Just Wars

[Ian Murray]

Yoshie:
>
> Why do you think it is a case of reification to regard standards of
> justice -- including what human beings think of as just & unjust
> conduct within war, just & unjust wars, etc. -- as historically
> evolving, being products of social struggles (or social relations)?
> I rather think that the principle of "non-violence" _at all costs_ is
> a case of "phantom objectivity."
================
But that is not what you wrote in your first post. You merely posted one word with no
context, leaving me and others with lots of surplus meaning to play off of. Of course
the standards change; they are changed by people. The problem is there has been no
"moral" "progress", by that I mean, minimally, a significant diminution of violence
through historical time. Non-violence is what  I would regard as an historically
"determined" metahistorical norm that should be striven for at all times and places.
Included in that is the recognition that one cannot relinquish the responsibility to
refrain from inaugurating violence against another person and that no person may
command or otherwise coerce/persuade another to forgo that responsibility. This is
not to deny that there are fetters on it's universalizability. But the fetters are in
each of us, not some other non-human "power". Institutionalized roles and classes do
not ameliorate the issue.  Somebody somewhere is always the inaugurator of violence.
It is how we deal with the ethics of that choice, for that choice is always a choice
irrespective of constraints and I don't deny that there are always constraints, more
than the subsequent behavior--even though that is every bit as problematic-- that we
need to focus our capacities for learning from history.

If we have no such responsibility that is "independent" of institutionalized roles
and classes, though not history, if non-violence is not a norm worth universalizing
then what is the point of even attempting to discuss just wars, victors justice; and
the like; especially if we are free to determine whatever standards we feel like
whenever we feel like it, if "capriciousness trumps" as a Viet Nam vet put it to me
in grad school. All such theorizing would be just so much "whining" especially if
cynicism was the prevailing cultural "ethos." With god being dead and all aren't we
really "off the hook?" Do we only want the law and the ones with the bigger stick,
gun bomb, space shield, panopticon etc. to intimidate us into restraining ourselves?
These are deep problems for moral realists, historicists and eliminativists and I
don't pretend to have any answers.

Ian