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28 results

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  • On Reciprocity and Practical Morality: A Response to Sagan and Valentino

  • Michael Walzer
  • Journal:
    Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 33 / Issue 4 / Winter 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    06 December 2019, pp. 445-450

  • The findings reported in the article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” by Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino, are indeed disturbing, but I am not convinced that they tell us all we need to know about public attitudes. Different questions, those that invite respondents to reflect on the reciprocal nature of practical morality (exemplified by the golden rule: “Do unto others . . .”), might reveal very different views of justified and unjustified conduct in war. I believe that these views, regarding, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war, would probably support the idea of the moral equality of soldiers on the battlefield.

Soft War
  • The Ethics of Unarmed Conflict
  • Edited by Michael L. Gross, Tamar Meisels
  • Foreword by Michael Walzer
  • Published online:
    20 June 2017
    Print publication:
    09 June 2017
  • Just war theory focuses primarily on bodily harm, such as killing, maiming, and torture, while other harms are often largely overlooked. At the same time, contemporary international conflicts increasingly involve the use of unarmed tactics, employing 'softer' alternatives or supplements to kinetic power that have not been sufficiently addressed by the ethics of war or international law. Soft war tactics include cyber-warfare and economic sanctions, media warfare, and propaganda, as well as non-violent resistance as it plays out in civil disobedience, boycotts, and 'lawfare.' While the just war tradition has much to say about 'hard' war - bullets, bombs, and bayonets - it is virtually silent on the subject of 'soft' war. Soft War: The Ethics of Unarmed Conflict illuminates this neglected aspect of international conflict.

  • 1 - The Strangeness of Jewish Leftism

  • from PART ONE - POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF JUDAISM
  • Edited by Jack Jacobs
  • Book:
    Jews and Leftist Politics
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    24 March 2017, pp 29-40

  • Summary

    I have tried to think about what a keynote address should be like, and in line with my sense of what is appropriate here, I will talk about a subject that occurs first in the story of Jewish leftism, both logically and chronologically. My subject is the difficult, problematic relation of Jewish leftism to the religion of the Jews. We (leftists) started from the religious world – there was no other place – and it was not an easy start.

    Many people have pretended that it was easy; they try to find reasons for the Jewish predilection for left politics in Judaism itself: Pesach as a celebration of national liberation, Hanukka as a celebration of religious freedom, the prophets as social critics and advocates of social justice, tzedakah as a commitment to the most vulnerable members of society. There is something to say in favor of this view of our religion, but not enough to explain Jewish leftism. Certainly the holidays, in their Orthodox versions, carry a message very different from the one we were taught in Reform and liberal–left households: Pesach celebrates a liberation at the hand of God and God alone; the people of Israel did nothing to free themselves; this was a liberation without human agency, which is the absolutely essential feature of any left politics (of any politics, actually). And the leaders of the Maccabean revolt were religious zealots; they were opposed indeed to the imposition of an imperial, Hellenistic religion; they fought for the freedom to impose their own orthodoxy on their own people; they were closer in spirit, I dare say, to the Taliban than to the Labor Zionists. The prophets, in the texts we love to quote, were magnificent social critics and advocates of social justice, but there are many texts that we do not love to quote. And the practice of tzedakah in the old kehillot, which certainly made for a kind of welfarism, did not interfere at all with the oligarchies that ruled in each kahal. In fact, traditional Judaism offers precious little support to a left political orientation.

    Hence the strangeness of Jewish leftism, for which centuries of religious life did not prepare us.

  • A Response

  • Michael Walzer
  • Journal:
    Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 11 / March 1997
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 September 2012, pp. 99-104

  • Responding to the critiques of the four previous authors, Walzer opens with a statement of the inherent imperfection of any theory of war. He reminds us that theories are merely frameworks for decisions and cannot provide answers in and of themselves. Moral decisions in war are especially difficult, for it is often necessary to choose between equally valid claims. Walzer continues the discussion of sieges initiated by both Koontz and Boyle and concedes the validity of Koontz's criticism of inconsistency in his theory of noncombatant immunity. Addressing the different authors' moral doctrines–Hendrickson's consequentialism and Koontz's and Boyle's deontology–Walzer argues that it is better to judge each case individually, weighing both the consequences and principles, rather than strictly adhere to one moral doctrine, an approach commended by Smith. Finally, in the search for a perfect just war theory, Walzer issues a realist reminder that there can be no such thing as a morally perfect war.

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