Abstract
I am very grateful to Frankfurt and Coady (2021) for their thoughtful and passionate critique of my article. While I disagree with some particulars of their argument(s), I agree with what I take to be their most important contention: There are good reasons to be cautious about using a normative theory (in this case, just-war theory) as a framework for a descriptive, explanatory, research project. Frankfurt and Coady’s valuable contribution outlines many reasons for caution, which I think should be considered alongside my arguments in favor of using just-war theory. I return to this core contrast between our approaches after tackling some more minor issues.
I thoroughly agree with Frankfurt and Coady that just-war theory is not the only possible framework (whether philosophical and normative, or psychological and descriptive), and I am grateful to them for further highlighting pacifism and political realism as philosophical alternatives. It is certainly possible that some people’s moral judgments will be a better descriptive “match” to these theories (rather than to just-war theory), and this possibility should be taken into account by anyone attempting to comprehensively map the moral psychology of war.
Further, Frankfurt and Coady point out in several places the distinction between determining whether a particular moral judgment does or does not match the principles of just-war theory (or some other normative theory) compared with the question of how or why such judgments are made. I agree that this is an important distinction, but I think Frankfurt and Coady are wrong to claim that my proposal does not also take this into account. In my article, I provide practical examples of how moral psychological research has used just-war theory as a framework and starting point for describing people’s moral judgments in war, and then I argue that “in explaining lay moral judgments, we must look beyond philosophical justifications . . . and instead draw on established psychological phenomena and mechanisms such as person perception, (perceived) identification, and side taking” (Watkins, 2020, p. 236).
For example, one empirical question (which Frankfurt & Coady also raise) is about the distinctness of the war and peace contexts when it comes to moral judgment. This distinction is conceptually important to just-war theory, but my reason for raising it had more to do with a methodological criticism of existing approaches to war in moral psychology (the “continuity” approach and the “conflict” approach, outlined in my original article) than with believing that such a simplistic dichotomy exists in the real world. I agree with Frankfurt and Coady when they write: “The separability of war and nonwar should be empirically tested by comparing moral scenarios that may have similar contextual and social features” (p. 1455). And, in one study in which I attempted this exact empirical test (Watkins & Brandt, 2019), I was surprised to discover that judgments in war and peace were less different than we had a priori expected. Our tentative conclusions—for this particular study—are compatible with Frankfurt and Coady’s suggestion that a “discoverable set of norms may not be what distinguishes war from peace but rather shifting social factors that guide moral judgments” (p. 1454). But it is not clear to me how we could have made this empirical finding—which involved comparing moral judgments about war and peace—without first considering and assessing them separately.
A separate set of arguments Frankfurt and Coady raise have to do with the possibility or impossibility of being an uninvolved third-party observer to war. I have no rebuttal to these arguments: It is indeed very unclear “who would qualify as both uninvolved and influential” (p. 1455) when it comes to observing and judging behavior in war, and Frankfurt and Coady are right to point out this apparent contradiction in my proposal.
And they are also right that those who have participated in war are a key “source of information” for the goal of understanding morality in war (p. 1455). In my original article I omitted most discussion of combatants’ actual experiences because it is well outside my area of expertise, not because I think they are less important or that their perspectives will be incompatible with my proposal. For example, Frankfurt and Coady write that “moral injury may develop following legal or permissible acts of war . . . some U.S. veterans who reported killing combatants in war reported worse mental-health outcomes”. (p.6) In other words, just-war theory “principles may not track with how combatants describe their moral judgments of their own actions”, just like just-war theory principles may not track with how laypeople make moral judgments of combatants’ actions (e.g., Watkins & Goodwin, 2020). And sometimes, laypeople’s judgments may not track with how combatants describe their moral judgments either. I am not aware of any research (yet!) that so comprehensively compares and “matches” judgments across different groups in society. But the hope of my proposal is that if researchers focusing on different groups, different scenarios, different wars all have a shared framework within which to work, it will be easier to contrast, integrate—and perhaps reconcile—their findings.
When exploring the morality of war, all research methods and theoretical frameworks are likely to have both advantages and disadvantages—which brings me back to what I think is the overarching disagreement between Frankfurt and Coady’s arguments and my own. Our disagreement seems to me to largely hinge on a difference in prediction about how the research program may be used, over time.
Frankfurt and Coady and I agree about the links among just-war theory, the United Nations Charter, and the Geneva Convention. I argue that the link is a benefit, because a psychologically informed, descriptive research project using the language and analytical framework of just-war theory may more easily be able to engage with and critique the various normative, legal, and political structures currently surrounding war. Meanwhile, Frankfurt and Coady argue that it is a cost because such a research program “will likely be used to support the U.S.- and Western-dominated approach to global affairs” (p. 1457) and “may—even unintentionally—support militarism” (p. 1457). In other words, I hope using just-war theory as a framework for mapping the morality of war will have a net positive rather than net negative impact (my primary audience is moral psychologists), and Frankfurt and Coady caution against the possibility of the opposite outcome. But all of us are speculating (perhaps implicitly) about a complex, multiply determined set of relationships in a future we cannot yet know. In the absence of a definitive forecast, I instead urge interested researchers to read both articles, draw on their own expertise, and make up their own minds about how to study the morality of war.
