Abstract
This article argues that the Just War tradition would do well to consider the importance of competence – and that doing so would invigorate debates about the use of organized violence. The article defends this argument through several moves. First, inspired by Aristotle’s thoughts on phronesis and chance, we view competence as a practice among those who, as a matter of course, engage in practical reasoning that takes into account the contingency of political action. Second, following from Arendt, competence can be considered that which foregrounds means over ends. Third, because competence is a continuous and more vigilant consideration of justice within war, it extends through both jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles, including the ‘proper authority’ and ‘reasonable chance for success’ conditions of the former, and the ‘double effect’ doctrine discussed in the latter. The article concludes by acknowledging the challenges presented by an overemphasis on competence, before ultimately restating its purchase for Just War debates in the twenty-first century.
Thomas Ricks
1
begins his chronicling of the infamous run-up and early stages of the 2003 Iraq War with the following statement justifying his use of the term ‘adventure’ in his subtitle, describing the Iraq War as:
An adventure in the critical sense of adventurism – that is, with the view that the US-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation. None of this was inevitable.
This article is not another study on the ‘justness’ of the Iraq War, but Ricks’ assessment provides a glimpse into the important role competence can play in how we evaluate war(s). Leaders often speak of the ‘solemn duty’ with which they feel burdened in deciding to go to war, in knowingly placing the warrior in ‘harm’s way’, in the challenge of giving the warrior everything (including competent leadership) that they need to accomplish the mission, and in conducting war with minimal harm. We might even say that competence is an intuitive requirement we expect of leaders, warriors, and even political communities as they decide to go to war and while they practice it.
Yet, in the Just War tradition and in International Relations (IR) more broadly, the notion of competence has gone largely unexamined. Although contemporary jus ad bellum considerations feature the principle of competent or proper authority, it is narrowly defined as having the status of an actor who represents people and is thus able to legitimately and capably wage war on its behalf. In the modern states system, this actor is almost exclusively recognized as the state, and sometimes only democratic states. 2 Additionally, this aspect of competence is invoked for the initiation of wars and does not apply to evaluating how wars are fought (although it is often used as a convenient excuse by states for altogether disregarding jus in bello considerations when they are fighting non-state actors). 3 Competence as actorhood does not capture how competence as a qualitative aspect of action is relevant for both jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations and may contribute to Just War as a practice that is context-based and a more vigorous and continuous guide for the use of violence.
Attention to competence as we develop it orients judgment toward a critical assessment of both thought and action throughout a violent conflict and encourages and accounts for evaluation of how well leaders navigate Just War guidelines. Competence is particularly relevant for a political realm that, according to Hannah Arendt, is a frenzy of human agency and unpredictability. If Just War, as both thought and practice, fails to deal with the political, it will ring hollow as an ethical guide for foreign policy, as it already does for many, particularly among the ‘unintended’ objects of its violence.
There is wide recognition, even among Just War scholars, that leaders often dress up wars in moral language when their motives and/or goals are otherwise. This is the hypocrisy of Just War discourse and one reason that the Just War tradition is so often discussed by its proponents, detractors, and constructive critics alike. 4 By proposing ‘competence’ as a useful correlate to the Just War tradition, we pivot away from some of the more analytically and methodologically difficult terrain of motive and intent. We thus see competence moving beyond discussions of the application of Just War (and potentially beyond Just War itself) that often get bogged down by the jus ad bellum principle of ‘right intention’, and the intent-laden jus in bello principle of double effect. We promote instead a greater focus on the practice of war and on the ability and willingness of leaders to anticipate and consider ethical and practical complications as reasons for changing course before and during conflicts.
We expect that our proposal for placing the spotlight on competence in Just War discussions will face some resistance from those who see the Just War tradition as already too restrictive of the use of force, especially in an era where many organizations seek ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) and reject the rules and institutions of an international society of states. 5 If we are tasked to ‘update’ or ‘renegotiate’ Just War in light of the new, deadly empirical developments of the past two decades, we caution that this period has also been defined by other empirical developments within war which can prove to be just as destabilizing and tragic. It is this threat of incompetence, we argue, that also needs to be grappled with in Just War discussions. By turning to Aristotle and Arendt (two scholars rarely discussed in the Just War literature), this article’s critical perspective of the Just War tradition is arrived at by ‘step[ing] out of the dominant narratives that govern the way we think’. 6
We pursue these arguments through four sections. In the first part of the article, we offer an account of competence based on readings of Aristotle’s account of practical reasoning and those who do it well, comparing this view on competence with those found in the Just War literature. This account is supplemented in the second part with a discussion of Arendt’s work, from which we develop the notion of competence as foregrounding the means of action within the space of politics. The third section applies this understanding of competence to Just War. Competent authorities, we argue, attend not just to ends when enacting violence, but more importantly to the ways in which means unfold into other means. The article concludes with some final thoughts on the risks of promoting the consideration of competence in a ‘post-post-9/11’ era.
Locating competence via Aristotle and Arendt
In brief, we develop competence in this article, following Aristotle and Arendt, as a form of practical wisdom that privileges the means of action. We propose a contextual basis for competence as one aspect of a practice of capable ethical agency. This context-based approach has particular force because of the ways, following Arendt, in which ends, as conceived in the ‘mind’ of an agent, get confounded and overwhelmed by the unstable and unruly social character of political action. Thus, Aristotle’s practical wisdom, that is attentive to the importance of particulars for ethical reasoning, is helpful in developing an account of competence that responds to the challenges of action that both he and Arendt point out. From Aristotle and Arendt, we proceed to conceptualize competence as the ability and willingness to interrogate possible futures – to continuously think about the possible, likely and unlikely consequences of action; to invite differing and even unpopular opinions; and to acknowledge the judgments of others. It thus necessitates humility – to change course upon continuous action, and sharpening ethical judgment in reaction to the unfolding consequences of prior action.
These measures are undertaken in the interest of making competent decisions, but by invoking Aristotle, we are also concerned with ethics. Competence cannot be separated from ethics; to do so would result in a conceptualization of competence as efficient and effective action (or expediency) without referring to and critically assessing the conceptual categories that orient our action (including those of Just War). We stress competence as necessarily concerned with the unboundedness of action, per Arendt, in order to draw attention to how ethical judgment cannot be concerned only with intent when we take action. In addition, to pose competence as a correlate to the principles and approach of the Just War tradition is to consider competence in relation to a particular practice of ethics and as a way to manage and reform that very practice. We begin this formulation of competence with Aristotle’s insights on the necessary qualities for good ethical reasoning and action before moving to the treatment of the means versus ends problem in Hannah Arendt’s work. We also engage two challenges of competence – experience and chance – before returning in the penultimate section of the article to the Just War tradition and the importance of competence within it.
Aristotle’s phronimos and phronesis
In contrast to theories of ethics or morality that seek to establish and work from first principles founded on some objective truth about human nature or empirical conditions, Aristotle outlines a contextual approach to decision-making that underscores the importance of judgment and the qualities of the person who deliberates and judges well. At times, virtue theories are mischaracterized as concluding moral right if it is judged to be so by a person with certain characteristics or virtues. Like others, we reject this reading and undertake a more nuanced interpretation of Aristotle. For their part, contemporary Just War theorists have tended to shy away from pre-Augustinian influences and sources. 7 Our use of Aristotle here might be characterized as part of the Just War literature that looks to these earlier thinkers such as the work of G. Scott Davis, David Fisher and Charles Jones, 8 but our interpretation takes inspiration from Aristotle to think about the specific issue of competence; it is not an attempt to recapture the Just War tradition as inclusive of Aristotelian virtues per se or to trace Aristotle’s influence on the Just War tradition over time.
Aristotle distinguished between ethical reasoning as a process (phronesis) and the agent who capably engages in ethical reasoning (phronimos). The phronimos, or prudent man, deliberates well ‘about the kinds of things that are good and expedient for living well’, while phronesis is the deliberation itself (often translated as ‘prudence’ or ‘practical wisdom’). 9 The phronimos exercises prudence in that he or she reasons and judges with excellence, making and acting upon sound ethical choices as a matter of course: ‘prudence is a disposition with true reason and the ability for actions concerning what is good and bad for man’. 10 Experience makes prudence possible: ‘prudence is concerned with particulars, which become familiar from experience’. 11 Good ethical reasoning, on this account, is often made by one who has experience reasoning well, and not often made by those who possess intellectual prowess (intellectual virtue) but little experience. 12 This does not imply that a person with experience necessarily makes sound choices, but a person with experience and success in ethical reasoning is one who is practiced. Aristotle notes that ‘we become builders by building and lyre-makers by playing the lyre. Similarly, we become just by doing what is just’ and ‘men become good architects by building houses well, and bad architects by building houses badly’. Virtues such as justice, temperance, and prudence are acquired through activity, and this activity must be performed well before we can judge men to have these virtues. 13 Experience not only makes possible sound reasoning and knowledge about particular domains of action, it also provides occasions to develop other capacities that contribute to ethical judgment such as intuition (nous) and even emotion (pathos). In sum, the phronimos maintains a sharp ethical acumen that comes from taking all ethical deliberation seriously and identifying the relevant characteristics of each occasion for action through different modes of perception. Aristotle describes this quality as a disposition (hexis) for right reasoning.
A closer look at the ontological basis of ethics in Aristotle’s account discloses why the capability of sound judgment is important for ethical action in two noteworthy ways. First, Aristotle views the domain of ethics as complex and specific because questions of ethics pertain to particular occasions for action. 14 If there are objective truths along the lines of Platonic Forms, Aristotle doubts that we can know what they are or attain them. 15 Furthermore, because the relevant features of the situation vary, the wise course of action is neither obvious nor simply a matter of applying universal principles. 16 Thus, universals alone (about which we can only make vague and possibly inaccurate statements) are not useful for ethics which concerns specific occasions for action, and ethical judgment and action take place in a unique set of circumstances, making them contextual. 17 Aristotle reiterates throughout Nicomachean Ethics that the phronimos confronts this specificity by referring to both particulars and universals. 18 This activity can be characterized as a kind of critical searching that judiciously draws on ethical resources to navigate situations that have been identified in their particularity. Thus, for Aristotle, both theoretical and practical knowledge are conducive to ethical reasoning. It would not be enough, for example, to have a sophisticated theoretical knowledge of the Just War tradition and its principles. A Just War practitioner needs to be familiar with and responsive to the ways in which Just War principles may or may not be appropriate for specific occasions.
Second, we need to consider Aristotle’s theorization of the ‘good’ and its pursuit. Although the ‘good’, the object of action, figures prominently in Aristotle’s account of ethics, judgment is not just relevant to finding the best means to achieve the end of a good, including the highest good of eudaimonia (often described as ‘living and acting well’ or ‘human flourishing’). Rather, the good demands specification in particular and concrete circumstances and continually revisiting this specification so that the aims of action are responsive to particulars and our experience of them. 19 In addition, Aristotle is modest in his efforts to define the highest good, offering his view contingently, for our consideration as a specification that is widely shared. 20 In sum, ethical decision-making necessitates considering context, and entertaining different conceptions of how we should live and what we should do, keeping in mind that these evaluations should be made in view of specific circumstances. 21 Thus, Just War thought should not only be considered in view of concrete situations; the principles themselves and their meanings are subject to reconsideration in light of a critical evaluation of their practice. Turning to Arendt next helps us to further elaborate the difficulties for reconciling (Just War) thought and (Just War) action.
Hannah Arendt on means versus ends
The use of unjust means – violence – is permissible in Just War if there is a noble just cause being pursued and intended – a just end. Yet, the ‘means–ends’ problem is one which bedevils political action. In Scientific Man, Morgenthau noted the methodological crux of the issue, that ‘weigh[ing] the immorality of means against the ethical value of the end’ is in the realm of ‘impossib[ility]’ because we actually never know what is an ‘end’. Thus, ‘the ethical worth of the action here judged not by its results but by the intentions of the actor’ which themselves are ‘nothing but the end of the action as mirrored in the actor’s mind’. 22 Taken in its extreme, Morgenthau asserts that ‘the ethical end justifies unethical means [will] lead to the negation of absolute ethical judgments altogether’. 23 For certain scholars and thinkers, means become a more urgent focus. David Cortright notes that for Gandhi, ‘the ends of human action are unpredictable, but the means employed are concrete and certain’. 24 We need not share Gandhi’s faith that ‘if one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself’ 25 to understand that prioritizing means provide us a more practical, grounded basis for action than focusing on an ‘end’ that remains ethereal and problematic.
Hannah Arendt was also skeptical of the means–ends framework. The space of politics is a realm which frustrates the intentions of actors. In Arendt’s view of political life, because the agency of others impacts our own, actions never have a pure ‘end’. Arendt asks, for example, whether the seed is the means to the end of the tree or the tree is the means to the end of the seed.
26
In the realm of human action, we also see how means directed toward an end tend to exceed this trajectory. Thus, one more accurately characterizes politics in terms of a means–means continuum. Means flow into other means in an indefinite and often indistinguishable chain of intention and action. The concept of ‘blowback’ captures this confusion, where foreign policy strategies that are ‘intended’ to fight an enemy on one occasion later provide the grounds for violence directed back at the self in a way that is unintended and unforeseen.
27
The consequences of action, according to Arendt:
are boundless, because action … acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes. Since action acts upon beings who are capable of their own actions, reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others.
28
Although moderation (as the Greeks understood it) and law can ‘offer some protection’, this protection is not enough to control the volatility of action that ‘has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’, particularly with ‘the onslaught with which each new generation must insert itself’. 29 In addition to the boundlessness of action, Arendt continues, we find that action is also inherently unpredictable. As one scholar who uses Arendt and Aristotle to shape his own work suggests, ‘being unable to predict the consequences of actions means that good intentions will, inevitably, go awry as a single action travels an unpredictable course’. 30
The means–ends framework can be especially problematic in war, according to Arendt, because speech and action lose their self-disclosing character. For Arendt, speech and human action usually do more than potentially articulate and achieve some political goal; speech and action reveal who we are, as agents with specific identities.
31
War more closely approximates means–ends action, but only in a narrow and morally vacuous way, because in war, ‘people are only for or against other people’ (their death and/or defeat). They:
use the means of violence in order to achieve certain objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these instances … speech becomes indeed ‘mere talk,’ simply one more means toward the end, whether it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda.
32
While Arendt did not see all violence as only annihilative in its aim, we interpret Arendt as saying that speech is more likely to reveal the ‘who’ through its justification of violent action in the public realm only when that speech takes itself seriously as something other than propaganda, and when action is oriented to something other than death. And, this is only possible if speech can discipline even violent action. 33
If action is a series of means unfolding into other means, competence represents the ability of the agent to acknowledge and accommodate the ways in which his or her action will unfold into a space punctured by the actions (agencies) of others. Thus, the ‘right intention’ of an action is but only one important contextual factor shaping the actions of an agent. Just as important is the extent to which agents educate themselves about the environment where they will act, the means they have at their disposal to engage in those actions, and the ethically problematic ways in which action can go awry. The competent agent not only formulates his or her own intent and how it will be put into action – but how the ‘others’ upon which his or her actions’ impact will re-act and then interact with those actions. The competent agent must not only formulate, however, one set of re-actions or interactions, but several, precisely because of the inability to ‘predict’ and control how others will re-act. Yes, there are limits to these formulations – one cannot ‘foretell all the logical consequences of a particular act’ 34 – but the exercise of acknowledging a contingent realm beyond the agent’s control makes that agent more judicious about their actions and raises an important ethical challenge; namely, how does one responsibly respond to this instability of action and reaction and the potential limits of knowledge? For these reasons, the competent agent is measured, moderate, temperate, and cautious, but also imaginative and searching, both for Arendt and Aristotle. 35
Taken together, we might highlight the distinctions of our formulations of Aristotle and Arendt for Just War thinking relative to existing approaches. First, a phronetic account of competence keeps the agent closer to the means–means sequence that we seek to prioritize. Cataloguing virtues and thinking about the ultimate good of happiness or human flourishing (eudaimonia) can offer ethical resources for discussing war, but an ethics of war that is consistent with a means–means focus looks more to the ‘lesser’ (or more specific) goods that are always identified, defined, and pursued contingently and modestly from within particular situations where action is taken and then takes form in the world.
Second, our Aristotelian and Arendtian approach de-emphasizes (but does not ignore) rules. The difficulty exists at the outset when we attempt to marry approaches that stress the complex, contingent, and particular (Aristotle and Arendt) with a tradition of thought that has fairly stable conceptual categories if not stable criteria (Just War). It is thus not surprising that Fisher turns to prudence in his practice of ‘virtuous consequentialism’ only when there are situations in which it is unclear which just war rule or virtue applies, and that he narrowly renders prudence as that which promotes human welfare or reduces human suffering. 36 The tension between rules and judgment can be productive, but the difficulty of directing action toward identifiable ends is one more reason to privilege judgment over (the application of) rules. 37 As Jones and Davis have critically noted, a more formulaic Just War framework summarized by Walzer has perverse consequences when the parties to (potential) conflict interpret ethics as when it is and is not permissible to break the rules (revealing just how inadequate rules can be). Even when we acknowledge that interpreting rules can result in a wide scope of action for the agent, freezing normative guideposts as ‘rules’ inhibits agents’ ethical moves. Aristotle envisions a much more dynamic and flexible relationship between thought and action where reflecting on our experience and taking special note of particulars can subsequently reconstruct thought (‘universals’). A competent agent has become practiced in this activity, an activity more attune to the elusiveness of action.
The challenges to competence: experience and ‘chance’
There are two key challenges to competence we recognize here. First, there is the inevitable role of chance in political life – that for all the preparations, the contingent nature of politics alters and even swamps the agency of actors. In Machiavelli’s well-known discussion of fortuna, we find a rare acknowledgment of the fact of contingency in political affairs. This fact comes packaged with an admonition on how a Prince might handle fortuna’s presence in political life. The key to a competent actor is not only that they acknowledge contingency, but how they seek to confront it in their actions. Machiavelli thus sees a role for fortune as ‘the arbiter of half our actions’, with human freedom controlling ‘roughly the other half’. Some take from this acknowledgment of contingency the need to overwhelm it. In dealing with fortuna, Machiavelli makes a wager on one type of action – ‘impetuousness’ – over another – ‘caution’. In a proudly crude assertion which forces one to wonder just where a metaphor ends and a literal meaning begins, Machiavelli informs us:
I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly. And it is clear that she is more inclined to yield to men who are impetuous than to those who are calculating. Since fortune is a woman, she is always well disposed towards young men, because they are less cautious and more aggressive, and treat her more boldly.
38
Thus, the answer to contingency is to forcefully combat it with a more preemptive and overwhelming action in an attempt to boldly transform action’s environment.
This is certainly one response to chance, a popular formulation with obvious echoes in the preventive wars of the past decade. Its popular appeal is its inspirational, masculine, and even poetic notion that certain agents have the capacity to both acknowledge chance and eliminate it from future political contexts. But it may also be a superficial and naïve way to treat chance in political life, part of what Arendt titles the ‘political temptation par excellence … hubris’. 39
Aristotle offers another response to chance in The Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle concludes from his discussion concerning deliberation that ‘we deliberate about things (a) which are possible or occur for the most part, (b) whose outcome is not clear, and (c) in which there is something indeterminate’. These are things that are practical to deliberate about and are nontrivial in that understanding them or predicting outcomes is not obvious or assured. Aristotle also states in the same section of this text that no one deliberates about eternal things, things that are mechanical in their operation like the sunrise, eternal things like the universe, intermittent things such as droughts, and things that occur by ‘luck’, such as finding treasure. There is no reason to deliberate about things we know will occur or things we cannot affect or anticipate. When it comes to political decision-making, then, we might ask to what extent Aristotle thought phronesis could competently navigate situations in which there might be a great deal of indeterminacy in our ability to anticipate the consequences of particular actions. Instead, Aristotle provides us an admonition which might sound like a precursor to the ‘serenity prayer’: We deliberate about ‘practical measures that lie in our power’, 40 and thus, like Arendt, Aristotle suggests deliberation is more about means than ends.
Assuming that chance is inevitable and can never be removed, the competent agent works at conditioning themselves to notice, acknowledge, and grapple with contingency and chance. Aristotle’s emphasis on experience values the ability of agents to learn from the past by responding to the unanticipated as it occurs and in subsequent deliberation. The Aristotelian notion that context and particulars have priority over universals in ethical reasoning looks to that which is closest to us, as the ‘good’ can only be appraised and specified meaningfully at the moment of action. Thus, the competent agent confronts chance not by seeking its elimination once and for all, but with the patient, stoic realization that unpredictability is perennial and should be carefully considered.
Experience is therefore necessary but not sufficient for competence and the recognition of chance. This is because experience has its limits, and it may counter-intuitively detract from our ability to reason well about particular situations, most acutely when they are especially novel, different, or aleatoric. For instance, much of the literature in Foreign Policy Analysis has pointed to particular pathologies which lead to an inverse relationship between ‘optimal’ decision-making and ‘experience’. Robert Jervis’ 41 classic study includes several hypotheses which suggest that decision-makers tend to ‘fit information’ into their theories ‘bit-by-bit’, allowing those theories and worldviews to remain largely consistent even in the face of radically disconfirming information. Related scholarship on generational analysis illustrates how the formative experiences of a generation can profoundly shape the lens that it brings to events once it gains access to a society’s political institutions. 42 Security scholars studying changes in military strategy have used similar devices to understand the popular notion that military and political leaders often ‘fight the last war’. Furthermore, while historical analogies help simplify complex situations so that one has the basis to act, such analogies can be misappropriated. 43 Once an analogy is drawn, it can be difficult for the policymaker and his or her audience to invoke or consider alternative examples. In fact, some of this literature suggests that certain cohorts of decision-makers cannot break free of these analogies. So while experience can be useful, it can also blind us to different interpretations of the ethical contours of situations and thus to alternative courses of action.
What this suggests is that experience may be a vice, rather than an asset, if agents become unwilling to change course when political reality does not ‘fit’ into their preexisting frames. Fortunately, Aristotle offers further resources that may accommodate these concerns. Although experience is an important part of the equation, ‘of all of the qualities that characterize phronesis, Aristotle seems most concerned with deliberation and what good deliberation might look like’. 44 Deliberation involves inquiring and making estimates; the phronimos aims to bring about a good and takes time to carefully consider the particulars of the situation, calling on advisers and experts to offer different perspectives, and carefully considering the appropriateness of particular analogies. 45 Examples and analogies alert us to possible courses of action, but the argument that the present situation is like a past situation needs to be credible and persuasive. 46 In this regard, one must not only offer an argument that appears valid (logos), but must also gain the trust of the audience (ethos) and appeal to their needs and desires. The audience is best able to judge the speaker when they too exercise practical wisdom.
Competence and the Just War tradition
Two particular ad bellum principles – ‘proper authority’ and ‘reasonable chance for success’ – may already incorporate the intuition behind competence. At times, proper authority assumes competence as a core component of its ‘properness’, and sometimes the condition is rephrased as ‘competent authority’. 47 The notion here is that an agent, such as a sovereign state or its leader, has been competent enough to acquire a position of recognized (internally and externally) authority, and therefore the authority is legitimate and proper. If this reasoning sounds a bit circular, one must remember the important function authorities, such as sovereign states, provide in restraining violence by ‘monopolizing’ it within their own borders. 48 Nicholas Onuf discusses, within the broader ‘rule leads to rule’ thematic of his work, 49 how authority is a competence to rule. 50 As Onuf notes in the case of a sovereign state, ‘the land and the people are each linked to those agents empowered to act at home and abroad in the name of the state’. 51 This ordering function becomes expanded when this rule is recognized by others in a broader international community. 52
The authority condition of jus ad bellum has been attacked from a variety of angles. From the core post-structuralist insight that authority is established through violence and that sovereign states exist as violent artifacts of exclusionary practices, 53 Michael Shapiro and David Campbell have asserted that what the ‘legitimate authority’ function of jus ad bellum is legitimating, via violent practices and Just War discourse, is a status quo racket, whereby particular actors are given leeway to deploy violence and others are not. One recent study went so far as to claim that of all the principles of Just War, the ‘proper authority condition of Just War has been particularly responsible for favoring the powerful’, 54 a claim echoed in kind if not degree by Shapiro and Campbell. 55
Incorporating a stricter understanding of competence need not be viewed as overtly critical. In fact, it can even be conservative, promoting an additional criterion for what is or is not ‘authoritative’ of those speaking and acting for a political community through violent discourse and practice. Nor does a more developed understanding of proper authority have to be in tension with the ‘right intention’ behind an action. The two work together by asking what the action hopes to accomplish. The more ambitious the goal (‘nation-building’ versus the restoration of sovereignty, for instance), the more ‘unknown unknowns’ which cannot be ascertained ahead of time, the more competent the proper authority needs to be. Furthermore, a competent agent might wisely refuse action that portends such risks when, in light of what they know from experience and (public) deliberation, a considered course of action carries so many uncertainties and contingencies that it threatens various normative aspirations.
We would also like to offer Aristotle and Arendt’s consideration of the public quality of judgment as a necessary quality of competence in taking up the challenge of thinking more critically about Just War’s ‘competent authority’ as ‘a process rather than an entitlement’, as proposed by Sjoberg. 56 It is in the public realm with its pluralism that politics takes place for Arendt, a perspective surely influenced by her study of Aristotle. Here, we respond to the speech and action of others, and judgment is a crucial part of these responses. From Aristotle’s work on rhetoric, it is apparent that judgment of the credibility of the speaker by the audience is necessary for a persuasive argument about right action; as part of this assessment, the audience ascertains how well the speaker engages in phronesis. 57 Applied to the phronimos as political leader engaging in a Just War argument, whether about the principles of jus ad bellum or jus in bello, public judgment assesses competence and offers public moments for raising critical questions worth consideration by decision-makers. Decision-makers who spurn or fail to create such opportunities for public critique are less competent. Political leaders argue, for example, that they take due diligence to minimize civilian casualities because of the moral importance of noncombatant immunity, and they entertain and exhaust less violent alternatives. Yet, when it comes to some of the primary strategies used to injure or kill terrorists in the War on Terror, such as drones, US leaders have provided very few details about how such care is taken, how much ‘collateral’ death is deemed acceptable, and which alternatives have been thoroughly explored. 58 As we noted in the previous section, good deliberation features wide consultation, and here, we argue for persuasive, credible public appeals. To modify ‘right authority’ as we suggest has promise in that it resonates with sixteenth-century formulations of ‘king in council’ by Vitoria and Suárez. 59
Another jus ad bellum principle that would be implicated by a more robust requirement of ‘competence’ has been termed the ‘reasonable chance for success’ condition. This condition, titled one of the ‘prudential’ considerations of jus ad bellum by James Turner Johnson, 60 has as Nick Fotion and Bruno Coppieters note, a ‘relatively short history’, 61 with most work only mentioning it in passing or ignoring it altogether. As one of the prudential considerations, it has even been deemed in a twenty-first century context to pervert classical Just War, ‘smother[ing] just cause’ and other ad bellum principles, thereby ‘blocking the possibility of Just War reasoning’. 62
Skeptics of this condition fear that it is overly restrictive of war. One might note that it need not be – for it is not the consideration of success but its content which serves to determine how restrictive this condition will be in enabling or constraining violence. For instance, inferior armies might still fight a war even if there is no ‘chance’ for ‘survival’ because it could help assure ‘respect by putting up a noble fight’. 63 This seems to have been the formulation of success that the Belgians took in their decision to fight the Germans in August of 1914, defending their ‘honor’ even though they faced certain destruction. 64 And early military success does not always portend long-term success as the Athenians learned in their conflicts with other Greek city-states and Americans recently found in Afghanistan and Iraq. What we are suggesting here, via the insights of Arendt and Aristotle, is that competence involves a clear statement of not only the envisioned outcome of an action, but the possible alternative futures implicated by the agency of others as action takes shape.
Turning to Arendt’s means–means framework for understanding intention and action, the competent agent would not only be concerned with the ‘justness’ of their cause or their tactics, they would attempt to prospectively assess how their violent campaigns and actions might create the conditions for others’ responses, providing the stimulus and conditions for reaction.
65
Doing so is necessary for ethical deliberation that brings in more information. Evaluation of the ‘success’ of violence would thus not stop at intention. In the words of Laura Sjoberg who articulates a ‘feminist ethic’ of ‘success’, the emphasis on means would imply that regardless of the intention of the war, the means put into practice help make ‘the reasonable chance of success standard … relate to the possibility of a just politics after the war’. What we expect from ‘the actor looking to estimate possibilities for success’ is:
not only whether or not the opponent will lose the war, but whether or not fighting (and losing) the war would make it more likely the opponent will behave in a way more conducive to justice in politics in the future. This part of success is crucial; in a feminist ethic of war, war is not punishment, or show, but a way to try to fix a problem.
66
Thus, far from success being about the possibility and probability of ends, an emphasis on means would implicate not only whether to go to war but also how a war should be conducted and how the agency of ‘Others’ impacted by violence will get enacted. We are calling for some evidence that the ‘competent authority’ will consider how their certainty regarding the context of war can be qualified, measured, tempered, and chastened. The reason for focusing on competence within a ‘reasonable chance for success’ condition of jus ad bellum is not to preclude the possibility of war a priori – it may do that, but the ‘prudential’ consideration at stake is that the mistakes made at the early stages of a conflict, mistakes derived from the certainty one enters a war with, prove to extrapolate and expand in importance as the war develops thereafter.
Let us take one illustrative example from Operation Iraqi Freedom. A 25 October 2004 New York Times article detailed one account from the early stages of that conflict – the loss in the spring of 2003 of a ‘huge cache of explosives’ at the al-QaQaa weapons facility 30 miles south of Baghdad. 67 These were conventional weapons, although they could have served as devices to detonate a nuclear weapon as well. Further reports detailed that the US military, certain that the bunkers contained WMDs, failed to blow them up. Having been certain that the same Iraqi population that would greet US troops as ‘liberators’ would also ‘lead’ coalition forces to the ‘WMDs’, 68 the troops left the explosives not only unexploded, but unguarded, free to be picked up and used for who knows how many improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by an insurgency that would gain strength in the months ahead.
For this example, competently meeting the ‘success’ condition would not have been a countless exercise in ‘all the possible logical consequences of an act’. Rather, competence might be an acknowledgment that leaving weapons unguarded may prove to be costly in an alternative future where the Iraqi populace exercises its own agenc(ies), at times when they might no longer view the coalition on friendly or even neutral terms. This materiel (along with that found elsewhere in Iraq and brought in from neighboring countries such as Iran), as it turned out, was used to create the IEDs (‘the emblematic weapon of the Iraq War’ 69 ) that proved to have multiple effects upon the Iraqi population, influencing the way in which coalition forces engaged this population in increasingly and mutually antagonistic ways.
What seems to only be a basic lesson for military competence also exemplifies the need for ethical competence. A ledger of power is thus not sufficient for meeting the prospect for success condition when success as it is initially defined is elusive and unlikely. Instead, we must continuously assess and reevaluate actions with an openness to finding that which we did not want or did not expect. US leaders, for example, were not particularly eager to entertain the possibility that the violence of counter-insurgency strategies such as ‘clearing and holding’ further facilitated an alliance between Iraqis and ‘foreign fighters’. Public judgment, in contrast, featured a great deal of mistrust of the Bush administration’s rosy assessments as the war dragged on. 70
While we have focused on two ad bellum principles, one can also use competence to reconsider the doctrine of ‘double effect’, an important qualifier of the ‘noncombatant immunity’ principle of jus in bello. This doctrine sees noncombatant casualties as acceptable so long as civilians are not deliberately targeted and if ‘reasonable precautions are taken to minimize harm to civilians’. 71 Noncombatant casualties may be foreseen, but the moral burden of harm is relieved if the intent is to achieve a military objective. This qualifier privileges intent over consequences. Take the case of aerial bombing, where high levels of civilian casualties may ensue. Often times, we are told both that the intention of the attackers was to ‘avoid civilian casualties’ while the ‘tragic’ situation presented itself because of the intentions of the enemy, an enemy deliberately hiding among the ‘human shields’ of its own civilian population. 72 While intentions are surely morally significant, they have distracted us from honestly acknowledging and grappling with the implications of our actions.
A competent agent takes into account these civilian casualties regardless of the intent of the enemy. Considered this way, competence in double effect becomes more about how endangered civilians are by practices of war regardless of the ‘intent’ on both sides. It is not enough to proclaim, as Fisher does, that civilian casualties in Iraq since 2003 have been ‘high, although the bulk of these have been caused by insurgent action and civil disorder’ when the decision to go to war in Iraq and to keep a continued presence there was made by the invading countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies. 73 In this example, in other words, intent elides responsibility for agency and how it has been acted upon.
Anticipating the unboundedness of our actions and acknowledging that there will be unpredictable consequences matters for initiating violence in the first place (jus ad bellum). It is also significant for considering in bello actions anew as others respond to the stated and perceived basis for the conflict and interpret our actions. In addition, ad bellum issues may continue to be relevant after hostilities begin. An example from Francisco de Vitoria as summarized by Alex Bellamy is instructive. 74 Vitoria found it significant that one or more side could enter war based on beliefs and judgments that turn out to be in error, reflecting the limits of human knowledge (relative to God’s knowledge). In addition, it might be the case that both sides to a conflict could provide a plausible account of a just cause (when multiple parties can claim the same land, for example). When these scenarios appear to have materialized, Vitoria urged greater restraint. We might add to Vitoria that an unstable and tenuous connection between means and ends is a further reason to continuously revisit Just War principles. When, for example, WMDs were not found in Iraq, this information should have prompted the United States and United Kingdom to revisit and reinterpret both ad bellum and in bello principles, including how much death and destruction was ‘proportional’. 75
Still, we want to avoid falling back on arguments of responsibility as we turn to a means–means understanding of action. The temptation to rely on means–ends thinking is particularly acute, as Judith Butler points out, because we yearn to understand our actions within the confines of what we believe we are responsible for, but the competent ethical agent should be able to separate understanding from responsibility to avoid taking on the myopic lens of means–ends reasoning. Instead, competency is being able to entertain how we might best respond to others’ responses and how we might reinterpret ourselves and the situation, regardless of how tightly we can couple our actions with the relationships and situations we arrive at. In this vein, we should take seriously the question of how others respond even to the use of technologically sophisticated weapons that have the advantage of decreasing civilian casualties. We might ask, for example, whether drones expand the theater of force and thus threaten civilians with at least psychological terror if not also the possibility of ever greater violence. 76
Conclusion
To briefly defend what we have presented in this article, we see competence as a holistic way to interrogate Just War, to expand the critical questions we ask before and shortly after war begins, and continue to ask thereafter. Competent agents question not just ‘What is this war for?’ They also ask ‘What will it look like when it gets going?’. And, ‘How does it look now?’. We expect a competent authority to formulate a credible story about what might transpire, provide an inventory of the relevant agents (not only the enemy but those caught in-between), and give an account of how others’ agency might be impacted and the ways in which they could re-act to the violence. Authority is more than being able to speak and act for a political community. It is about being able to acknowledge how those actions may be altered by others in the course of ethical judgment.
Our study, like those before it, draws upon the influence of Aristotle on Just War thinking. Davis, Fisher and Jones, for example, have each pointed to the influence of Aristotle on the Just War thinking of St Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria. 77 Together, these projects seek to move beyond the more recent formulaic rendering of Just War thinking and thus reflect the rich opportunities for reengaging Aristotle for the Just War tradition. Much of their collective focus is on identifying the virtues and values of leaders and soldiers who strive to work within a Just War (and military ethics) framework, as well as connecting the practice of Just War to the challenge of sustaining worthwhile political communities that pursue ‘the good’. 78
We look to Aristotle as well, but find him instructive for articulating a ‘competence’ that attunes the agent to the means–ends problem for ethical reasoning and action. Jones agrees that judgment and deliberation receive less attention in today’s Just War thinking. For Aristotle, phronesis is elevated above all the other virtues. Although Aristotle often refers to prudence as a ‘virtue’, it is the most important virtue and is more often described as if it is an approach to ethical reasoning, a process, or even a disposition. 79 An Aristotelian ethics is most like an art where moral agents pragmatically, critically, and creatively confront everyday ethical questions by looking to the various beliefs that we have about morality. Which ethical resources we draw upon and how we are inspired by them will depend on their usefulness for the particular circumstances of the situation. Thus, the capacity for critical judgment should be restored such that we are more competent in drawing on and managing ethical resources where they are useful in a complex and contingent environment, whether of the Just War tradition or its alternatives. 80
While we have acknowledged several possible challenges to incorporating some notion of competence into Just War debates, we close here by entertaining two others. The first is that to judge competence, one is almost inevitably in the realm of the ad hoc, looking back to reevaluate with ‘20/20’ hindsight a political realm rendered by Arendt above as unpredictable and frenzied. Charges of incompetence as complicating ‘proper authority’ and ‘reasonable chance for success’ will thus be vulnerable to the counter-charge of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’.
A second and broader challenge is that while we have argued that it needs to be part of Just War debates, championing competence should be tempered for several reasons. First, one may become so enamored with competence displayed in conflict that this would enable, rather than restrain, future wars. One might consider, in this light, the relative jubilation upon the fall of the Gadhafi regime in Libya, and the cost-benefit analyses which followed comparing the high financial and human cost and ambiguous outcomes of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars with the low costs and more (but not entirely) clear outcome of Operation Odyssey Dawn. 81 A similar type of concern pervades evaluations of the use of UAV’s (drones) in warfare – a tactic that has grown into its own counter-terrorism ‘strategy’ that appears so technologically ‘competent’ it seems unbounded by the constraints of time and space. 82
Returning to a theme advanced throughout this article, the way to begin grappling with these challenges is to privilege as much as possible political context. By privileging context, one acknowledges that hindsight is to an extent ‘20/20’ because we were perhaps not ‘in’ the same environment as those authorities who made the decision. Yet precisely because they are ‘authorities’ they have to answer to our 20/20 hindsight quality interrogations. We have proposed in this article that for these interrogations, we might think of fitness for decision-making not only as intellectual knowledge but also the ability to critically think through contemporary dilemmas in international politics and offer alternatives that take seriously the volatility and uncertainty of action. Candidates for leadership should demonstrate more than knowledge of the names of various countries and their leaders, but should be able to critically and ethically evaluate situations. These leaders also should have a demonstrated history of dealing with unexpected outcomes in a way that treats thought and action dynamically, and a history of assuming a stance of ethical humility rather than certainty. Moral certainty assumes more than we can know about responses to and the consequences of our speech and actions.
To the extent that relatively inexperienced individuals seek to build their competency, they would be well advised to pursue a kind of collective phronimos, putting together a team with experience, managing decisions in ways that invite dissent, and erring on the side of more rather than less deliberation and reflection. Aristotle’s emphasis on the necessity of deliberation and his portrait of good deliberation links up Arendt’s focus on ‘means’ as most within our control and the aforementioned IR literature on the importance of dissenting opinion and critical debate for decision-making that avoids such pathologies as groupthink. 83
Finally, the purpose of developing an account of competence is as much empirical and analytical for the scholar as it is normative for the practitioner. We indeed should continue to reevaluate the Just War ‘tradition’ via ‘new thinking’ in light of the new ‘threats’ of the twenty-first century, such as WMDs in the hands of transnational terrorist organizations. 84 Yet, we also need to consistently reevaluate the tradition to recognize that the past decade or so of violence has been defined not only by these new threats but also by the threat exemplified by the incompetence of those ‘legitimate authorities’ who have made it their task to fight new types of ‘Just’ wars. If we are going to loosen the rules constituting what types of ‘anticipatory’ actions are permissible, or what types of ‘extraordinary’ measures are just in the fantasy-land ‘ticking time bomb’ scenarios that have often been substituted as the only form of reality worth considering, then we indeed can and should expect more – much more – from the agents who have gained this increased freedom and have the capabilities to engage in destabilizing practices in this still new century of global politics.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.