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Utilitarianism and Recourse to War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

WILLIAM H. SHAW
WILLIAM H. SHAW*
Affiliation:
San Jose State [email protected]
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Abstract

Despite the enormous impact that war and the threat of war have had on human well-being, utilitarians have had surprisingly little to say about when, if ever, we may fight wars. Discussion of this question has been dominated by realism, pacifism and just war theory. This article takes some preliminary steps toward remedying this situation. I begin by spelling out what I call the Utilitarian War Principle (UWP). After presenting some considerations in its favour and answering some possible objections to it, I compare UWP with pacifism and with the principles of jus ad bellum found in the work of contemporary just war theorists. I argue that adherents of UWP should treat those principles as secondary moral principles, which, although subordinate to UWP, can and should guide its application and which, in turn, should be refined and revised with this goal in mind.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 380 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 See, for instance, Brian Orend, ‘War’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at <http://www.plato.stanford.edu>, and Lackey, Douglas P., The Ethics of War and Peace (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1989)Google Scholar.

2 This neglect of, or hostility towards, consequentialism was by no means theoretically preordained. The classical just war theorists were writing before philosophers distinguished between consequentialism and non-consequentialism, and, as will become evident in the discussion below, there are significant consequentialist strands within just war theory itself.

3 Two noteworthy exceptions are Brandt, Richard B., ‘Utilitarianism and the Rules of War’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1.2 (1972), pp. 145–65Google Scholar, and Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ‘Preventive War – What Is It Good For?’, Preemption: Military Action and Moral Justification, ed. Shue, Henry and Rodin, David (Oxford, 2007), pp. 202–21Google Scholar. John Stuart Mill said some pertinent things about the justification of war in his essays ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ (1859) and ‘The Contest in America’ (1862). In a chapter of The Elements of Politics, 3rd edn. (London, 1908), Henry Sidgwick discusses the regulation of war.

4 Because, strictly speaking, states differ from nations, state is the proper term to use here. In this article, however, I forsake terminological purity for stylistic convenience and, like most writers, employ state, nation and country interchangeably.

5 Some utilitarians prefer to formulate their criterion of right in terms of actual outcomes, rather than expected outcomes. For various reasons, I prefer the expected-outcome standard, but the practical upshot of this intramural debate is not great. Because we lack omniscience and never know for certain what the outcomes of the actions open to us will be, actual-outcome utilitarians will say that the reasonable way for us to proceed is by trying to maximize expected well-being. For further discussion, see Shaw, William H., Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism (Oxford, 1999), pp. 27–31Google Scholar.

6 Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 1, and vol. 3, bk. 8, ch. 2.

7 See, more generally, Goodin, Robert E., Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For a presentation of this final criticism, see Coates, A. J., The Ethics of War (Manchester, 1997), pp. 173–5Google Scholar.

9 Contemporary philosophers typically distinguish three accounts (or types of accounts) of well-being: mental-state accounts, desire-satisfaction accounts and objective-list accounts.

10 Here it is worth bearing in mind Thomas Hurka's point that it is fallacious to maintain ‘that what cannot be measured precisely cannot be measured at all’. Hurka, Thomas, ‘Proportionality in the Morality of War’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 33.1 (2005), pp. 34–66, at 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 One who has is Bart Gruzalski. See his ‘Some Implications of Utilitarianism for Practical Ethics: the Case against the Military Response to Terrorism’, The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, ed. Henry R. West (Oxford, 2006), pp. 249–69.

12 R. M. Hare, for example, argued that although it is logically possible that slavery could be happiness maximizing, in the real world it never is. We therefore get better results if we teach people that slavery is categorically wrong and should always be resisted and if we internalize and act on that principle ourselves than we would get if we encouraged people (including ourselves) to weigh the consequences of each and every instance of slavery before deciding whether to oppose it. See Hare, R. M., ‘What is Wrong with Slavery’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 8.2 (1979), pp. 103–21Google Scholar.

13 In the final paragraph of ‘The Contest in America’, Mill writes, ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.’

14 Stuart Hampshire, ‘Russell, Radicalism, and Reason’, New York Review of Books, vol. xv, no. 6 (October 8, 1970), pp. 4–6, at 4.

15 See Orend, ‘War’; Lackey, Ethics of War and Peace; Coates, Ethics of War; Christopher, Paul, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues, 3rd edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar; Cook, Martin L., The Moral Warrior: Ethics and Service in the U.S. Military (Albany, 2004)Google Scholar; Dower, Nigel, The Ethics of War and Peace (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Fotion, Nicholas, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Guthrie, Charles and Quinlan, Michael, Just War: The Just War Tradition: Ethics in Modern Warfare (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Hartle, Anthony E., Moral Issues in Military Decision Making, 2nd edn. (Lawrence, 2004)Google Scholar; Johnson, James Turner, The War to Oust Saddam Hussein (Lanham, Md., 2005)Google Scholar; and Alexander Moseley, ‘Just War Theory’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at <http://www.iep.utm.edu>.

16 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), ch. 2, paragraph 24.

17 As things stand now, there is, writes George R. Lucas, Jr., ‘a disturbing looseness, ambiguity, and indeterminateness in the formulation and interpretation’ of the ad bellum principles. See his ‘“Methodological Anarchy” and the Case for Preventive War’, Gathering Threats: The Ethics of Preventive War, ed. Dean K. Chatterjee (Cambridge, forthcoming).

18 Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973), p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 This is similar to the two levels of moral thinking distinguished by Hare, R. M. in his Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For further discussion of the role of rules in utilitarian thinking, see Shaw, Contemporary Ethics, ch. 5.

20 For example, in a 1991 meeting with Vatican officials the leaders of Iraq's Christian churches defended, apparently in good faith, their country's invasion of Kuwait on just war grounds (Coates, Ethics of War, p. 152).

21 I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy and to thank my colleagues at the Center for many valuable and stimulating conversations on the ethics of war during the 2010–11 academic year. I also thank Dale Miller for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.