THE ETHICS OF WAR

Nigel Biggar was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, and Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford. Here are some of his thoughts from his 2013 book, In Defence of War.

“This is the dilemma: on the one hand going to war causes terrible evils, but on the other hand not going to war permits them. Whichever horn one chooses to sit on, the sitting should not be comfortable. Allowing evils to happen is not necessarily innocent, any more than actually causing them is necessarily culpable. Omission and commission are equally obliged to give an account of themselves. Both stand in need of moral justification.

There has to be a better way to respond to grave injustice than by waging war, if one adopts something like Rousseau’s faith in human nature. In this view, human beings are basically well intentioned and only do wicked things to other people because they themselves have been victim to a distorting social or political or historical environment. The way to get them to stop doing wicked things, therefore, is by reasoning with them sympathetically and patiently, even to the extent of addressing their legitimate grievances. We are often implicated in each other’s sins. Nevertheless, victims, too, retain moral responsibility, which obliges them to proportion their justified resentment and retaliation, and to restrain the latter from waxing into fresh forms of injustice. Besides, not all abuse perpetrated by one human being against another is motivated by a sense of outraged innocence. Sometimes it is motivated by the sheer pleasure of domination or by the self-exonerating need for a racial scapegoat. It seems empirically self-evident to me that not all human beings are well-motivated or well-intentioned. We are also creatures of passion and can lose the ability to contain ourselves out of respect for justice toward others. I do not suppose that the perpetrators of grave and persistent injustice can always be deflected from their course by ever more patient reasoning. I do not believe that there always has to be an available pacific solution. There is the virus of wishful thinking.

I do not believe that all war may be avoided. I do not believe that international conflict is always the product of a failure of understanding or that it is always the equal responsibility of all parties. Nor do I believe that every international player always negotiates in good faith. Sometimes conflict is decisively the fruit of one party’s greed for power or ethnic contempt or delusory paranoia or fetid resentment; and sometimes it bursts into open warfare because that party really is not open to persuasion or to honest negotiation. Some people really do not want peace. Or at least, they do not want it enough. Or they want it only on their own, seriously unjust terms.

As I believe in the fact of gross and intractable wickedness, so I believe that punishment is necessary and that it has a basic, broadly retributable dimension. Retribution is important because wrongdoing needs to be contradicted, fended off, reversed. Not to contradict it and fend it off and try to reverse it is to imply that it does not matter, and, therefore, that its victims do not matter. Just war is an extreme form of retributive punishment. Human experience teaches that wickedness, unpunished, tends to wax. Human wickedness is excited, not sickened, by impunity (exemption from punishment). There is no reason in principle, nor any in practice, why it could not come to achieve global dominance. That is why effective retribution is so important.”