PAID PART-TIME INTERNSHIPS
Humanities Internship Program
Humanities Core: Winter 2005
Week 8-1
I. Societies in a state of nature
a. Beitz on self-preservation (p. 52-5):
i. nothing more than a right to protect the lives and security of individuals
ii. cosmopolitanism—in asking moral questions, we should consider what is owed to individuals as such, regardless of their citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, and so on.
b. Civil order versus individual liberty?
c. “Boundary crossings”
d. Societal self-defense
i. No international law in a state of nature. Natural, law-independent rights.
1. Doctrine of Pre-emption: a society cannot use force in self-defense until it is faced with a credible and imminent threat.
2. The Bush Doctrine of Prevention a society can attack before a threat is imminent; we can attack “rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten” us. Or: “America will act against…emerging threats before they are fully formed” (p. 4).
ii. “Surgical strike.” More like the individual sworn enemy case?
iii. Even in a state of nature, it is much more difficult to justify preventive strike as a just cause when many innocent people will die in the process.
1. One single terrorist for ten thousand innocent foreigners?
2. Alternatives?
II. The factual premise: Are relations between societies as they exist today a Hobbesian state of nature?
a. Is this question necessary?
b. Special moral concerns
III. Existing organization
a. Examples: United Nations (security and law), International Monetary Fund (financial stability), World Bank (development), World Health Organization (health policy), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization (trade), International Labor Organization (labor standards). (Beitz, pp. 37-40, 43-6)
b. Transnational organization—organization of people of common interest across different societies.
IV. Assurance
a. Established social practices, which will for the foreseeable future continue to stably exist.
i. Only general compliance is necessary
ii. Reduced threat of violence (Beitz, p. 44-6)
iii. Economic factors
iv. Informal pressures
V. Inequality of power
a. Assurance problems: each party takes a significant risk if he or she acts on moral rules without assurance of reciprocal compliance.
b. If one party is sufficiently powerful, it does not take significant risks in initiating cooperation even when it lacks assurance that others will cooperate.
i. The more powerful the U.S. is, the harder it is to argue that war is its natural right of self-defense.
ii. Duty of Greater Power: the greater a state’s power in comparison to others, the greater its duty to build international arrangements that serve everyone—even if it could do better for itself making bargains and strategic alliances on its own.
1. Balanced by the right of sovereignty?
VI. Fair Play
a. Other grounds for the Bush Doctrine of Preventive War?
i. A special privilege within international law, for the U.S. only.
ii. A proposed law, for all nations.
b. Duty of Fair Play: absent special justification, those who accept the benefits of a practice sustained by the participation of others must do their part when it comes time to do so.
c. International law
i. War is permitted only if: (1) it is authorized by the community of nations (via the UN Security Council), or (2) it is taken in self-defense.
1. No Security Council resolution ever authorized the Iraq invasion.
2. Self-defense?
a. Article 51 of the UN Charter: force “if an armed attack occurs” is rightful self-defense
b. The Doctrine of Pre-emption
i. No settled law about exactly what threats count as “imminent.” Sufficiently urgent and immediate that no response other than use of force is available.
ii. In the run-up to the war, the U.S. and Brittan never produced credible evidence of a threat of this immediacy.
ii. Is this cheating, a violation of the Duty of Fair Play? Or is there some “special justification”?
VII. Exceptionalism
a. Applied to the Doctrine of Prevention,
i. The Hobbesian right: without assurance that agents will generally comply with rules for the use of force, every agent has a right to preventive war (without the authorization of others).
ii. The exceptionalist right: when there is assurance that agents will generally comply with rules for the use of force, most agents have no right to preventive war without the authorization of others. Yet certain agents, such as the U.S., can wage war whenever they alone deem it necessary.
b. The U.S. is special because it is the U.S.?
c. The fact of power
d. U.S. as the sheriff
i. Greater responsibility for others, not less
e. Special vulnerabilities?
i. Limit the exception?
ii. If everyone has the privilege of preventive war, this is not exceptionalism.
VIII. A final approach: “let’s change the law.”
a. We should all accept that every nation has the right to wage preventive war without the authorization of others.
b. Convenient pretext for unjust attack?
c. Dangerous for everyone?
i. Mountain side pass case
ii. A world in which you and your neighboring country is allowed to wage preventive war, whether the threat is real or imagined, is a world much more dangerous—much more like Hobbes’s state of nature—than our own.
IX. Questions:
i. Does the U.S. Doctrine of Prevention have a moral justification?
ii. Could the U.S. adoption of the Doctrine of Prevention change international law and eventually cast the world into a Hobbesian state of nature?
1. Would it then have a Hobbesian right of self-preservation which it did not have before?
2. Would making the world more dangerous in this way be compatible with the Duty of Greater Power?