Pacifism: Designing a Moral Defence Force

The legitimacy of a state rests in part on its capacity to provide the conditions for its citizens to lead good lives, through ensuring that they have access to the basic goods such as education, adequate housing, and the like which allow them to develop and pursue their own conception of the good, and by protecting them from the violation of important rights, such as the right to bodily integrity, to free association and the like. Given increasing global inter-dependence, both the provision of basic goods and protection against violation of rights require states to participate in the construction and maintenance of an orderly international system. Among the central elements of that system are the arrangements for preventing and resolving violent conflict between states. Since the end of the Second World War, at least, there has been broad agreement about the principles which should govern those arrangements. Each state has sovereign authority within its own territory, and must acknowledge that all other states possess the same right. In particular, they must not use force, or the threat of force, to violate another state’s territorial integrity, though they may be justified in using force to respond to such violation. There is of course an elaborate structure of norms and organizations dedicated to instantiating those principles, what might be called the institution of war. That institution has a long history, but the acceptance of the prohibition of aggressive war has fundamentally changed its raison d’être, which is now (perhaps paradoxically) the preservation and restoration of peace. The primary purpose of national armies, the main purveyors of inter-state violence, is to deter attacks on the state and if deterrence fails, to resist such attacks. Understood in the way sketched above, the institution of war is animated by a fundamentally moral purpose, and needs to be designed and evaluated in the light of that purpose. Many of the particular developments in the laws of war, such as the prohibitions on ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and on targeting civilians and non-military targets, can be rationalized as attempts to limit the damage that war-fighting can do to the pre-conditions for a good life in peace-time. And there is a huge literature discussing the ways in which the institution of war should evolve in the face of changing contingencies in such things as weapons systems and socio-political forces