Abstract
The effect of feminism on just war theory has long been a research desideratum. Both have significant theological presuppositions, and political deconstructivism and non-violence have never been straightforward feminist positions. For her part, Rosemary Kellison takes a wide range of just war thinkers by the horns whilst seeking to be constructive. Her interest is mainly in the harms done to non-combatants, frequently regarded as collateral, tragic or in some instances as foreseen, yet justifiable nonetheless. The aim is to establish and expand moral responsibility for these harms and thus to argue for ‘changes in the way we do war’ (p. 230). For the concept of responsibility, she draws, amongst others, on pragmatism, in particular John Dewey. Her specifically feminist contribution is to work out the impact of relational personhood, going beyond the classical rights-holding individual. For Kellison this extends the concept of intention, the extent of harms done in war, and responsibility for them.
The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork: feminism looks at human beings as persons, albeit persons ‘at least in part … embedded and constituted by relationships’ (p. 2). Morality is constructed and maintained in the context of human social relations (my emphasis). These relations are marked by power and inequality, exacerbated by violence creating a downward spiral of personal disintegration. A central term here is vulnerability, which may be read as a non-theological version of human sinfulness, albeit with a greater tendency to capture (potential) victimhood.
Kellison argues that much of just war thinking has served to evade responsibility, and she identifies a somewhat surprising target: proponents of the principle of double-effect (PDE). It is that doctrine which in her reading has been narrowed to an agent’s intentions as the sole marker of responsibility. She relies on Thomas Cavanaugh’s summary of the contemporary principle: (1) the act itself must not be evil; (2) the agent mustn’t intend an evil effect; (3) the effect must not be an evil means to a good end; and finally, (4) the evil effect must be proportionate. Kellison reads this to make ‘intention … central to the assignment of moral responsibility’ (p. 48) and even that ‘[e]ffects … are to be outside the control of the agent and therefore beyond the scope of moral responsibility’. An agent who means well is (supposedly) not responsible for the harmful effects or side-effects of their action.
Arguably, the proportionality principle captures precisely the responsibility beyond good intentions. Yet Kellison merely decries that principle’s all-too-permissive flexibility (p. 53), its ambiguity (p. 72), and the difficulty in applying it. Various (in my view, valid and debatable) specifications of the principle for her do not address the problems of ‘how to determine whether a given military objective really is necessary’ and ‘what is meant by calling an end or an action necessary, denying the possibility of choosing something else, in the first place’ (p. 55). So, she effectively changes the subject. The critique of the invocation of necessity (pp. 55–63) that follows is on target in so far as the law is frequently invoked as a rule-automatism, lifting personal responsibility for deliberate decisions. Michael Walzer’s ‘supreme emergency’ is rightly identified as leading to paradoxical justifications of murder, though Kellison doesn’t challenge the frequent elision between conditional or instrumental necessity—necessary means to achieve a chosen end—and natural necessity, the gravitational inevitability of an apple falling to the ground. Either way, her aim to dismantle the PDE altogether seems too broad.
Kellison turns to collateral civilian deaths with a view to the principle of discrimination. No contemporary solution to the moral problem of non-combatant deaths seems viable: neither non-combatants’ potentially indirect support of the war effort (Jeff McMahan) nor the primacy of necessity over moral liability (Helen Frowe), because for Kellison these approaches suggest citizens are individual, autonomous and free rather than relational (p. 67). Notably, when engaging with Nigel Biggar’s notion of a potential moral obligation to sacrifice one’s life for others, Kellison baulks at an implication of the very concept of relational personhood: ‘This conclusion is, for me, untenable; to argue that innocent persons sometimes have an obligation to suffer or die for the good of their community is to justify all manner of violence by turning violence into a vehicle by which those it harms can achieve the fulfilment of moral personhood. It is, in other words, to heighten the vulnerability of those who are already most vulnerable while minimizing the responsibility of those who are relatively more powerful’ (p. 65). Kellison, it turns out, is not looking for a solution to the problem of collateral non-combatant deaths, but wants to emphasise the paradox of finding any moral solution.
The third chapter underlines this. Kellison shows how a relational concept of personhood makes visible harms and damages frequently not captured by universal individual rights. ‘Moral injury’, originally used in a clinical context to describe elements of PTSD, describes ‘feelings of shame and brokenness brought about by killing or other actions performed during war’ (p. 78). At the heart of it is an ‘incongruity’ (Boudreau, cit. p. 79), an incoherence, or the ‘split mind’, as a Marine officer in Iraq put it (p. 78), between moral commitments and violent actions. Perhaps somewhat too general, the concept does not distinguish between perpetration and victimhood; the two most vulnerable groups are both fighting combatants and civilians living in war zones. In any case, it allows Kellison to bring out the ‘harms to personal and social relationships and to relational autonomy itself’ (p. 82). Examples from America’s contemporary wars include the damage, fear and trauma caused by remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) strikes. With great empathy she recounts a small number of stories, mentioning the social disintegration when gatherings such as the Afghan jirga became too dangerous. A pure rights approach might not quite grasp this damage, so it would be worth investigating whether the older, seemingly more conservative term of ‘order’ or ‘Right’ (also used by Paul Ramsey) contains these supra-individual entities or relations. Kellison thus argues collaterally to the ongoing debate in Christian ethics.
Chapter 4, ‘Intention Matters’, forms a central piece of the book. Kellison’s ‘radical proposal’ is to extend responsibility, ‘though not necessarily culpability’ (p. 197) also to unintended consequences of action. Intention first is not a private, internal and thus an ultimately inaccessible state of mind. In Kellison’s reading it is expanded specifically by the feminist relational account of personhood. As a result, intentions are realised in actions or ‘consequences’ (via the pragmatist Robert Brandom she draws on Hegel, who talks in the Rechtslehre about the ‘concrete issue’). Individual human agency is also ‘impure’ in that it takes place ‘within a relational context and as part of larger processes than any single act’ (p. 112). ‘Moral luck’ and the inhibitions of others and adverse circumstances cloud the clarity of individual moral agency. Intentions can also be social in that collective agents such as states or military can intentionally act (pp. 113–14). Most importantly and in line with pragmatism, intentions are social because they are interpreted and attributed, even constructed, by others (p. 148). Kellison here overplays her hand when she infers that ‘intentions are not fully our own’ (p. 112). No doubt a person is located within contexts shaping and interpreting their intentions. But it is still a particular person that intends, not someone else. The partial dissolution of intention into what others make of an action (familiar from irritating concepts such as ‘unintentional aggression’) arguably disintegrates the agent. By contrast, communication, and in grave circumstances a trial, brings to the fore intentions which shape the act. If one reads Hegel differently than Brandom, intentions do not dissolve into actions’ consequences, let alone others’ interpretations, but are aufgehoben—removed, yet preserved in the action.
Kellison’s observations on intention are integrated into the context of moral character: it is to be developed through the habitual performance of intentional, good actions. Agents can learn from their mistakes, gradually improve and make amends; in this process, morally ‘aberrant acts’ (p. 117) can be recognized, and personal integrity as ‘moral reliability’ and ‘dependability’ (p. 118, with Margaret Urban Walker) can be developed. The damage to persons is conceptualised as foiling their opportunities to cultivate integrity. (Throughout the book, at times in the subtext, the moral character at stake is America’s and that of its military after 9/11.)
The crop of the understanding of intention as consequentially visible, contextual and social is then applied to the just war criteria. Kellison argues that the ‘prudential’ ad bellum criteria of proportionality, last resort and reasonable hope of success can be applied to show the intention of an agent. For example, the ‘war against terror’ ‘exemplifies one kind of gap between stated intention and what is reasonably achievable’ (p. 122). Disproportionate damage betrays the wrong intention. Hence, in so far as the ‘traditional’ just war criteria are concerned, the (dis-)proportionality of an act also betrays intention in Kellison’s interpretation.
In a separate section, Kellison addresses the moral relevance of foresight, again on the premise that the PDE absolves agents of the side-effects of their intentions. She rightly attacks the artificial distinction between harmful effects foreseen with certainty and intended harms that is part of contemporary US military practice (p. 126). One is responsible not just for intended or foreseen effects, but also for reasonably foreseeable effects of one’s actions. Expanding responsibility then consists in subsuming a ‘failure to deliberate well’, a lack of ‘due care’ into an agent’s intention: the person ‘did not intend not to [harm the innocent bystander]’ (p. 131). Yet this optical trick overstretches the idea of intentional killing: the number of omitted intentions is per definitionem infinite. Indeed, to distinguish intentional, wrathful killing from recklessness or negligence without diminished opprobrium for the latter would actually strengthen Kellison’s emphasis on the habitually (re-)formed character.
In the next chapter, Kellison further develops the concept of expanded responsibility. It goes ‘beyond culpability’ and negative-reactive ‘blame’, which, again, would imply a single, free, autonomous agent. Responsibility is rather ‘a habit of reliably enacting the intention to show due care for others’ (p. 154). With John Dewey, ‘positive responsibility’ means that a person ‘holds himself responsible for the consequences of his acts … men who habitually form their purposes after consideration of the social consequences of their execution’ (cit. Dewey, p. 154). A responsible person is forward-looking, ‘responsive to the needs and claims of others’ (cit. Dewey, p. 155). Taking responsibility has effectively four components: ‘recognition of a harmed person as a person, response to the needs of that person, repair (to the extent possible) of the harms inflicted on that person, and rehabilitation of oneself—learning from past mistakes that caused harm and changing one’s behaviours to minimize causing such harm in the future’ (p. 156).
The chapter further ‘expands’ responsibility also for ‘tragedy’: one is fully responsible ‘though not necessarily culpable’ even for unforeseen effects. So, with Brandom’s development of Hegel into pragmatism, Oedipus is a fully responsible parricide, because that’s what he effectively did (cf. pp. 162–63). Kellison writes: ‘Part of what makes the story of Oedipus tragic is that responsibility must be taken even for alien and unintended consequences’ (p. 163). One might quarrel with this reading of Hegel as after all embracing a very ‘traditional’ interpretation of tragedy—and indeed with the genre of tragedy as such, where human attempts to take responsibility are arguably foiled. Kellison identifies this effect elsewhere as moral luck. But Kellison is after the right people: those who say the deaths they caused beyond their good intentions are ‘tragic’ and then move on. Culpability cannot be reduced to (stated) intentions.
Responsibility is also extended to social entities and large organisations. By going beyond the atomised individual, relational personhood makes this piece of political mereology seem an easy task. Yet Kellison is aware of the problem that responsibility may be diffused and dissipate. She resolves it elegantly, arguing that individuals frequently use organisations to leverage their agency. In that sense, one might add, the broadly Western idea of the culpable individual person is never entirely dissolved, no matter how ‘collective’ personhood is assumed to be.
In her final chapter, Kellison suggests ways in which ‘full responsibility’ for harms in war can be taken (p. 182). Here, she first criticises the (relatively new) category of jus post bellum reasoning. Conciliatory practices are always possible, and ‘the responsibility to repair harms is already implied by the ad bellum criterion of right intention’ (p. 187). This is explained by our intentions also being ‘relational’ and is part of a developing moral character of belligerents. With the post bellum reasoning removed, Kellison seeks to move peace and reconciliation studies into just war reasoning. The four components of responsibility—recognition of a harmed person as a person; response to their needs; repair (to the extent possible) of harms; rehabilitation of oneself—are elaborated with a view to non-combatants in the post-9/11 wars. They should be reported on, remembered, (financially) compensated and apologised to (pp. 192ff.). Kellison’s extensive research here shows many mechanisms already in place within NATO and the US military, albeit ‘inconsistently’ (p. 192). Where information on deaths and harms is missing, the American public needs to develop a certain ‘moral imagination’.
It is in the Conclusion that Kellison explicitly brings just war and just peace reasoning together. It doesn’t quite amount to pacifism, but scepticism (p. 227) about just war thinking: the harms done to persons in war are so grievous that going to war is almost always imprudent. Yet the difficulty with pulling peace practices into the just war remains visible in truth and reconciliation commissions (mentioned on p. 196), which prioritize reconciliation over justice and punishment—arguably central concerns of just war reasoning.
As the book puts the ‘collateral’ at the centre, the (possibly wrong) theories about governments’ responsibilities for their own citizens remain unaddressed. If avoiding harm to enemy non-combatants is to be their priority (e.g., p. 143), one wonders why they would go to war in the first place. In that sense, the relationality of personhood and relational autonomy only go so far in identifying concrete responsibilities or culpabilities. Feminist theorising, it seems, cannot quite take up the mantle from plain old political theory—or, for that matter, political theology.
By demonstrating the gravity of harms done to non-combatants, Kellison’s work tries to come to terms with the injustice of the United States’ post-9/11 wars. At times the pragmatist quest for moral renewal doesn’t quite reflect the veritable reckoning that would be in order for figures such as Dick Cheney or the late Donald Rumsfeld. She doesn’t seem to doubt the sincerity of their ‘ethical’ defenders’ argumentation; the word ‘hypocrisy’ occurs only once in the book. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, politicians around 9/11 have also frequently lied about theirs.
Nonetheless, Kellison’s ‘expansion of responsibility’ shines a bright light on what is often only implicit or presumed by many just war thinkers, and it raises the stakes of going to war. Particularly the pragmatist framework opens up the vista to just war reasoning’s philosophical hinterlands. It is on these grounds that Kellison’s book will provoke the most serious engagement, as it proposes a shift in what is to be the fundamental concern of future wars and the reasoning about them.