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Heartfelt truths: Towards an existentialist ethics of war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2022
Abstract
Just war theory appears ever more alienated from the practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. An increasingly abstract and esoteric discourse, it can seem very remote from the mud-and-blood actualities of warfare. This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the study of, on the one hand, the ethics of war, and, on the other, the lived experience of war. Seeking to address this problem, this article asks: How can we recentre just war thinking as a ‘lived’ theory? It proposes that we can reconnect just war theory to the lived experience of warfare by restoring its historical dialogue with existentialism. It develops this position by reading just war theory through the prism of Albert Camus's writings on political violence. It concludes that Camus's political thoughts provides a set of signposts for the development of a mode of just war theorising that places that the lived experience of warfare at the heart of our ethical thinking about war.
- Type
- Special Issue Article
- Information
- Review of International Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 5: Existentialism and International Politics , December 2023 , pp. 872 - 884
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association
References
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2 I use the term ‘Algerian’ loosely here, to note that both men hailed from the same part of the world.
3 This claim paraphrases William James: James, William, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1922), p. 20Google Scholar.
4 The place of the nuclear bomb in existentialist thought is tackled elsewhere in this Special Issue.
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11 See, for example, James K. A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2019).
12 Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of Saint John, ed. by Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2012). With thanks to Liane Hartnett for drawing my attention to this important point.
13 Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and their 19th Century Backgrounds (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), pp. 71–2.
14 Kierkegaard, a fervent admirer of Augustine, captures the gist of this idea nicely: ‘The crucial thing is to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.’ Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Early journal entries’, in Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds), The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 10.
15 Once again, Kierkegaard frames the concept: ‘When the question about truth is asked objectively, truth is reflected upon objectively as an object to which the knower relates himself. What is reflected upon is not the relation but that what he relates himself to is the truth … If only that to which he relates himself to is the truth … then the subject is in the truth. When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual's relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.’ Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Concluding unscientific postscript’, in Hong and Hong (eds), The Essential Kierkegaard, p. 206.
16 Augustine is credited with the authorship of 113 tracts, 300 letters, and approximately 8,000 sermons. What he had to say about just war is scattered across these various texts. See R. W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers (Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), p. 7.
17 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 50.
18 Ibid., p. 91.
19 Consider, for example, Augustine's famous statement that what is evil in war is not the fact that some people will be killed who would die anyway, but the desire for harming, the thirst for revenge, and the lust for dominating that it ignites in the breast of man. Augustine, ‘Against Faustus the Manichean [XXII.74]’, in Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrik Syse, and Endre Begby (eds), The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), p. 73.
20 This comports with the fact that the Augustine who wrote The City of God against the Pagans was of course the same person who wrote the Confessions. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).
21 Nahed Artoul Zehr, ‘James Turner Johnson’, in Daniel R. Brunstetter and Cian O'Driscoll (eds), Just War Thinkers: From Cicero to the 21st Century (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), p. 227.
22 James Turner Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 15
23 James Turner Johnson, The War to Oust Saddam Hussein: Just War and the New Face of Conflict (Lanham, MD; Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 35.
24 Andrew Fiala, for example, describes it as a dangerous form of ‘nostalgia’. Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusions of War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 41.
25 See, for example, Johnson's analysis of the role that the transmission and use of Augustine's just war writings, rather than the writings themselves, played in the development of the just war tradition. James Turner Johnson, ‘St Augustine’, in Brunstetter and O'Driscoll (eds), Just War Thinkers: From Cicero to the 21st Century, p. 22.
26 A notable exception here is: Valerie Morkevicius, ‘Looking inward together: Just war thinking and our shared moral emotions’, Ethics & International Affairs, 31:4 (2017), pp. 441–51.
27 Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 20.
28 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (5th edn, New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. xxvii.
29 Ibid., p. xxv.
30 Ibid., p. xxvi.
31 Ibid., p. xxiii.
32 Ibid., p. xxvii.
33 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (new edn, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 83–4.
34 Ibid., pp. 83–4.
35 Ibid., p. 85.
36 For a primer, see Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).
37 Specifically, they contest the relation Walzer assumes between just cause for war and collective liability to armed attack, the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants that goes with it, and the principle of non-combatant immunity that he champions. For more detail, see Jeff McMahan, ‘Just war’, in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2017), ch. 37.
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40 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 15.
41 Bertrand Russell's sketch of this form of theoretical activity is disclosive: ‘The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge.’ Quoted in Antony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 28.
42 Kierkegaard, ‘Concluding unscientific postscript’, p. 220.
43 Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 11.
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49 Quoted in Joanna Bourke, ‘Pugnacity, pain, and professionalism: British combat memoirs from Afghanistan, 2006–14’, in Philip Dwyer (ed.), War Stories: The War Memoir in History and Literature (New York, NY: Bergahn, 2018), pp. 286–7.
50 Quoted in Mark Willacy, Rogue Forces: An Explosive Insiders’ Account of Australian SAS War Crimes in Afghanistan (Sydney, Aus.: Simon & Schuster, 2021), p. 275.
51 The idea of rereading just war theory through the prism of Camus's writings on the absurd builds on the ground-breaking work of Liane Hartnett. In particular, see Liane Hartnett, ‘Love in a Time of Empire: An Engagement with the Political Thought of Tolstoy, Tagore, and Camus’ (PhD thesis, London School of Economics, UK), available at: {http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3889/}. It also draws on Liane Hartnett and Cian O'Driscoll, ‘Sad and laughable and strange: At war with just war’, Global Society, 35:1 (2021), pp. 27–44.
52 Jean Elshtain often treats Camus in conjunction with Augustine. Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, p. 6.
53 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century (London, UK: Peter Halban, 1989), pp. 136–8.
54 Stephen Eric Bronner, Camus: Portrait of a Moralist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. ix.
55 Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. by Benjamin Ivry (New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 1997), p. 379. Cooper dismisses Camus's credentials as an existentialist philosopher on the grounds that he was ‘neither a philosopher nor systematic’. David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999), p. 9.
56 John Cruickshank, ‘Introduction’, in Albert Camus, Caligula and Other Plays, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 20. See also Robert C. Solomon, Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 5–9.
57 Patrick McCarthy, Camus: A Critical Study of His Life and Work (London, UK: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), p. 73.
58 Todd, Albert Camus, pp. 43–4, 230.
59 Colin Davis, ‘Violence and ethics in Camus’, in Edward J. Hughes (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Camus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 108.
60 Albert Camus, ‘Neither victims nor executioners’, in Jacqueline Levi-Valensi (ed.), Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–47 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 259.
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67 Ibid., pp. 32–3, 35–9.
68 Ibid., pp. 31, 93.
69 Ibid., pp. 119–22.
70 Albert Camus, ‘Pessimism and courage’, in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. by Justin O'Brien (New York, NY: Vintage, 1995), p. 59.
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75 Camus, The Rebel, p. 28.
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83 Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living, p. 175.
84 See Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the guillotine’, in Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, p. 175–6.
85 Camus, ‘The just assassins’, p. 174.
86 Camus, Caligula and Other Plays, p. 186.
87 Ibid., p. 187.
88 Camus, The Rebel, p. 139.
89 Camus, Notebooks, 1942–51, p. 109.
90 Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture (7 December 1995), available at: {https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/lecture/} accessed 21 April 2021.
91 Camus, The Rebel, p. 12.