It's really a great pleasure to introduce to you this afternoon, Professor Cheney.
Ryan Cheney. Many of you will have known already is he's been writing and thinking about these issues for many, many years.
He's certainly one of the reasons why I started working in this field.
He brings to these discussions, I think,
in a way that nobody else does a real historical and intellectual richness and appreciation
of the particularly of the status of different actors operating in this area.
And I think that today's discussion of taking soldier seriously is going to be very much a manifestation of that.
But if I can just about this one for 40 minutes or so.
Thanks very much. Well, thanks, everyone, for coming out on this glorious day.
Let me just say one or two words about the background to this and that.
I'm going to read the paper. Someone commented a few weeks ago that philosophers tend to do this.
I actually find that if I read the paper, first of all, I can make sure I say everything that I want to say.
And also, I certainly make sure that I don't run over the time limit a lot, and that's the best way I found to do that.
Now I am both a philosophy professor originally, and now I'm a law professor in the United States when I'm not here.
And I want to mention both of those things.
The interest in law is related to the fact that I'm going to be talking today about what kinds of reasons soldiers are given for the things they do.
And one background for that is that in the legal profession of the United States,
I serve on a committee that studies what kind of reasons lawyers have for what they do and
how they their lives fit together in terms of the justifications and motivations for things.
Once in a while you'll see me alluding to the parallel with attorneys, and that's that that's the background of that.
Now, as a philosopher, I've been working on issues of war and peace for quite a long time.
And one of the things that will show through it in the paper I'm going to read to you is that when I first taught Just War Theory,
I taught it in conjunction with a Vietnam Marine combat veteran.
And we talked about those things together.
His name was Ron Phillips. And one of the things we did in the course of the class was talk about the theories
about it and then talk about what they meant to someone who was actually in combat.
And it was an extraordinary experience for me and one that I'm actually really still wrestling with and continuing to wrestle with.
I refer at one point to my offer, my experience in officers candidate school, and I certainly don't want to make too much of that.
Every young man of my generation in the United States was required to be in ROTC if you went to a public school.
And so interestingly, you had no matter who you were, you had experience with several years, in my case,
four years of ROTC leading nowhere in my case, because the Vietnam War was going on and I really didn't have any intention of serving in it.
So I want to make sure that I'm not drawing on any experience.
And in fact, I'm very aware that I need to learn a great deal from people who had more experience like that than I am.
Finally, the thing that I'll move towards in the end is the fact that we have America just concluded the Iraq war.
My concern is that like other wars that in my view were terrible mistakes, that this will now be forgotten about conveniently.
But the problem is, how do you remember something like that? What is the proper way to remember it?
So that's one of the things that I'll I'll bring up at the end.
I'm a philosopher, which means that I'll raise more questions than I'll answer a lot of things I'll bring up,
and I won't give you my own sort of solution to it. So I invite you to to share with me your own thoughts about it afterwards.
The young George Washington admired European military doctrine.
Washington had read the European authorities as a commander of the Virginia militia.
And Washington's experience in the French and Indian War had confirmed their basic teachings.
Washington wrote in 1757, Discipline is the soul of an army.
Unfortunately,
Washington's experience commanding the Virginia militia only raised doubts about whether ordinary citizens were capable of such discipline.
These doubts remained with him when he took command of the Continental Army 20 years later.
Absent the aristocratic virtues of honour, fame and glory, Washington wondered,
could the citizen soldiers of the New Republic stand up to the professionals of the British Empire?
The beginning was not auspicious.
At the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, Washington lost his composure at the sight of his soldiers running from the oncoming British.
In a rage,
he took to flogging the fleeing officers and men with a writing cane until his aide grabbed the bridle of his horse and led him out of danger.
Apparently, he came very close to being captured by the British when he lost control like that.
In a letter to the Continental Congress, Washington voiced strong doubts about whether all of his troops would do what he called their duty.
By this, he meant, would his troops stand their ground even when things seemed hopeless?
Would they continue to fight even in the face of death?
If discipline was the soul of an army, could a democratic army possess a soul?
An answer of a sort presented itself in February 1778, in the darkest and coldest days of Valley Forge.
His name was Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Von Steuben, Baron von Stoiber,
a former Prussian officer whose résumé was almost entirely fabricated but who offered his services to Washington for no pay,
just the honour of serving the cause. He proved to be an effective trainer of men.
In fact, one stipend is generally credited with a major,
major role in the survival of the Continental Army and then the ultimate victory of the Americans.
So von Stoiber proved to be an effective trainer of men, even though he actually knew no English.
His orders were issued in French and then translated by his military secretary to the troops.
Periodically he would scream the only two English words he knew.
God damn. But his efforts proved invaluable in keeping the army together.
But one storm in two was impressed by the differences between American soldiers and those back home, especially in their attitudes to authority.
One strong man has served under Frederick the Great, who had famously remarked,
If my soldiers began to think, not one of them would remain in the ranks.
By contrast, Von Stoiber wrote to a friend, these are his words.
The genius of this American nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French.
You say to a Prussian, Do this, and he do with it.
But here I am obliged to say this is the reason why you want to do it.
And only then do the soldiers obey. Now Americans are tired.
A great deal of nonsense growing up. Every American, when you're in school in the United States,
every American is told that we won the revolution because our soldiers hid behind trees when they fired.
And in six years, the forces of the British Empire could never figure this out.
But the story about Von Steuben turns out to be actually true.
And his letter home captures an important contrast.
The conception of the American citizen soldier as both demanding and deserving reasons for what they do,
played a vital role in the ideology of the early American Republic and played a vital role in civic Republican ideology.
Generally in this era of. The contrast is captured in Thomas Paine's remark.
This is actually an article he wrote on agricultural issues.
Thomas Paine remarked that the army of the United States was an army of principles
whose soldiers are treated with the respect that democratic citizens deserve.
By contrast, Paine said, despotic governments.
These are his words. Consider man merely as an animal or a child.
The soldier of a despotic government has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.
For Benjamin Franklin, writing at the same time, the condition of the soldiers of Europe was actually worse than slaves.
Benjamin Franklin wrote, The soldier of a monarchy is not to inquire whether a war be just or unjust.
That soldier, wrote Franklin, is just to execute his orders.
Now Franklin goes on to make an interesting contrast. Franklin says A Negro slave in our colonies,
being commanded by his master to rob or murder a neighbour may refuse and the magistrate will protect the slave in his refusal.
The slavery then of a soldier is worse than a Negro because the soldier has to obey an order no matter how immoral.
I'm not sure what Franco saying is true. By the way, I tried to research about the law of slavery.
The problem is, is that it was entirely dependent on which part you were in.
But I think that would be an interesting fact if a slave could refuse on moral grounds in order of his master the brainless status of such soldiers.
That is, the perception of European soldiers as brainless was immortalised in Washington.
Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, whose headless horseman is the ghost of a Hessian missionary.
Finally, Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist thinker.
Mary Wollstonecraft, in her vindication of the rights of women, goes so far as to liken the standing army to a bunch of infantilized females.
She writes, The military man, like the young girl, is sent into the world before his mind has been fortified by principles.
As a result, she writes, soldiers like women practice the minor virtues with punctilious politeness.
European officers in particular are particularly attentive to their persons, fond of dancing and crowded rooms.
And they only live to please. Hence they blindly to submit to whatever they're told to do.
Now, let me just comment and some of you may know this, that the contrast between the American soldier and some a little bit later,
the French soldier, the Republican soldier and the soldier of monarchy was was a major, major issue for ideology at the time.
Adam Smith writes about it at length in his lectures on law.
Adam Fergusson writes about it as well. So this is not just something that is sort of self-congratulation of the new United States.
It was it was the perception was, was that the difference between the thinking soldier and the unthinking soldier in
some sense was what the creation of a democracy or a new republic was all about.
But Paine, Franklin and Wollstonecraft knew little about the realities of war.
A logical question about their army of principles is whether it is capable of fighting a war at all.
The Standard Guide for Foot Soldiers. At the time of the American Revolution,
Humphrey plans an abstract of military discipline called for 17 separate commands to be given to soldiers when loading their muskets.
Obviously, arguing about each one of these would mean that no one ever fired a shot.
The question for George Washington, though, was whether the prosaic concerns of reason could truly motivate what was required of
soldiers or whether they needed augmenting by the more poetic concerns of honour,
fame and glory. This was something that the founders of American politics, of modern politics are worried about a great deal in his leviathan.
Thomas Hobbes wondered how the principles of rational prudence could ever be squared with the sacrifices required of soldiers.
Hobson's answer was they couldn't. What he says is the principles of rational prudence could never warrant sacrificing your life has soldiers,
even in the military, reserve the right to want to run away when their life was threatened.
Now, those of you know Hobbes also know that.
But at the same time, he said that the military reserves the right to prevent them from running away when their life is threatened,
leading to a picture of battle, which is fairly incoherent in that later,
critics of Hobbes picked up on John Locke doubted that a soldier sacrificing his life could ever be grounded in the principles of a social contract.
Wasn't it odd? Locke asked.
Wasn't it odd that a sergeant could command a soldier to march up to the mouth of a cannon where the soldier is almost sure to perish?
But at the same time, the soldier could not command the soldier.
The officer could not command the soldier to give him one penny of his money.
How do you explain that? How can you demand the ultimate sacrifice?
What? You can't ask a soldier to give you a pound or a dollar made no sense.
What then, is the logic behind the call for ultimate sacrifice?
Classical accounts of heroism have held that there is no logic beyond the value of heroism itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Heroism, feels and Never Reasons.
And this is why we admire it. Emerson said the military attitude of the soul is contemptuous of safety and ease and blindly indifferent to all danger.
It is a divine folly, said Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Folly because heroism rejects self-reflection.
Divine because heroism is, these are Holmes's words, sufficient to itself.
This is a thought, by the way, in this address essay called On the Moral Equivalent of War by William James.
Which one more famous American Essays on war? This is something that James talks about quite a lot.
He says, actually, that the heroism required for sacrifice in war is not just illogical, but that's why people are attracted to it.
He sort of thought that was the kind of attraction of a logic, and he had an interesting remark that I always thought was interesting, he says.
And so the problem with pacifism is that they shouldn't harp on the irrationality of war, because that's what makes it attractive to people.
They'll just make it seem more interesting the crazier it is. That was what James kind of said about that, concluded Emerson.
Our culture must not permit the arming of the man.
Emerson wrote, Let him here in season that he is born into the state of war and that the Commonwealth
and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace,
but fortified by honour, should never dread the thunder.
George Washington never resolved his worry about an army of ordinary citizens.
And those of you familiar with American military history may remember that as soon as the republic was founded,
there was quite a long argument about the nature of the military establishment.
And behind that argument was the issue of could you have a military of citizen soldiers?
Or did you have some kind of professional army? And how could those two things be squared with each other?
Washington never resolved his worry about an army of ordinary citizens.
Could the common sense that inspired Paine's Democratic soldier be reckoned with?
The divine folly that facing the sun required?
Could an army of principles also be an army of passion?
Washington's distrust of civilian and arms ran so deep as to blind him to the possibility realised 20 years later in the
French Revolution blinded him to the possibility of drawing an entire population into war through the power of nationalism,
nationalism with his particular blend of high ideals and the martial spirit.
But I want to suggest that the general problem here has not gone away.
The problem of the Democratic soldier, that problem has actually not gone away.
And in fact, it is reappeared today in what I call the problem of the cosmopolitan soldier,
because just as Washington worried whether ideals were enough to motivate the citizen soldiers of a democracy,
today there is a discussion about whether cosmopolitan ideals are sufficient to motivate the sacrifices required of cosmopolitan soldiers.
So I'll get back to that a little bit later. But first, what I want to do is step back and consider some of the philosophical issues about reasons,
reasoning and soldiering that have just been raised.
Okay, so I step back a moment and make some philosophical comments on the issues we've been talking about.
Contemporary philosophers have come to see a close connection between taking someone seriously and
respecting them as a rational adult and the kinds of reasons you give them for how you treat them.
The idea comes from a manual count.
Treating someone as an autonomous agent, in his words, means acting towards them on reasons that are responsive to their autonomous status,
hence acting to work towards them on reasons that they themselves would accept as legitimate.
As a result of this way of thinking and what it means, take someone seriously.
Philosophers train their attention on what counts as a good or bad reason to
give another autonomous person for what we ask of them or what we do to them.
This emphasis on the reasons we give others leads to another important idea the link between justification and dialogue.
This is the idea that we should always act towards others in ways that we could explain to them face to face,
mindful of the fact that they might challenge us back. This holds for our institutions as well as our actions.
The reason behind our laws or practices should also be ones that can be explained
to people face to face and mindful that they might challenge them back.
In philosophical parlance, our reasons cannot be just third person or third person reasons.
Ones that speak about other people or about them. Our reasons must be second person reasons.
Reasons as to other people and with them.
Now, in the realm of politics especially, I think this stress in dialogue often plays an important role in bringing things back to Earth.
It is easy to speak of abstract policies carried out by abstract people attentive to their abstract rights and duties.
The stress on dialogue requires that our judgements be ones that we could explain to the people themselves that are most impacted by things.
We must think of people involved. We must think of the people involved as well as the policies at issue.
Taking others seriously means acting towards them in ways that are answerable to this dialogue.
We might call this the dialogue of dignity.
Those of you who study just war theory will recognise that this is the fight at the heart of Thomas Nagel's classic essay War and Massacre,
where he basically sort of said that the way to understand the kinds of
prohibitions and requirements on people is to imagine them having a dialogue with
another person about the person they're going to injure and whether they can
explain in terms that the reasons that person could understand what they're doing.
Now, my title, Taking Soldiers Seriously, means to suggest that we extend this thought to soldiers.
And what we ask of them. Taking soldiers seriously means giving them reasons for what they do.
And not just any reasons, but ones that are responsive to their status as autonomous agents are fully adult persons.
Both thoughts, I think, are implicit in the views of democratic soldiering we just met.
I think we are repelled by Frederick the Great's remark that soldiers should
never think because we believe that soldiers deserve reasons for what they do.
And we are attracted to the views of Thomas Paine,
Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft because we agree that those reasons must not treat soldiers as slaves.
Children are lesser forms of humanity. Soldiers deserve good reasons and they deserve the reasoning behind them.
Finally, I think this is why we worry about conceptions of heroism like the ones of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At best, there seems to be something adolescent about talk of a divine folly that never drives the thunder.
It reminds me of adolescent views of love as something that has nothing to do with reasons and reasoning.
It's no surprise, by the way, that Emerson was a very young man when he wrote these words,
and Oliver Wendell Holmes was a very old man wishing he was a young man again.
Sometimes the dialogue is hypothetical. Taking another seriously means acting on reasons one could give them and that they could accept.
But sometimes the actual dialogue is simply not possible.
An officer cannot always give his soldiers the reasons for what he orders them to do.
Any more than a professor can always give his or her students the reasons for his demands or her demands.
The enterprises in question, soldiering or whatever are incompatible without amount of discussion.
But if the officers demands of the professor's demands are legitimate,
then there will be good reasons for them that could be given if need be, and if the proper occasion arose.
Now, the hypothetical element here, it does introduce some slack into the requirement, but I don't think it renders it meaningless.
It commands us to reflect on whether our grounds for asking things of soldiers or students or clients or whatever are in fact backed by good reasons,
ones that could be given and accepted in a spirit of mutuality. Now, in reality, everything I've said so far just leads to the $64 question.
What's a good reason? What counts as a good reason to give soldiers for what they do and what counts as a bad reason?
And what are the terms that we can assess this on? What counts as a good reason for soldiers.
We can probably agree that cursing at them doesn't count.
You might disagree about that, but that's all you do.
That doesn't count, you know? So just a curse is not a reason.
So it's neither good or bad reason. When I was an officer's training school, most of my inquiries were met with the response because I told you so.
By itself, that didn't seem like a good reason.
Beyond this, though, people can disagree sharply about what are good or bad reasons for asking things of soldiers.
So addressing these disagreements will mean a number of things. It will mean addressing a host of issues.
Some of them are more philosophical. What does it mean to respect a soldier as an autonomous agent?
Assuming they do not forfeit that status when they enlist. Some of the issues are more empirical.
What, in fact, are today's soldiers asked to do? And how does it continue?
And how does that, in fact, continue to change?
For us to discuss these kind of concerns for fields of law and medicine under the topic, professional responsibility.
And so my suggestion is that taking soldier seriously means extending these discussions to the enterprise of soldiering.
Now philosophers have actually haphazardly talked about this topic.
What are the reasons and good reasons for soldiers? They've already talked about this topic of so somewhat on systematically.
As I mentioned, Hobbes and Locke worry whether the reason soldiers are given could justify the sacrifices asked of them.
Critics of mercenaries have always felt that money is a bad reason for soldiers to do what they do.
So this is a framework for looking at the problem of mercenaries and asking, is paying someone a good or bad reason?
If not, what's exactly wrong with it? We pay, by the way, almost everybody else for the things they do in college.
Professor, include college professors. So why is it that soldiering is something that seems to be particularly obnoxious to do for pay?
I'm not answering that. I'm simply saying this is one of the questions that falls under this framework.
Reason discussions have used in Bello have asked whether soldiers on the unjust side of a conflict can ever have good reasons for what they do.
Is it example have talked about? Now what we need is a larger framework for approaching these issues together though and I so sketch one in a moment.
But first let me remark on a second less philosophical sense of taking soldier seriously.
The second sense in which I think we must take soldier seriously is is the sense in which we must talk about them at all.
Philosophers used to say things about soldiers, not just harm, lock and can't.
Sometimes their views in the past were strange. Hagel has a long discussion of the courage of British soldiers in the philosophy of right wing.
Hagel maintains that the reason 500 men could conquer 20,000 in India was their greater capacity to subsume themselves to the world spirit.
It is for this reason that is so the British could conquer India.
For this reason, Hagel says that rational thought invented the gun.
At other times, the discussion is more sensible.
No topic gets more attention in the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, J and Madison than the Organisation of the Army and the soldiers it should attract.
But a striking fact is how the problem of soldiers and the reasons for what they do disappears in the mid-19th century.
There seems to be something happening in the mid-19th century where previously philosophers talked about this a lot,
and that is very, very hard to find any philosophical discussions starting in the late 19th century.
I would conjecture that this is due to the rise of nationalism. That would be my conjecture.
That has something to do with the rise of nationalism and nationalism at times being a sentiment
which he says even to ask questions like this can show you you're unpatriotic or whatever.
So that's just a conjecture. But, but I don't really have much evidence for that.
Just seems to me that this is what happened at the same time. So since the 19th century, it seems to me,
basically philosophers have said very little about the question of why one should fight or how one should fight,
etc., etc. It's changing now, but it still has not changed very much.
Isn't this weird? War and soldiering are two of society's most serious enterprises,
yet one looks in vain for much discussion of them outside of the speciality of just war theory.
John Rawls has a theory of justice.
The canonical text of modern political philosophy devotes two of its 550 pages to the question of war and military service.
And this isn't a book, by the way, that was written during the Vietnam War.
Contemporary philosophy has produced thousands of articles on questions like Who you should have sex with.
It is hard to find a single discussion of whether you should join the military, despite the importance of that question for many young people,
including constantly my students at the State University back in the United States.
Now, my own rather cynical view is that the whole question of military service makes privileged academics uncomfortable,
at least in the United States.
In the United States in particular, it raises the issue of race and class, which come very, very close to home to higher education.
And I think it's just more difficult to talk about that than the issue of who you should have sex with, what you can all sympathise with.
So privileged academics are happiest talking about just an unjust war.
And they're happiest if they talk about just an unjust wars without any attention to who is actually fighting them.
By contrast, I would argue that taking soldiers seriously should be a central part of just war theory.
Currently, just war theory is divided into two parts.
You saw battle armour, the justice of war, focusing on relations between warring states and use symbol of justice in war,
focusing on the relations between members of those states, soldiers and soldiers or soldiers and non-combatants.
But a third issue concerns the relation of a state to its own citizenry, what it asks of them by way of military service, taxation and so on.
I would call this just as at war. Traditional just war theory ignored just as at war because it regarded as a matter
of internal sovereignty of no concern with particularly international law.
But it seems to me those days are past use. And Bello insists that we treat that soldiers treat each other with proper regard.
An expanded just war theory would insist that such societies treat their own soldiers with the same regard take them seriously as persons.
Now, one final note before I sort of say some general things about the reasons for what soldiers do and drawing of distinction here,
I have asked what constitutes a good reason for soldiering?
I do not want to assume at the start that there are such reasons or that the reasons can be rendered internally coherent.
Both Hobbs and Locke had serious doubts about whether the enterprise of soldiering was compatible with liberal assumptions about the person.
We tend to assume that if a war. Just then, soldiers must have a good reason to fight it.
But this is exactly what Hobbs rejected.
Now, there has always been a strain of pacifism that holds that soldiers never have a good reason for what they do.
Specifically, soldiers never have a good reason for killing and dying.
In the eyes of the pacifists, taking soldier seriously means ending the enterprise of soldier.
Now, I'm not going to argue for that position here, but I am going to say I'm going to leave it open.
It seems to me that we have to leave it open. Philosophically, we can't assume that there must be a good reason and therefore let's go find it.
We have to assume that we characterise what good reasons look like and then we ask are there really any around?
Okay, so I'm not going to go into that here, but I just wanted to say I leave open that possibility.
Let me suggest that we can distinguish two types of reasons that we give to soldiers.
And much is to be gained by keeping them to state. The first type of reason involves the justification for how they fight, or for the first time.
A reason involves the justification for why they fight and how they fight.
A reason in this sense is something that warrants the doing of something, the doing of acts.
Let us call this a justifying reason. They pertain to the normative realm of what we are obliged to do in virtue of the claims upon us.
But in speaking of why soldiers fight, we sometimes have in mind a second type of reason.
The second type involves the motivation for why they fight.
What actually causes, compels, or brings about their doing of what they do.
These pertain to the motivational realm. What moves them to do acts?
So I'll call these motivating reasons. Now,
my distinction between justifying and motivating reasons is related to one that philosophers will recognise between internal and external reasons.
But I'm going to leave that issue aside for now because I think my distinction does work, even though it's related to some other philosophical issues.
Let me explain the distinction between justifying and motivating reasons with a humdrum example.
I can give you an example. It was not from soldiers from something else.
What I have in mind, why do I hold my office hours for students during my third term in America?
You have to haul 3 hours of off 3 hours office hours for your students.
Why do I hold my office hours? My justifying reason would refer to the considerations that warrant my doing so as a professor.
My justifying reasons would refer to the institutional factors of the mission of higher education,
the place of student advising within it, and the personal factors.
My justifying reasons would refer to why I became an educator in the first place.
All of these justify why I spend my time in office hours.
But do these reasons actually motivate my going to office hours?
Well, sometimes.
But frankly, most of the time, my my reasons for holding office hours is that people might yell at me if I didn't or I might even be fired.
The fact that people might yell at me doesn't justify my holding my office hours, but it certainly motivates it.
Now the relation between justifying and motivating reasons is complex, and in part because they're not mutually exclusive,
and in part because the same reason can shuttle back and forth between them.
A focus of personal relationships is that the link between justifying and motivating reasons is quite intimate.
It's a distinct fact about personal relationships that one justifies what you do,
motivates you to, and your relationship to your spouse or loved one tend to be the same thing.
I think it is a characteristic of professional relationships or professional roles that they can come apart so that
what actually only justifies what you're doing is not the thing which actually motivates you most of the time.
Now, my suggestion is that soldiers have both justifying and motivating reasons, and the taking soldier seriously means attending to both.
Specifically, it means attending to the kinds of reasons that can fully justify what they are asked
to do and attending to the kinds of reasons that can properly motivate what they do.
They both raise distinct problems and ask to say a few words about both.
Right away, though, this distinction helps us frame Washington's worry about an army of principles.
You can put George Washington's worry this way.
Principles may be great as justifying reasons for what soldiers do, but are they sufficient as motivating reasons for what they do?
Or do we need something more like hero ism or things like that to motivate them?
So let me say first more is about justifying reasons.
Contemporary just war theory focuses almost entirely on the justifying reasons for what soldiers do,
and contemporary just war theory tends to ignore the question of motivating reasons.
This is understandable, I think, but unfortunate because motivating reasons also raise interesting normative questions as we shall see.
It is. Also unfortunate because the focus on justification over motivation gives contemporary just war theory an air of unreality.
There is a lot of discussion of what one ought to do with a soldier, but not as much about what it means to be a soldier.
The reasons inspired people to become soldiers or remain soldiers once, once they do so clearly,
the reasons that justify a soldier's going to war begin with the reasons that justify their nations going to war more generally.
In a democracy, soldiers have additional reasons for going to war.
But the principles of civilian control of the military means that the military cannot have separate reasons for going to war.
That's one way to think about the structure of justifying reason.
Soldiers might have additional reasons for justifying what they do, but they can't have separate reasons,
because the reasons must be the ones that the society as a whole endorses.
In my view, the United States Constitution was too designed to make take these matters very seriously.
The idea that a war must be declared and not just wandered into embodies the notion
that its justifying reasons must be clearly spelled out delegating the war,
making power to Congress and body. The further idea that the declaration should be the result of deliberation.
The decision to wage war should be discussed not just because people differ about it,
but because the full reasons for doing it will only become clearer through discussion.
This is why the constitutional scholar Joseph Story insisted that war is something that must be entered into slowly.
That was the original idea, at least. I am probably not the only American who wonders whatever happened to it.
I remember when I was in school reading of World War One and how for several years the
parties to the conflict of World War One refused to say exactly what they were fighting for.
This struck me as bizarre. But now I have lived through several wars in which the aims of the United States are either nonexistent,
hopelessly vague, or, in the case of Iraq, built on falsehoods.
And none of them were initiated by the procedures the U.S. Constitution required.
There are many reasons to fault this, but the one I want to just mention now is that it seems to me that it doesn't take soldiers seriously.
Soldiers must be given reasons to justify what they do.
If the government does not provide clear reasons, among other things, it's not taking the actions of soldiers seriously enough.
I have said that contemporary just war theory focuses entirely on justifying reasons, not motivating reasons.
More specifically, contemporary just war theory tends to focus almost entirely on the reasons for killing in war.
My biggest criticism of contemporary just war theory is that while it says a great deal about the justification for killing and war,
it says very little about the justification for dying in war.
The justification for war sacrifices.
Now, this is striking for several reasons, starting with the fact that dying in war was the issue that so exercised earlier.
Philosophers like Hobbes and Lock Horns, as I have noted, worry about the justification from the standpoint of rational prudence.
Locke worried about it from the standpoint of the social contract.
It is especially odd that philosophers would ignore the question of what justifies dying in war,
since the issue of what is worth dying for is the founding question of their field.
The question what is worth dying for was first posed by a distinguished military veteran of ancient Greece,
Socrates, who had distinguished himself as a Hoplite soldier in three of its most important battles.
The occasion, which he raised the question of what is worth dying for was the sentence imposed on him by the citizens of Athens,
giving him the option of drinking the hemlock or fleeing the city.
Socrates rejected the latter in military terms. I remained at my post in battle.
Socrates as an apology, and I cannot retreat from philosophy now.
To do so would mean choosing dishonour over death. But dishonour is something that runs faster than death.
Socrates says the philosopher is someone who's willing to die because the philosopher has pondered what is worth dying for.
Taking soldier seriously means assessing and more seriously the reasons they are given for dying in war.
And let me say that what strikes me as odd about the neglect of this question is that I don't see that you can answer what's worth killing for.
If you don't answer at the same time,
what's worth dying for does seem to me like so interconnected that it seems to me you have to look at the two of them together.
Now, we could talk about that, and I might have more, more to say about it, but that's especially odd to me.
There's so much stress on killing what is worth killing?
What is worth sacrificing a human life of someone else for? Not much discussion of what might be worth sacrificing your own life for.
We move on to motivating reasons. Washington did not doubt the democratic ideals justified killing and war.
His question was whether they provided sufficient motivating reasons or did they need augmenting by more aristocratic virtues?
Let's call this the dilemma of the Democratic soldier. In the end, it did not prove much of a dilemma due to the rise of modern nationalism.
One of the most powerful motivating reasons that history has seen in recent years,
though some have taken the decline of nationalism to pose a new dilemma called the dilemma
of the cosmopolitan soldier involved in the relation of justification to motivation.
A good statement of this is provided by Mary Kaldor. Soldiers used to fight for national values.
Soldiers of the 21st century will be asked to fight for cosmopolitan values like universal human rights.
Counter asks Are these sufficient to motivate fighting and dying?
She writes, Does the individual have to be prepared to die for humanity?
At the very least, she notes, the individual has to be prepared to risk his life for humanity, but not in an unlimited way.
Nevertheless, in the new war, is is it possible to find cosmopolitans who will risk their lives to save others?
Or is this ridiculously utopian, our cosmopolitan values enough?
I don't have an answer to this question, and let's talk about it in the discussion.
Instead, let me say a bit more about the nature of motivating reasons that serves to frame the problem here.
You might think that if I'm justified in doing something, indeed, if I'm obligated to do it, then it wouldn't much matter what motivates me to do it.
All that matters is I do it. Motivating reasons on this view are purely pragmatic.
Their only concern is do they do the job? But an interesting fact is that we don't think of motivating reasons in this way.
There are good and bad motivating reasons. So taking soldier seriously means attending to this distinction as well.
Take my example of office hours. I've confessed that my reasons for doing so are often things like not wanting to be yelled at.
This is not a noble reason, but it doesn't strike me as a bad reason because it's kind of a human reason.
But suppose I told you that what moves me to drag myself to office hours is my sadistic impulse to hope
that a student will wander in so incompetent stupid that he will give me a chance to humiliate him.
Most of us would think that sadism is a bad motivating reason for doing that,
even if their actions serve the cause of education or justice or whatever.
By the same token, in the case of soldiers, Augustine held that hatred should never be a motivating reason for why a soldier fights.
In the 20th century, racism was constantly exploited as a motivating reason.
And I think we're uncomfortable with this, even if we think that the cause for which the war was being fought was a just one.
And one of the things that I've admired about Franklin Roosevelt was that Roosevelt, actually, during World War two,
was mindful of the potential for racism against Japanese and actually did take measures to try and rein it in,
even though one could argue that that motivation might have led to heroic actions on the part of American soldiers that have expedited the war.
Now a couple of others have. I'll skip skip over time. Okay.
So I've thought a lot about is the use of stimulants in getting soldiers to fight as a motivation motivating reason.
The phrase the Dutch courage originally referred to a type of gym dispensed to English soldiers and 30 years war.
Prior to battle, soldiers brought the gym back to England, making John a favourite of the English population.
Generally, alcohol played a role in the battles of World War One,
though General Pershing prohibited the use of alcohol by American troops on the grounds that ideal should be enough sentimental of Thomas Paine.
Instead, Pershing made a deal with the American tobacco companies to distribute cigarettes to all the troops, which gave rise to the modern cigarette.
In American culture, one worry about such things reflects the view that soldiers should be taken seriously.
Even if a cause is just, you don't drug someone to fight it.
Drugs are not a reason. On the contrary, they now muster questions of why we fight and how we fight.
That said, if we have good reasons for what we do,
what's the matter with making it easier with stimulants now you might be expecting a justification for why I have a few drinks before office hours,
but I'm actually not thinking of that. I'm thinking of the fact that we anaesthetise people before operations.
We sedate people in certain situations.
We don't sort of feel that that's disrespecting them as persons, even though it makes easier what they have to endure.
And so the question I'm raising is I don't have an answer to what would be the matter with doing that with soldiers if they are given for reasons,
etc., etc. Let me suggest a general contrast between justifying and motivating reasons that illuminates the problem with cosmopolitan soldiering.
Justifying reasons refer us to the aims being achieved.
Reasons for fighting a war include the defence of the homeland, the defence of ideals and so on.
Motivating reasons, though, often refers to the identity being expressed.
We are moved to great sacrifice by our sense of what it means to be a soldier or what it means to be a citizen.
Appeals like this are often couched in terms of historic models that we should seek to emulate the heroes of the past.
We are motivated to action because we want to be like them. The worry of Mary Calendar and others about the Cosmopolitan Soldier.
The Soldier for Humanity is not whether the cause this provides is just enough, but whether the identity it involves is thick enough.
We are motivated by what we care about and what we care about. Crowns our identity.
We fight because we are Americans. Because a country is something we can care about.
Will people fight because they are human beings? Will they fight because they care about humanity generally?
We have tombs of the unknown soldier, while we have tombs of the unknown human being.
Proponents of cosmopolitan soldiering, it seems to me,
have to address this as do particularly with relation to the issue of humanitarian intervention.
Now, discussions of all these matters is hampered, I think, by today's schizophrenic attitude towards soldiers,
perhaps reflecting an ambivalence towards war generally at the end of the 20th century.
We witness, on the one hand, the national desire to honour the sacrifices of their soldiers.
In the United States. Efforts have proliferated to honour the troops, especially the fallen.
Australia has its Anzac Day, whose war memorial describes the spirit of Anzac as courage, mateship and sacrifice.
All of them, in the words of the Australian War Memorial, having meaning and relevance for our sense of national identity.
I can't speak for Australia, but I can tell you that in the United States the celebration of soldiering first it
focuses entirely on the nobility of the motivating reasons for what soldiers do.
While adamantly insisting that we ignore the question of justification,
the question of justifying reasons whether the cause they fought for is a just one above and beyond the nobility with which they fought.
In my view, this may honour the troops, but it doesn't take them seriously because taking someone seriously means, frankly,
assessing the reasons they were given to justify their actions and facing up to the fact that those reasons may not have been good ones.
Now, this may explain the second part of the attitude towards soldiers, at least in the United States.
Soldiers are praised for their sacrifice, but then everything is done to deny the fact that they actually die.
People may know Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, home of the Defence Department's Centre for Mortuary Affairs,
where the bodies of dead soldiers first arrived for years, executive orders prevented photographs of soldiers caskets.
A reporter I was actually given a lengthy sentence in federal prison for taking a photograph of one of those caskets.
We honour sacrifice. We avoid death. America seems particularly bad in this regard.
When 19 Italian soldiers died in a suicide bombing.
A day of grief was proclaimed at a state funeral held. President Obama has lifted the restrictions on photographing caskets at Dover,
but neither he nor George W Bush nor any president since the Second World War has actually attended the funeral of a soldier.
But perhaps I'm too hard on people here. Perhaps I minimise how difficult it is to talk about these things.
For any discussion of death in war must ultimately confront the problem of grief,
the grief of loved ones for lost family members or society as a whole.
The grief of society as a whole for the cost of its wars. Yet grief, by its very nature, seems to resist articulation.
Grief needs to be shared, but it cannot be represented. It resists.
That is the logic of reason and reasoning that I've been assuming so far.
To me one of the most striking features of my lens, Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. To me, one of the striking,
most striking features of her design for the Vietnam War Memorial was how it confronted the question of grief head on.
For those of you who've not seen it, the Vietnam War Memorial is two long slabs of reflective rock dotted with the names of
thousands of Americans who died with rooms for names to be added as they are discovered.
The slabs are stuck in the earth like two large tombstones.
They're inscribed with names like two big dog tags, resisting any further expression.
The Vietnam War Memorial is actually not far from the World War Two memorial, which was actually built after the Vietnam War Memorial.
And yet the World War Two memorial seems like a relic from a forgotten age.
Compared with the Vietnam War Memorial. Taking people seriously, I claim, means an openness to reasoning and dialogue.
But grief seems to defeat all that. Raising questions about how we proceed next.
We begin with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson, written as a young man in celebration of sacrifice.
Here are some words Emerson wrote later on in life in his essay experience describing the grief he felt at the death of his young son.
Emerson wrote I cannot shake off the lethargy of noonday.
Sleep lingers all our lifetime before our eyes.
As night hovers all day. And the boughs of the fir tree.
My life is not so much threatened as my perception goes like a glide through nature and shall not know my place again.
The ghost like existence that Emerson describes is one of being cut off from others by grief, of no longer being in dialogue with those around us,
but more importantly, of wanting dialogue, but by being incapable of dialogue with someone who has now departed.
This desire for dialogue with those who must be silent might be a name for grief.
It is captured, I think, in another striking feature of the Vietnam War Memorial.
There are memorials, shiny black surfaces, such that when you stand up close to read the names of the dead, you see the reflection of your own face.
Perhaps unwittingly, the memorial captures the fact that the dead on the wall are our dead,
our soldiers, and we must answer to them for having sent them there.
Standing close, your reflection is in fact a ghostly one, as if those who died in Vietnam are not the only ghosts left by the war.
Taking soldiers seriously.
This last part taking soldier seriously means asking if they are reasonably is the reasons they are given for dying are good ones,
but a good means ultimately acceptable to them. How do we answer this ahead of time?
For it seems to require a dialogue with the departed.
The answer is that we cannot answer it. We can only imagine it.
And this is exactly what the literature of war does both the literature that celebrates war and the literature that condemns it.
In my view, it is the inconclusive nature of such imaginings that speaks to the tragic nature of war itself.
The literature that celebrates war constantly tells us of how the dead must feel now that they have given their lives.
The most famous modern poem of pro-war literature genre craze in Flanders Field recounts the voices of We the Dead,
urging us to take up our quarrel with the foe to you from failing hands.
We throw the torch, be yours to hold it high.
The dead speak to us from their graves. Carry on the fight.
But the standpoint of the dead is also the perspective of the greatest modern anti-war novel.
Dalton Trumbo's. Johnny got his gun turning the greatest anti-war model in the English language.
Johnny. God is gone. If you haven't read it is told from the perspective of a World War.
One soldier, Joe Bonham,
who lies in a hospital bed after his face has been blown off and his arms and legs have been amputated from combat injuries to his dead to the world.
His lack of a face and mouth dramatises. His inability to engage in dialogue with the world anymore.
I've often thought this dramatises the fate of many combat veterans whose experiences
render them so terribly isolated from the normal world to which they must return.
Johnny God is Gone is an extended interior monologue by one whose greatest desire is to be seen,
to be sent around the country to display what happens to people in war.
At one point, the young man, musing to himself, poses the question of dialogue directly.
Here's the words from the novel. Did anybody ever come back from the dead?
Any single one of the millions who got killed?
Did any one of them ever come back and say, By God, I'm glad I'm dead because death is always better than dishonour?
Did they say I'm glad I died to make the world safe for democracy?
Did they say I like death better than losing liberty?
Did any of them ever say, It's good to think I got my guts blown out for the honour of my country?
Did any of them ever say I've been rotting for two years in a foreign grave?
But it's wonderful to die for your native land. Did any of them say, Hooray?
I died for my country and I'm so happy. See how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms.
Let me conclude by returning to the importance of dialogue. Discussions of war like war itself can fly off into space.
I am a professor of law, but the problem with legalistic discussions is they can hover too high above the personal realities.
They can stand too far away from them.
Justification is a matter of dialogue requires, as I have said, that we bring things back to Earth or keep them down to earth.
I see this as a moral imperative, as a responsibility to soldiers and fellow citizens.
I started writing this the week the United States officially concluded its war in Iraq.
The newspaper that morning carried the story about the last American to die in that conflict.
Army Specialist David Heckman was a 23 year old African-American from Greensboro, North Carolina.
A former high school linebacker, much beloved for his sense of humour, who was blown to pieces by an improvised bomb just two weeks before going home.
The average age of Americans who died in Iraq was 26.
But David was not untypical. Nearly 1300 Americans were told age 22 were younger.
The newspaper tells us that David's mother does not want to concern herself with
thoughts about the cost of the war or whether it was worth her son's life.
Indeed, the story notes that war generally has faded from America's thoughts.
Reports of David's death dwell entirely on the nobility of the motivations for his actions,
with studious avoidance of any doubts about whether the death of Army Specialist David Heckman was ultimately justified.
But this cannot be avoided.
Indeed, I would suggest the test of whether any war is justified is whether it can be justified to the last person who dies in it.
This is the sense in which taking soldier seriously is the key to taking seriously war itself.
Thank you.