VANDA BOŽIČEVIĆ METZGER
The basis of this text is the argument I presented at the debate “Is there a just war?” organized by the Philosophy and Religion Department of Bergen Community College in New Jersey on November 30, 2023. It is a purely personal statement, somewhat modified through conversation with friends, not a summary of philosophical research.
Though the call for pacifism as a personal ethical and religious goal is certainly an inspiring vision, something we should all ultimately strive for, bearing in mind the state of the world we live in today, the more urgent is the call for universal anti-war pacifism, its proximal goal being cessation of present and prevention of any future armed conflicts. This, I believe, can only be achieved by abandoning the very idea of war as an acceptable means of resolving international conflicts.
Growing up in Europe where the memory of the WW2 was still very much alive, learning of its unbelievable atrocities and its human toll, I naively accepted as a truism that this experience will serve as a sufficient deterrent of any future war, that people will have finally clearly understood that no civilized, rational, not to mention empathic, beings could ever think of war as a justified collective venture. Of course, history has shaken me out of my naiveté, but I still believe universal pacifism is the only solution. I will support this position by several arguments along with some pragmatic considerations that recommend peaceful negotiations over armed conflict. Finally, I will try to refute two main counterarguments to pacifism⎯the argument from self-defense and the dismissal of universal pacifism as an unrealistic dream.
War violates the basic human right⎯the right to life
The right to life is unquestionably the basic human right, a precondition of any other rights we might have, so the moral prohibition against killing and its affirmative counterpart⎯the duty to save lives⎯are the corner stones of any code of ethics. There is a universal agreement that killing is the worst of harms, premeditated murder an evil act deserving the harshest of punishments, so war as a “massive, systematic and deliberate killing of human beings” represents a compounded if not the worst evil. Since our moral intuitions about the evil of deliberate killing are clear, it is those who justify killing in war who should carry the burden of proof.
Depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants
It is a clear moral imperative, famously endorsed by Kant, that other people should never be treated as means, that respect for our common humanity, our rationality and personhood of others should have priority over any other concern, therefore it should override any religious, economic, national or ethnic considerations. Respect for human life and our shared humanity is really a precondition of all other values. In war this moral imperative is being violated at all stages and for all the participants.
Since perpetual war is existentially untenable and peace necessarily the norm, any divergence from the norm requires justification. Preparation for any war on the side of the aggressor, as well as the justification of defense on the side under attack are, as a rule, in the service of political propaganda which, instead of presenting the situation in rational and realistic terms, aims at arousing passions and lowering the ability for critical thinking in the general populace. By often distorting and abusing historical, economic or current geo-political facts the propaganda’s goal is to create a partisan⎯us v. them mindset that will quash any dissenting opinion and give the party in power a free hand to make decisions on the part of their fellow citizens. So, at its very onset, even before armed conflict has begun, the means of war’s justification is the disrespect for the rationality of the fellow citizens and their autonomy in making critical judgments, until they are eventually reduced to a screaming mob that could easily be manipulated. Once historians, intelligentsia, journalists and artists, who could have acted as a controlling force, are neutralized by the propaganda, everyone is swept along in the hysteria of warmongering, or at least neutralized enough to ensure their silence.1
Once the propaganda manages to mold the perception of the opposing side as an existential threat, the next step is transforming those actively participating in the war into actual killers. Since most humans abhor killing and naturally feel empathy for other humans, in order to weaken the scruples and assuage possible guilt, the purpose of military training is to dehumanize the enemy in the eyes of the trainees, to condition them to overlook the personhood of enemy combatants and see them simply as targets, relying on crude generalizations that presume their guilt and evil intent.
The goal of military training is to likewise erase the personhood of those who have enlisted or who have been drafted, turning each soldier into an anonymous part of the collective, a cog in the war machine. The very fact that nation states usurp the right to conscript their citizens and punish them for defection, sometimes at the point of execution, implies their depersonalization, their treatment as a means. Soldiers who voluntarily join the military are expected, as part of the contract, to give up their autonomy to make personal decisions, agreeing in advance to follow the commands of their superiors, which undercuts their ability to be moral agents in the crucial scenarios where their moral character will be put to the test. Arguing that they are doing so of their own free will diminishes respect for soldiers as rational agents, since depriving oneself of one’s own freedom could hardly be seen as a free rational decision.
Depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants is a premise on which common military strategy operates. Planning military operations requires calculating the odds of winning and losing, presenting risks and effects on human lives as the number of possible casualties. Working out the proportionality requirement for a just war is immoral in principle: it is performed from the unjustified position of power over people’s lives on both sides of the conflict, the supremacist position that usurps the authority to decide about other people’s destiny, treating them simply as instruments of achieving the set military goal. It prioritizes the group’s agenda over the value of human lives on both sides of the conflict. Military strategists assign instrumental and numerical value of human lives based on a morbid hierarchy: at the bottom are the lives of enemy combatants treated as liable targets and basically having a negative value, since “eliminating” them is the desired goal. Even though the lives of “our boys” are nominally understood as valuable, they still enter into the calculation only as a number needed to achieve victory, often reduced to the sheer cannon fodder. And though military strategy technically aims to avoid casualties among the civilian population, such casualties are often foreseen and discounted as a necessary “collateral damage,” the very formulation revealing the obscenity of such reasoning.
While the depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants precedes the armed conflict, once the war campaign actually starts it brings about the brutalization of the soldiers who are turned into killers and forced to commit atrocities. In combat most moral concerns are put aside and survival takes priority. Freed from the burden of personal responsibility for their actions in war and operating under the motto “kill or be killed,” soldiers are capable of committing crimes such as causing needless civilian deaths and injuries, engaging in torture, rape, pillaging, destruction of infrastructure, actions they would have never dreamed of committing as civilians, actions they cannot come to terms with once they return to civilian life. After witnessing and most probably committing atrocities and possibly war crimes, after living under conditions where one’s life is constantly under threat, where all the conventions of civilian life are set aside, they have a hard time returning to normalcy. Having once lived and operated on the other side of the moral order, it is difficult for them to achieve a coherent world-view, even if they sincerely believed they fought on the side of good against the evil. A common defense strategy is blocking those experiences from awareness, refusing to talk about them, closing them off in some hidden and buried corner of their conscience. Veterans often succumb to addictions, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and other psychiatric conditions, the rate of suicide among them is one of the highest of all social groups. The baggage they bring from the war is a far cry from the myth of a just warrior perpetuated by the propaganda in order to entice young people to enlist, which they do without having the slightest idea of what they are getting themselves into.
The war brings about depersonalization and dehumanization not only to soldiers actively engaged in combat but also to noncombatants living in the war zone. When one finds oneself under the conditions of war where the only goal is survival, one’s being is reduced to one’s own flesh, while all other goals and interests that make us who we are get cast aside. With the exception of a few moral heroes, under the conditions of scarcity, where resources are limited and one’s life depends on obtaining them, solidarity and generosity commonly give way to selfishness, greediness, aggression.
In the territory where the war is fought, the basic conditions of communal life are obliterated. Thomas Hobbes hypothesized about the state of nature that supposedly preceded civil society, where everyone was in a state of war with everyone else, where people’s actions were not guided by any laws nor moral norms, where “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.” 2 Although Hobbes was wrong in presenting the state of nature as an actual historical account, he accurately describes life in the state of war. In the territory where the war is fought the basic fabric of social life is torn apart: electricity, water, and gas supplies are cut off, food stores are empty, schools and offices closed, public transportation is not working, medical offices and hospitals cannot provide health care. People are brought back to the state of nature, each man to himself fighting for survival. 3
It defies reason to think of a war as a possible, let alone justified way of resolving international conflicts
Hobbes was likewise right that living under the conditions of a permanent war is unacceptable for human beings as rational individuals, however, if we look at our history there has hardly been any period where some war somewhere was not going on.
Just as it is rational, on Hobbes’s account, for individuals to abide by contracts, moral rules and laws in order to enable peaceful communal life, it would be rational for the states, which lacking such contracts are still in the state of nature, to form such contracts and develop means of enforcing them. The existing laws that regulate armed conflicts and define war crimes as well as the UN peacekeeping forces have obviously been insufficient as a means of deterrence and enforcement of peace among nations or religious and ethnic groups, but as rational individuals we can surely realize the most urgent need to establish such laws as well as the efficient means of enforcing them.
In addition to the above arguments, peaceful resolution of conflicts is recommended by a number of pragmatic considerations, so let me mention a few.
Pragmatic reasons to reject war
Typically, each side participating in the war believes they have moral arguments on their side, that the war they are fighting is just. Even if one side is successful in meeting its goals, the other side necessarily loses which becomes the fertile ground for grievances, resentment and planting the seeds of the next conflict.
While wars are fought, they radicalize conflicts instead of resolving them, so when they eventually end they will have usually caused more harm than those who justified them in the beginning had predicted.
The usual justification that one side has to match military capacities of the other side, unless it wants to be conquered, leads to an unending arms race.
Wars end either when the stronger party wins confirming the principle that eventually might makes right, or they end with political negotiations, signing of peace treaties, resorting to contracts which should have been monitored for fairness and enforced by the UN in the first place, instead of letting the parties in conflict see the war as the necessary and/or the last resort.
After the war, we celebrate fostering solidarity and the heroism of the fallen, a thin layer of gauze covering the deep wounds that will take decades, if not centuries to heal. Scars of wars remain and what all groups involved in the conflict would need after the war is collective psychotherapy and mutual atonement for the crimes committed.
One could go on and list a series of other long-term disastrous consequences of war that each presents a strong case against it, such as the war’s economic impact, the destruction of resources that need huge investments and decades to overcome, the destruction of cultural heritage, the demographic impact⎯the dislocation of persons whose lives have been upended and who will suffer personal consequences for generations, masses of refugees that change and possibly disrupt the economic, cultural and political landscape people identify with and hold dear, war’s environmental impact, etc. etc. The list seems endless.
In conclusion, let me address the two usual arguments raised against anti-war pacifism: the strongest argument against it⎯that war is justified for self-defense⎯and the one that dismisses pacifism as an unrealistic fantasy.
The challenge of self-defense
The strongest argument against pacifism is of course the argument from self-defense: the right of a state, or an ethnic or religious group under attack to defend itself against its aggressors, against those who would violate the state’s sovereignty or present an existential threat to the group. The idea of the right to self-defense is derived from the basic human instinct for self-preservation, the situation when we are forced to defend our life from the one who unjustifiably threatens it. The problem with the application of this argument to the situation of war is that it extrapolates from a case of a personal attack to a broader case of an attack on a collective unit. While the whole war enterprise implies the depersonalization of both sides in a conflict, paradoxically, justification of the war is grounded on the scenario of a conflict between persons, treating the group as a person. In war, however, unless the atrocities have already started and unless we are already in the midst of battle, we are not defending ourselves against immediate peril from a concrete attacker whose guilt is directly witnessed. Killing in war is morally different from killing in the time of peace; it is impersonal, indiscriminate, on a far grander scale, so basing its justification on the attack that occurs on a personal level, where we are literally defending our own self, does not suffice.
Parties to the war conflict are organized social groups which put the group’s interest above the interest of its members. Although we often strongly identify with our social groups⎯our nation, our ethnicity or our religion⎯liberal principles⎯individual sovereignty and individual liberty⎯do not justify putting the interest of a group over the interest of a concrete individual. The life we are asked to put on the line for the protection of our group is ultimately our own individual life, the only one that we have.
Often the citizens of the state disagree with the causes of war and feel alienated from its political goals, or simply do not feel like putting their lives on the line for such goals.
Although in the world we currently live in the right of sovereign states to defend themselves is taken for granted, we should remind ourselves that nation states are not organic units; they are, as Yuval Noah Harari calls them, “fictions” that will historically dissolve just as they have historically emerged. What is morally relevant and nonnegotiable is the reality of human suffering which happens on the level of each individual person. Of course, in the world we currently live in, radical cases such as a looming genocide do not leave social groups with an alternative but to engage in an effort of self-preservation; however, what all our efforts should be focused on is to work on international laws that would prevent such scenarios.
Is pacifism unrealistic?
Bearing in mind such cases the eventual argument against pacifism is that it’s idealistic, detached from the reality of global politics and economy and, in a world where so many conflicts are brewing, simply impossible to implement. If we took this argument seriously and abandon the hope for permanent peace as an illusion, we are no better than those entering hell whom Dante wisely warned: “lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate.”4 It seems to me, on the contrary, that permanent peace IS the only realistic long-term solution, because all other so-called “solutions” only perpetuate the problem. When there is no solution to the problem at the current level, one needs to transcend that and find a solution at a higher level. What we need is putting all our efforts into raising humanity to the point from which wars would be just a distant memory, a primitive, barbaric and inhumane stage, a long-ago transcended period of human history.
Those who argue that universal pacifism is just a utopia should consider how today’s technology⎯airplanes, movies, cars, space explorations, internet and cell phones⎯were all pure science fiction not so long ago. Isn’t suggesting that a man could fly counter to physical evidence? If humanity was capable of such advancements in technology, why couldn’t we work on issues that are so much more important⎯literally issues of life and death⎯so that we can one day look back at the history of wars the way we look back at slavery, not really being able to imagine how people could possibly act this way toward others who are just like them⎯simply human.
- It is true that in densely populated, for thousands of years inhabited areas such as Europe or the Middle East where populations mix and rulers change, we do not have to get far into the past to discover past wrongs. However, instead of using these facts as an opportunity for education and mutual atonement, the wrongs that are committed and need to be avenged are always on “our” side.
- “In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13: “The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery.”
- Living under the conditions of war is actually worse than living in the state of nature, since hunter-gatherers could live peacefully in plentiful natural environment.
- “abandon all hope ye who enter”
