lets us reflect upon the act of citizens becoming soldiers. In Walzer's theory, a free citizen loses their rights through the act of becoming a soldier, thereby becoming a dangerous man. However, this act is, in Walzer's view, not a free choice. It is not an activity of a soldier's own choosing, therefore, its integrity as an act justifying the loss of a combatant's rights is compromised. If we recall Walzer's two absolute rights, life and liberty, surely the forced enlistment of soldiers, whether by moral obligation or legal duty, constitutes a breach of the latter right? In fact Walzer clearly states that ‘soldiers would almost certainly be nonparticipants if they could’.Footnote ¹³¹ Therefore, Walzer's justification for the killing of combatants hinges upon a prior violation of their absolute right to liberty, for which no justification is given. Prior to enlistment, combatants are non-combatants, innocent and immune from attack. It is only when they are forced to enter the battlefield that they are transformed into legitimate targets. Their loss of rights is not a result of their actions. It is a result of the actions of their own state and its adversary. They did not choose to start the war and they did not freely choose to fight in it. They are what Walzer describes as ‘coerced moral agents’ whose acts are not entirely their own.Footnote ¹³²

Nevertheless, Walzer cannot reverse his contention that soldiers do not fight freely, for to do so would implicate combatants in the justness of their cause, thus eliminating the moral equality of soldiers. It is only because soldiers do not fight freely that war is not their crime. If this condition were to be reversed we could only justify killing in the name of just ends.Footnote ¹³³ Walzer clearly does not want or intend to produce such an argument, an argument that he maintains would create ‘a new class of generally inadmissible acts and of quasi-rights, subject to piecemeal erosion by soldiers whose cause is just – or by soldiers who believe that their cause is just’.Footnote ¹³⁴ The moral equality of soldiers is imperative to Walzer's theory, to his separation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, and to the foundation of his war convention. Yet, this imperative can only be founded through the unjustified erosion of combatants' right to liberty. Combatants can only be justifiably killed in war because they have forfeited their rights due to identifiable actions. However, this justification is premised upon the unjustified revocation of combatants' absolute right to liberty. Rights are sacrificed in their own defence.

Walzer's desire is to construct the death of combatants as a noble sacrifice; their lives are given in the service of rights, and innocent civilians. Yet, as elaborated in the previous section, the notion of this death as given or offered by combatants rests on a paradoxical argument. Soldiers give their lives in the name of rights but they do not fight freely. For Derrida, Se Donner la Mort implies that the gift only remains a gift when dying remains the singular property of individual. Conversely, the war convention offers soldiers' lives as a sacrifice in the name of rights it claims to protect, thereby aiming to usurp the combatant's irreplaceable gift. Walzer thrusts the state into the role of Abraham. Commanded by a secret absolute, the minimalism underpinning maximal rights, the state offers its sons' and daughters' lives in the defence of rights. In Walzer's theory, our metaphorical Abraham takes Isaac to Mount Moriah and binds him to the role of combatant, guided by the secret voice of minimalism. The blade is held over Isaac's head when the state declares war, and yet, no dive profession can justify the sacrifice. The absolute, Walzer's rights of life and liberty, will unavoidably and unjustifiably be sacrificed in their own defence.