Michael Walzer and Disproportionality

Disproportion in warfare is sometimes a simple matter of commonsense. As Justice Potter Stewart wrote of hardcore pornography, “I know it when I see it.” We don’t need philosophers and moral theologians to define it for us. When we heard in Vietnam that “We destroyed the village to save it,” we instinctively knew it was wrong. Similarly, when seasoned military officers  learned that a minimum of 300 people and perhaps as many as 3000 had died and a whole neighborhood razed in “Operation Just Cause,”  the 1989 U.S. effort to arrest the drug-running Panamanian president Manuel Noriega for dissing the United States, they needed no precise calculations to know that disproportionate force had been used.

Michael Walzer is one of our distinguished moral philosophers. His Just and Unjust Wars (1977) set the standard for just-war analysis. He showed 20th century Americans, including his fellow philosophers, there was still a place for careful casuistry in thinking about moral problems. He also showed how moral norms need to be re-formulated in light of changing conditions. But in his recent New Republic essay, “On Proportionality” (Jan. 8), he has gone too far in bending his principles to defend Israel against charges of disproportion in its war in Gaza. He would have done well to remember that ethics does better when it stays close to our ordinary moral intuitions, and the further it moves off into abstraction, the more likely it is to go awry, simply providing rationalization for military offenses. Gaza is a case where the guy in the street has sounder moral judgment than the moral philosopher.

Proportionality has generally been linked closely to discrimination, aiming narrowly at the military objective. When civilian casualties exceed military ones, and especially when they exceed them by several orders of magnitude, as in Panama, where it was 30 to 300 to 1 civilian to military deaths, commonsense knows proportionality has been exceeded. In Gaza, as I write, one third of the casualties are children. Assessing the overall number of casualties is compromised because the figures we see only count women and children. Men are excluded, because it is difficult to distinguish between dead civilians and jihadists fighting Israel. Schools, clinics and refuges, whose coordinates were known to the Israel military have been attacked. UN agencies have declared the IDF responsible for war crimes. So has the highly impartial International Committee of the Red Cross.

But outsiders are not necessary to document Israel’s policies or indict its failures. Senior officers of the IDF have made their intentions plain. In an October interview with the Hebrew daily Yedioth Aronoth, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, reports Mark LeVine, revealed the Israel strategy. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said. "This isn’t a suggestion,” he added. “This is a plan that has already been authorised."

In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer writes that to a point and only to a point, proportionality invites calculations of utility: Will the damage done worth the military advantage gained by a tactic? But, at a point, proportionality meets up with moral rules, “fortifications” he calls them, that “can be stormed only at great moral cost.” While there has been a place for double effect, and so “collateral damage,” the sanitary phrase for violent civilian deaths, in applying just war, war on civilians and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure is prohibited. While Walzer observes in Arguing about War (2004) that military law has not been scrupulous about holding officers accountable for counter-population warfare. But here popular opinion is ahead of both philosophers and jurists. Inured to propagandistic official protests about the ethical commitments of the military, civilian deaths count more and more in popular judgments about unjust war. Furthermore, nongovernmental and international organizations put increasing weight on the restraining effect of “international humanitarian law.” When philosophy begins to get too wooly and too defensive of troublesome policies, then its time to turn to our spontaneous moral judgments. As Malcolm Gladwell has argued, sometimes first intuitions are a better guide to action than careful arguments.

Drew Christiansen, S. J.