David Egan Philosophy

Each of my monthly newsletters comes with a photo I’ve taken in the past month. The photo above is my first exception to that rule. I took it almost exactly thirteen years ago in the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Esfahan, Iran. This relatively small mosque, dating to the early seventeenth century, is one of the masterpieces of Safavid Iran, and would be a top contender for the title of most beautiful building I’ve ever visited.

An Iranian proverb describes Esfahan as “half the world,” and my time there was one of the highlights of a month-long trip I made around Iran in the early spring of 2013. I could have avoided paying for accommodation for the whole month, such was the hospitality I encountered. On one occasion, I was met at four o’clock in the morning as I stepped off a bus in Ahvaz by a man whose only connection to me was that a former music teacher of his at the other end of the country had asked him to show me around. He and his family spent the next two days touring me around the Biblical-era sites of Khuzestan.

As far as I know, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque remains as beautiful as when I visited it thirteen years ago. But a number of other precious sites in and around Esfahan’s central Naqsh-e Jahan Square have reportedly sustained damage from recent American and Israeli air strikes.

The Trump administration hasn’t articulated a consistent rationale for the war, nor articulated a clear statement of the war’s aims. (Israel’s motives and goals are a bit clearer, which isn’t to say that they’re justified, or just.) It’s unclear when this war will end, or what its purpose will have been. But the human cost is already apparent, most horrifically when an American missile struck a school in Minab, killing over a hundred children.

Two months before the US and Israel launched their attack, nationwide protests spread through Iran in response to economic mismanagement and government corruption. Under an internet blackout, Iranian government forces cracked down brutally, killing tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. Families wishing to retrieve the bodies of murdered loved ones were charged exorbitant fees to cover the “expense” of the bullets used in killing them.

A different administration, with a different set of diplomatic priorities, could have made a humanitarian case for intervention in Iran. (Trump has occasionally gestured in this direction but he isn’t very good at pretending that he cares about other people.) If there’s ever a case to be made for foreign powers to intervene in order to free a people from its own government, this is a pretty good one.

But can an argument ever be made in favour of war? Is the notion of a “just war” an oxymoron?

Organized violence is a near-universal feature of human society and along with it are near-universal efforts to bring it under some framework or rules and laws. The Mahābhārata, an epic poem from ancient India, contains scenes of cataclysmic warfare as well as the earliest written references to the idea of a just war. The golden age of classical Chinese philosophy arose during the so-called “Warring States” period. Confucius and other sages reflected on how these states might do their warring in a more humane manner.

Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers also reflected on war and morality but the Western tradition of just war theory takes its modern form mainly through the influence of two Christian thinkers: the fourth century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo and the thirteenth century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas. The Christian just war tradition recognizes that violence is contrary to Christian teaching while allowing that violence between states may be justified under some circumstances.

Just war theorists distinguish between principles of jus ad bellum—when it is just to go to war—and jus in bello—proper conduct during war. Among the common precepts of jus ad bellum are that the war must be in service of a just cause, declared by a legitimate authority, be proportional in its aims, and that it ought to be a last resort when all other options have been exhausted. Among the principles of jus in bello are a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the use of violence proportionately and only so far as it’s necessary to achieve military objectives, and the fair treatment of prisoners-of-war. The Geneva Conventions are the best-known modern codification of jus in bello.

All of this rule-making around warfare might seem absurd. How can any war be just? That’s the view taken by pacifists. If it’s wrong to kill, it’s even more wrong to kill large numbers of people in an organized way. Some pacifists might allow for exceptions—Bertrand Russell, who was imprisoned during the First World War for his pacifist activism nevertheless supported the war to defeat the Nazis—while some might not—Gandhi advocated non-violence even in self-defense.

Or you might reject the idea of a just war from a position less hostile to warfare. Realists agree with pacifists that the idea of a law-abiding war is absurd but draw the opposite conclusion. War is a breakdown of the moral and legal order, according to realists, and it’s futile to try to regulate it. When war breaks out, might really does make right.

Depending on how you look at it, just war theory might seem complacent or utopian. Complacent in that it accepts warfare as an unalterable fact and tries to incorporate it into a broader political framework—seeing war as an extension of politics, as the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it. And utopian in the sense that it has such faith in justice that it aspires to regulate even the worst of human behaviour.

This is a philosophy newsletter and I just did a bit of philosophy for you. The previous paragraphs sketch out a problem and map out possible responses to it—you’ve got your just war theorists set up in contrast with your pacifists and your realists—all of it with a view to getting a clearer grip on the problem.

But this kind of philosophical rehearsal of arguments might feel beside the point. Philosophy and the law also speak in their detached ways about sexual assault and child abuse but, in all of these cases, if your reasoning isn’t accompanied by intense moral horror, your reasoning may be an obstacle rather than an instrument for seeing the situation clearly.

George Orwell was no pacifist. He volunteered to fight with the Republican government against Franco’s Falangist forces in the Spanish Civil War. But, in an essay about the war, he recounts an occasion on which he held his fire. He and a comrade were scoping out an enemy trench with their rifles when an alarm went off and a surprised soldier leapt up and ran across the parapet of the trench in full view while trying to pull up his trousers. Orwell reflects: “I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

What Orwell describes here fits what the philosopher Cora Diamond, in a powerful essay, calls a “difficulty of reality.” At certain moments, certain actions or situations may stun us in a way that defies comprehension. The man running across the trench is an enemy. The man running across the trench is a poor fool caught with his pants down. How can both of these things be true? There’s no logical contradiction here, nothing paradoxical. But Orwell crystallizes one aspect of what makes warfare so disturbing: that your enemy is also a “fellow creature.”

Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, Diamond proposes that philosophical argument can sometimes be a deflection from such difficulties of reality. Confronted with some perplexing and awful reality that defies our confident grasp, we spin it into a set of arguments that explain, justify, trim rough edges, and tidy things up.

So yes, I could explain how the current war against Iran falls short of any reasonable application of jus ad bello and jus in bello. But I’m not sure that sort of explanation would clarify more than it obscures, or deflects. There’s a danger that I might fool myself and my readers into thinking there’s clear sense to be made out of the carnival of horrors that, for half a century and more, has been visited upon a people that stands out for its warmth, for its culture, and, in spite of everything, for its capacity for joy.

I’m not sure I count as a pacifist but I think Orwell’s response displays a moral clarity that’s rare during wartime. It may be the case that war is sometimes the best among bad options. But if we must go to war, we should approach it with the gravity and humility that comes with acknowledging that it’s our fellow creatures that we’re going to war with.

More than any violation of the principles of a just war, when Trump and his cheerleader-for-war Pete Hegseth smirk and make jokes about destroying people’s lives as if they were schoolchildren playing at being gangsters, it’s the lack of seriousness that bothers me. I don’t have an answer for what should be done for the people of Iran (as if anyone were asking for my opinion) but I do have some sense of the spirit in which that answer should be sought. 

1. The rape kit was first introduced as a forensic tool in Chicago in the 1970s, largely due to the efforts of a woman named Marty Goddard. The Chicago Police Department was lukewarm on the idea and refused to provide funding for rape kits so Goddard had to find private funding. One of the main early funders was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Foundation. (source)
2. In the early stages of what became the EU, a plan was drawn up to integrate European national armed forces into a single European military. France vetoed the suggestion in 1954, principally because of its colonies: how would a European army defend French colonial interests in Algeria or Southeast Asia? (source)
3. In one of the weirder strategies for promoting fertility, French 29-year-olds get a letter from the Ministry of Health reminding them that they ought to have babies. (source)
4. Geoffrey Hinton, recent Nobel laureate for his work on artificial neural networks and dubbed “the Godfather of AI,” is the great-great-grandson of George Boole, inventor of Boolean algebra, which helped lay the groundwork for computer science. (source, with thanks to Philip Ryan)
5. The first fax machine was patented in 1843. (source)
6. Dallas Fort Worth International Airport is bigger than the island of Manhattan. (source)
7. The expression “the meaning of life” is only about two hundred years old. (source)