Deciding on preventive war

The conventional debates of a just war have become a major focus in responding to the challenges of the changing nature of warfare in the 21st century. Traditionally the just-war doctrine is known for its moral injunction against the preventive use of force, giving only a reluctant nod to the permissibility of first strike as a last resort in cases of imminent threat. However, the certainty factor of an imminent danger, debated considerably in the just-war tradition, is now put to severe test in view of the challenges of today’s warfare. The question these days is not simply about justifying first strike, but determining how much in advance to strike in view of the potential for catastrophic consequences if the threat is given the time to be carried out. Faced with this quandary, some contemporary just-war theorists espouse what they think is a morally permissible policy of preventive war. For them, the ambiguities of the just-war criteria allow them the latitude they need to restate the doctrine to meet the challenges of modern warfare.

In this article I present a critique of the moral permissibility of preventive war. Preventive intervention is a murky issue in the just-war thinking, so just-war doctrine does not provide moral clarity in this debate. By invoking the concept of a just peace, I discuss prevention from a non-interventionist perspective and show how it can be an effective measure for national security and humanitarian policies. Though the just-war doctrine has been around for many centuries – in its early days primarily intended for securing peace and order by limiting if not eliminating war – the concept of a just peace is a relatively recent one, indicating an emerging awareness that the broader issues of global justice transcend the confines of just-war concerns in promoting peace. I draw on Amartya Sen’s idea of justice to bolster my position.

Scholars point out that a cautiously permissive interpretation of preventive measures can be found in the later just-war tradition of Grotius and Hobbes as part of reasonable self-defense. Likewise, they point out that chapter VII of the United Nations Charter has provision for what could be taken as the use of preventive force with Security Council authorization in matters of international peace and security, thus making duly constrained preventive war legal under current international law. ¹

Today’s prominent just-war theorists are mindful of the Grotian tradition of caution while they espouse an expanded version of self-defense that construes the idea of imminent danger not necessarily as immediate but as a sufficiently serious risk of high probability. This expanded reading gives them a broader latitude in justifying first strike. Predictably, most of these just-war theorists find the United States National Security Strategy of September 2002 – the so-called Bush doctrine – too broad and therefore unacceptable as they try to formulate their own narrowly construed provision of preventive use of force.

Ironically, though couched in the language of pre-emption to make room for unilateralism in the guise of pre-emptive self-defense, the Bush doctrine embraces far-fetched preventive options. Indeed, the blurring of the distinction between pre-emption and prevention tends to make the slippery transition from the one to the other all too easy. ² In addition, it is likely that even a limited provision of preventive war for justified self-defense, construed as a rare exception, can lead to a rather open-ended advocacy and use of it. Accordingly, the issue is the moral permissibility of preventive war, regardless of the circumstances.

The concern of today’s just-war theorists is to stay within the spirit of international law and to devise means of accountability in advocating a limited provision of preventive war. Their goal is to find ways to respond to the new threats to peace and security posed by unconventional warfare and weapons systems. Their guidelines for assessing the gravity of the situation requiring prevention display a blend of substantive and procedural considerations, including such factors as severity of threat, the likelihood of its occurrence, just-war criteria of legitimacy, and the legality of the threat and the proposed response. ³

Nonetheless, these guidelines are open-ended and can be misused, especially if a go-alone provision is included in them. In fact, the just-war doctrine’s major flaw is that it allows self-interested interpretation by the contesting parties. Legitimizing principled preventive war, however constrained, can give a powerful nation the moral license to expand the principle by pushing it in the direction of its own convenience. Even with ex post standards of accountability suggested by some just-war theorists, the damage is already done. And no specter of a ‘contingent contract’ of ex ante accountability would deter a powerful state from trying to manipulate legitimacy in its own favor so long as the option of preventive intervention is in the vocabulary of legitimacy. ⁴

Indeed, the provision of preventive war in self-defense can get unduly interventionist, making the world less secure. Countries should promote prevention in non-interventionist terms by relying on the soft power of diplomacy and collaboration. This is the path toward just peace, which I present here as the antidote to preventive war. If one does not place a principled premium on a proactive and comprehensive non-interventionist policy of just peace, then the option of preventive war, however constrained, could gain undue legitimacy, leading to more war, not less.

This may sound like the standard consequentialist argument against preventive war, but my objection to the permissibility of preventive war is not based on narrowly construed consequentialist grounds. Though a good part of the critique of preventive war is prompted by our evaluation of the consequences of such wars, consequentialist reasoning is also used in support of preventive war. Preventive war causes misery and violation of human rights, but it also protects rights. These considerations are factored in while deciding on the justness of the cause of a war and the proportionality of outcomes, along with other conditions of just war. So, consequentialist evaluations can cut both ways in deciding on the moral permissibility of preventive war.

Likewise, duty-based deontic reasons can play important roles in deciding for or against preventive war. For instance, non-intervention is a sacred covenant of international relations that is a prima facie deontic consideration against undertaking preventive military intervention. But it can be superseded by other deontic considerations such as the right to national self-defense against the prospect of unjust aggression. Because both consequentialist and duty-based reasons can give us mixed verdicts on the morality of preventive war, they cannot be relied on narrowly in calling for an outright ban or a blanket approval of preventive war. The approach has to be more nuanced. My idea of just peace as an antidote to preventive war is one such approach that draws on Sen’s theory of comparative justice. I provide some details below.

To illustrate the scope and relevance of a broad-based consequentialist evaluation in practical reasoning and comparative justice, Sen cites the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna that reportedly took place on the eve of an immense battle between the armies of two royal clans in ancient India, as narrated in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. ⁵ Though there was no doctrine as such of what constitutes a moral warfare in the Indian tradition at that time, the details of the events leading up to the war and the war itself give us considerable insight into what the tradition considered relevant conditions for initiating a just war and the rules of engagement in such a war. Based on all such criteria, the war was widely regarded as just by both sides. Even the battlefield was called the field of dharma [righteousness], indicating high reverence surrounding the war. But the leading general on one side, Arjuna, in his front-line dialogue on the eve of the war with his advisor and charioteer Krishna, registered his thought about the futility of victory in a war that would result in large-scale death and destruction. Arjuna’s despondency was also due to his thought of fighting a war that would require him to kill people who were his relatives, friends and teachers on the other side.

The striking point about this story is that it is not just about Arjuna’s crisis of faith and resolve, which is how the tale is widely known, but more importantly, it is about the futility of war itself, even when a war is considered a just war by the prevailing judgement of the day. Also, being an ace warrior, Arjuna was not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, which makes the story all the more poignant, raising foundational questions about the ethics of war and peace. Sen insightfully brings out some of these issues in Arjuna’s dialogue with Krishna to show how a comprehensive, agent-sensitive consequentialist framework can diffuse the dichotomy between consequentialism and deontology in comparative justice, thereby helping us understand the implications of justice on warfare and other issues.

Krishna’s duty-based exhortation to Arjuna to fight and not give up seems pale compared to Arjuna’s compelling moral dilemma. Michael Blake has correctly noted that ‘the majority of our unease with preventive war seems to stem from forward-looking considerations of consequences, rather than from backward-looking considerations of duty’. ⁶ Krishna’s initial reason that it is Arjuna’s duty to fight a righteous war because he belongs to the warrior caste is problematic precisely because it is backward-looking and one-dimensional. A righteous cause or one’s caste duty to fight, without an evaluation of potential consequences, does not make a war moral or obligate one to fight. Indeed, one big debate in ethics and international law concerns whether a good soldier is duty-bound to carry out orders if they go against his conscience and good judgement. Sen notes that Arjuna’s concern was not only about the impersonal consequence of the war’s devastation; it was about his own role in contributing to that carnage. For Sen, a comprehensive consequentialist approach accommodates the motivation of taking responsibility for one’s choices, which demands a ‘situated evaluation’ of one’s own position in the scheme of things. ⁷ This agent-sensitive consequentialist perspective endorses the importance of agency and personal responsibility so ingrained in the deontic framework, without making the procedure backward-looking. It also puts a limit on the impersonal optimizing strategy that critics level against consequentialism. This broad-based consequentialist evaluation, where actual consequences are just a part of what Sen calls the ‘plural grounding’ procedure, ⁸ plays an important role in Sen’s social choice matrix of comparative justice. Sen’s approach focuses on assessing the comparative merits of available states of affairs. For him, we do not need to know – or agree on – what perfect justice is in order to be able to identify a particular state of affairs as unjust and how it stands in relation to some other state of affairs. This comparative approach can guide us in assessing and ranking available alternatives without the need to speculate on all possible outcomes.

Sen’s comparative method is primarily about rectifying injustices, not locating perfect justice. Too strict a commitment to definitive terms of justice risks neglecting injustices that fall outside the preconfigured ideal and crowds out potential resolutions to injustice that do not fall under the ideal model yet may nevertheless prove valuable to the pursuit of a more just state of affairs. Sen calls his own idea of justice a theory ‘in a very broad sense’, as an exercise ‘that aims at guiding practical reasoning about what should be done’. ⁹ For all these reasons, it is evident why Sen is more intrigued by Arjuna’s real-life predicament than Krishna’s narrow commitment to a fixed deontic ideal as portrayed initially in the conversation.

We should note that Krishna’s reasons for urging Arjuna to fight were not totally devoid of any consideration of consequences. Any time an expected duty is not performed, it affects other people, often more than the agent. But in a comparative ranking of consequences in Sen’s broad-based consequentialist evaluation, Krishna’s concern for what would happen if Arjuna did not fight seemed weak in comparison to the horrific consequences of the war and Arjuna’s own complicity in bringing them about. Nonetheless, pointing to the richness of the evolving narrative depicted in the epic, especially Krishna’s nuanced and lengthy exploration of moral psychology in defending an innovative and far-reaching duty-ethic, Sen acknowledges that the debate could possibly have two reasonable sides where both positions have ample room to develop their respective arguments. ¹⁰

This ‘valuational plurality’, discussed in more detail in Sen’s later work, is an essential part of Sen’s idea of comparative justice that underscores the futility of pursuing a perfectly just outcome due to the potentially divergent priorities over competing demands, none of which may stand out as more reasonable than the others from the perspective of reason and open impartiality. For Sen, even if this procedure cannot resolve all competing claims at times, it makes public reasoning all the more challenging, to be celebrated rather than shunned in a democracy. Indeed, Sen’s justice project is tied to the plurality of impartial reasons embedded in today’s expanding circle of global democratic human-rights approaches. Because the notion of human rights is predicated on our shared humanity, Sen’s idea of justice is open to the world. It goes beyond national borders and regards people, rather than states, as sovereign.

Sen draws on the great deontic teachings of Jesus and Buddha to underscore the dimension of shared humanity in his idea of justice. Citing the story of the Good Samaritan in the gospel of Luke, where Jesus questions the idea of a fixed neighborhood, Sen observes that ‘there are few non-neighborhoods left in the world today’. ¹¹ Here Sen questions the idea of the distant stranger in today’s global world who is not extended appropriate moral considerations of justice. Going beyond the Rawlsian reciprocity between equals, Sen’s project of global justice takes a critical look at the realities of entrenched inequalities. Citing Buddha’s teaching, Sen argues that we have responsibility to the global poor precisely because of the asymmetry between us – our power and their vulnerability – and not necessarily because of any symmetry that is presumed in reciprocity.

To be sure, religion cannot provide us with a rational explanation for the injustices of poverty and inequity; worse yet, it often seeks out poverty and deprivation as a target of charity for spiritual progress. In the end, as Michael Walzer has noted, poverty demands a political response. ¹² It is to Sen’s credit that he integrates the uplifting words of two great religious teachers into his secular political philosophy of justice, thereby providing a seamless blending of dimensions that is rich and unique.

Arjuna’s concern about killing his friends and relatives in the battle has great symbolic resonance for the idea of a shared humanity that is so central to Sen’s concept of justice. As spheres of interaction constantly expand, modern globalization makes the local encounter the global and we understand that we all share the same space. Unlike Arjuna’s times, the distant is not distant any more, so Arjuna’s concern may have a new relevance today in evoking a sense of moral duty of shared humanity.

For Sen, this global interconnectedness needs an adequately expanded theory of global justice. Central to this idea is the viability of democracy – both in the global order and in individual nations. The latter is mostly ineffective, and often hard to achieve, without the former. Sen has been a powerful voice in articulating a conceptual framework for the slowly emerging trend of democratization of globalization, with a focus on the normative and institutional imperatives of human development and well-being. ¹³ However, Sen points out that although well-being is an important consideration in promoting justice, the pursuit of justice is a nuanced procedure where the focus on well-being cannot trump the demand for procedural equity. ¹⁴ Sen’s theory of justice caters to both the fairness of the process and the enhancement of freedom and opportunity. For Sen, these two demands are to be understood and realized in their comprehensive outcomes through the matrix of social choice.

Providing a complete statement of Sen’s idea of justice is beyond the scope of this article, but the intent of the above sketch is to drive home the point that Sen’s global justice project is an ideal road map for an antidote to preventive war. An outright ban on preventive war based solely on a narrow construal of consequentialist or deontic reasons does not work, as noted above. Instead, Sen’s use of Arjuna’s dilemma reconstructs a justice-based, non-interventionist platform where, instead of enabling the act of warfare, as is the case if we start from a just-war approach, we are encouraged to devise an option that would make the case for preventive war redundant. Sen’s construal of global justice calls for rooting out the underlying causes of conflict, injustice and humanitarian crises by a collaborative system of just governance. This prospect is far more achievable and less costly than the current practice of perpetual war for perpetual peace. Peace with justice, or ‘just peace’, is the true foundation for an enduring peace.

The just-peace approach developed here is markedly different from the jus ad pacem or jus post bellum debate commonly associated with end-of-war considerations and peace-keeping operations in the just-war literature. The just-peace approach tells us that instead of preparing for war, the surer path to a more tranquil world is to prepare for peace directly. ¹⁵ Instead of seeking legitimacy for prevention by invoking just war, this move construes the idea of prevention through the lens of non-interventionist global justice.

In matters of individual and collective self-defense in a high-risk world, there is no foolproof answer. But we need to see if some direction other than preventive intervention is at least as promising, if not more. After all, anticipatory use of force can go horribly wrong, as recent military engagements in Iraq and elsewhere amply attest. Though the traditional just-war doctrine has not espoused preventive war, it is susceptible to compromises by threats of hypothetical scenarios or conditions of modern warfare made into a presumed reality by powerful states, and by their continued disregard for proactive non-interventionist policies toward the weaker and vulnerable states and peoples.

To build a culture of just peace as preventive non-intervention takes time and political will, and it is never complete. But the policy of preventive intervention cannot guarantee complete feasibility or total security either, even by the admissions of its own proponents. ¹⁶ It is high time that we shift our discourse from finding security in resorting to just war to building security via just peace. The vision of just peace, long considered an impossible utopia, should be the new realism of today’s world. ¹⁷

This just-peace approach sanctifies the traditional Augustinian just-war ban on anticipatory military measures in a way that the premise of just war cannot. A just-peace initiative allows measured military response if needed as the only option for self-defense or humanitarian reasons, either after an attack has occurred or when an attack is imminent, in the strictest sense of imminence requiring interception when the offense is irrevocable. But, in view of today’s unconventional weapons in the hands of sworn enemies, it is understandable if the contemporary just-war theorists who advocate morally permissible preventive war find this strict construal of imminence too risky and thus unacceptable.

However, these two approaches need not be considered as posing an irreconcilable dilemma. Though both sides have their compelling arguments in this debate, neither approach is foolproof or complete. Sen’s comparative justice embraces ‘valuational plurality’, noted above, which accepts the prospect of more than one reasonable option. In fact, Sen points out that one important factor contributing to the flawed decision of the Bush administration’s military intervention in Iraq in 2003 was a lack of vigorous public discussion of all reasonable options prior to the war. ¹⁸

An influential voice for peace and justice, Amartya Sen has informed and challenged the world with his global vision, humanism and emphasis on inclusive public discourse. Understanding his idea of just peace can help us understand the seeming paradox of indifference and apathy leading to intervention, and proactive engagement leading to non-intervention. ¹⁹