Is “better than war” good enough? New challenges in the ethics of war and peace

On 17 August, I took part in the New Zealand Centre for Global Studies’ 13th Annual Lecture, New Challenges in the Ethics of War and Peace, held in the beautiful old debating chamber at Parliament, in Wellington. Philosophy Teachers Aotearoa New Zealand partnered with the Centre for a conversation between Jeremy Moses from the University of Canterbury and myself, moderated by Anna Hood from the University of Auckland. Below is an edited version of what I talked about at the event. 

Old challenges, New Challenges

Before I talk about the new challenge, as I see it, we need to remember the old one. In the midst of the United States Civil War, the Union General William Sherman famously said: ‘I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.’

But the problem with war isn’t just that it’s hell for those, like Sherman, who fight it. It’s also hell for those who don’t: the innocent; people who have done nothing to make themselves liable to be attacked, terrorised, displaced, maimed, or killed.

That’s the starting point of the pacifist argument that I take seriously, one that rejects war as an acceptable means of obtaining peace because of the fundamental and widespread harm it does to innocent people. War can’t be justified simply by having a worthy cause. Whether or not a particular war can be justified at its outset, if it can’t be fought justly then it can’t be just at all.

High levels of civilian death are a defining feature of modern war. In earlier wars, even up to the Civil War, it wasn’t unusual for locals to watch battles from the sidelines. Modern war, industrialised, mass-mobilised war, changed that completely. In the 20th and 21st centuries, around half of all people killed in war have been civilians.

The pacifist challenge to the war machine isn’t based on sentimentality. It doesn’t see all violence as morally equivalent, nor is it blind to suffering. It’s based on the moral fact that if people haven’t forfeited their rights not to be harmed, then harming them requires an exceptionally demanding justification. The moral presumption must always be against violence.

This isn’t to say that political threats are never serious, nor that peace is easy, nor that evil should never be resisted. Whatever we think about military values, or the value of the military, or of war itself, we should all accept that the threshold for killing innocents is extraordinarily high. And the contingent facts about modern war give us strong reason to doubt that many, if any, actual wars meet that standard.

This is especially clear in urban warfare, which entangles military objectives and civilian life. Even when civilians are not directly targeted, they are predictably injured, killed, and deprived of ordinary life. Gaza is the most immediate example of a pattern that has repeated many times over.

A common response is to say that modern states don’t intend to kill innocents. Civilian deaths are regrettable, accidental. Collateral damage. But if innocent people are foreseeably killed as part of a military strategy, then their deaths count against the justification of that strategy. And they must be foreseeable, even if they’re accidental, because we know that war predictably kills innocents.

A victim’s complaint isn’t answered by being told that their death was unintended. What matters is not just what was intended, but also what was knowingly done, or knowingly risked. The victims of war are owed more than regret. They’re owed a justification. And the pacifist argument is that war very rarely, if ever, provides one.

That’s the old challenge inherited by the new technology. Before we can ask whether precise modern means of political violence such as drones, targeted killings, cyber operations, or AI-assisted weapons are preferable to war, we need to remember why war was morally problematic in the first place. The problem wasn’t simply that war produces bad consequences on a large scale, but also that it makes the harming of innocents central to its political action. So if new forms of political violence avoid the scale of war but retain the wrongful harming of innocents, then they haven’t really solved the old problem.

War is often considered to be “the continuation of policy by other means.” War is violence used as a political instrument. That’s why war has always raised two related questions: whether the political end is worth pursuing, and whether violence is a permissible way of pursuing it.

But traditional war also carried political burdens. It had to be named, justified, organised, funded, and supported. Some of war’s restraints have always been political as well as moral: publics had to be persuaded, soldiers sent, casualties risked, and resources visibly committed.

Targeted political violence changes the political calculation, making it possible to violently pursue political ends without declaring war, mobilising society, or exposing soldiers to serious risk. It can weaken the political restraints on violence by appearing precise and limited. Its relative moral appeal is part of the problem: its precision makes it easier to use and justify, and lets its violence, terrible violence nonetheless, fly under the radar, so to speak.

In 2016, the United States required annual public reporting on strikes outside areas of active hostilities, including the number of strikes and estimates of combatant and non-combatant deaths. In 2019, that reporting requirement was revoked. Political violence can become less visible not only because it is smaller than war, but because the official record of who is killed by it can be narrowed or removed.

So the new challenge is that states now have ways of doing some or much of war’s moral damage without assuming war’s name, visibility, or political burden. They can avoid the visible catastrophe of war.

This is why modern targeted violence is so appealing, and so dangerous. Its technologies can make political violence look more controlled, more discriminating, and therefore more humane. And if the comparison is full-scale war, that looks good. Surely drone strikes are better than invasions, and cyber operations better than bombs. Surely targeted killing is better than war.

Targeted violence looks attractive because it is less destructive than war. And, of course, scale matters. A strike that kills one innocent person is not the same as a war that kills thousands. But that’s not enough. A lesser evil is still an evil, and it still needs justification. The moral baseline can’t simply be “better than war”. It has to be whether the violence is permissible in the first place, whether it wrongfully harms innocents at all, and whether the burden of justification for doing so can really be met.

All political violence trades certain harms for uncertain benefits: people are killed or injured, families and communities are damaged, and ordinary life is disrupted, while the violence supposedly prevented is often speculative, or deferred.

Precision can reduce some risks, but it can also increase temptation. The more precise, remote, and politically cheap violence appears to be, the easier it becomes to authorise. But its justification is much more complicated, and must include whether nonviolent alternatives have been seriously developed and tried.

If a state has invested heavily in the capacity to strike, target, and kill, but has not invested comparably in prevention, diplomacy, nonviolent resistance, or other forms of nonviolent pressure, then it cannot truthfully say that its targeted political violence was necessary, or a last resort.

The danger, then, is that modern targeted violence retains the central moral problem of war while shedding some of the political burdens that made war harder to undertake. It allows states to say: this isn’t war; it’s limited and precise. The old problem is made smaller, cleaner, and easier to tolerate.

And the new problem can manifest at large scale. In 2011, the United States argued that prior congressional approval wasn’t required for the “limited operations” under consideration in Libya. NATO’s campaign went on to involve around 7,000 bombing strikes over eight months. Likewise, in 2018, the US-led coalition reported that it had conducted over 30,000 strikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014. These are major military campaigns carried out and normalised under the language of an “operation” rather than confronted as war.

The novelty isn’t just the technology, but the political situation the technology creates. A state can now strike at distance, at speed, with less risk to its own forces, without the public drama of war.

Autonomous weapons make killing faster and more removed from human judgment. Cyber operations damage systems that civilians depend on without looking like violence in the ordinary sense. AI-assisted targeting makes lethal force quicker and more accurate, but also easier to authorise and normalise. Like self-driving cars, one danger is malfunction. But the greater danger is that political violence comes to seem cleaner than it is.

My worry is that political violence has and will become easier to use, easier to hide, and easier to describe and justify as limited. The challenge is to make sure it doesn’t. We can’t let new categories hide old wrongs. 

Questions from the discussion

Jeremy and I were asked a number of questions during the discussion, both from Anna and audience members. Here are my answers to three of them.

Do you see a role for law or ethics around war?

Yes, both, although it is complicated. The just war tradition provides important concepts, such as just cause, proportionality and last resort, which can guide international law and help us judge political violence. However, the same language can be misused by leaders to give moral cover to actions driven by political or economic interests. Law and ethics can restrain violence, but only when they are applied consistently, including to powerful states and their allies.

Have Gaza and Iran fundamentally changed how we understand law and ethics around war, or have they brought longstanding problems to the fore?

I see them as the latest examples in a long history of immoral political violence. The circumstances and technologies change, but the underlying problems remain: civilians are harmed, claims of necessity are difficult to test, and moral and legal standards are applied selectively.

Sustained conflict also tends to produce further militarisation. Even if some wars can be justified, military build-up carries serious social, political and moral costs. It can weaken civilian security, encourage aggression, and create institutions that produce the very insecurity they are supposed to prevent.

Do you think war will always be part of the human condition?

I honestly do not. Conflict will always exist, but conflict and war are not the same thing. A peaceful society can contain serious disagreement if it has effective ways of managing it without organised violence.

Alternatives such as nonviolent resistance and civilian defence have worked, but they have received nothing like the funding, preparation, or attention given to military responses. Civil society should invest seriously in these alternatives, while also addressing the historical injustices from which many conflicts emerge. We cannot truthfully describe war as a last resort if we have not properly developed and attempted other options.

I am not confident that war will disappear, and I worry about what its continuation may mean for my children. But war is a human institution, not an unavoidable force of nature. People organise, fund and fight wars, which means that people can also build institutions intended to prevent and resist them.