1 00:00:02,060 --> 00:00:06,620 It is an enormous pressure painter and she seems very unpromising. 2 00:00:07,130 --> 00:00:12,900 He's the director of the Liberal Way of War program at the university and sounds very familiar. 3 00:00:12,930 --> 00:00:18,920 It's a cycle and he's living evidence that there is actually life in search for life going on. 4 00:00:19,250 --> 00:00:24,470 I thought I was sitting in the other place. My son was whether there's a university there at school and currently there is. 5 00:00:25,010 --> 00:00:30,200 And here he is as a scholar of true thinking and that focus. 6 00:00:30,200 --> 00:00:32,800 And I think I should say, one, 7 00:00:33,740 --> 00:00:43,190 he's he's going to be with us and he's going to come across his work and sense of who sort of famous for 17th century political thinking, 8 00:00:43,310 --> 00:00:51,320 even constitutionality politics. He's working with members of rights based politics and I'm writing I'm still hoping to get back 9 00:00:51,320 --> 00:00:57,470 to 17th century was taking this diversion for four years into war in the most significant 10 00:00:57,770 --> 00:01:05,030 works event promises written by sir Matthew Hale not not in my life and he would like for 11 00:01:05,030 --> 00:01:09,790 instance hopes and the revolution of the 17th century was actually where I began my. 12 00:01:09,980 --> 00:01:14,060 Such a remarkable point to say I send you flowers. Well, I didn't. This was the people who stopped it. 13 00:01:15,140 --> 00:01:20,959 And his interests are in the ethics of wonderful civil history alongside his issues about war. 14 00:01:20,960 --> 00:01:27,080 He's going to talk to us today about the last successful conference in July this year on the liberal way of war. 15 00:01:28,040 --> 00:01:34,880 Thanks so much for that as well. Tactfully said, my qualification for talking about war is that I know rather little about war, 16 00:01:35,420 --> 00:01:44,659 at least in the sense that before I found myself director of a program investigating the subject, I have no previous academic exposure to it. 17 00:01:44,660 --> 00:01:46,969 Study at road suggestion. 18 00:01:46,970 --> 00:01:54,040 This is a paper that's almost entirely the same as a lecture I gave at a conference earlier this year on the liberal way of Wall Street, 19 00:01:54,050 --> 00:02:00,050 speaking on on liberals, that character, that dynamics the reasons why they get fought. 20 00:02:00,620 --> 00:02:06,679 It seemed to me as I was directing the conference that it was desirable that at some stage 21 00:02:06,680 --> 00:02:11,270 someone should turn up and say something about what has happened in the world from 1900, 22 00:02:11,270 --> 00:02:13,669 which wasn't otherwise represented in the conference, 23 00:02:13,670 --> 00:02:20,600 and to try to bring together a number of pieces of fairly basic information that we think we know about, 24 00:02:20,600 --> 00:02:27,680 the way that war is a social and cultural institution as developed, and the ways, of course, in which it might develop in future. 25 00:02:28,790 --> 00:02:35,960 I reckoned when I was standing up and reading that, what I had to say was probably well known. 26 00:02:36,650 --> 00:02:40,760 About 60% of what I had to say was was well known to virtually everyone in the room, 27 00:02:40,760 --> 00:02:44,290 but I hoped obviously that different people would know different 60%. 28 00:02:44,570 --> 00:02:53,930 It may well be that in this forum I'm up to 90%, but I hope of the 10% of residual ignorance is distributed in an interesting kind of way. 29 00:02:54,410 --> 00:02:58,760 Anyway, this was originally called Liberalism State Violence. 30 00:02:58,780 --> 00:03:07,130 A slightly more accurate title might be three models of state violence because I like to have something to read myself during the boring bits, 31 00:03:07,610 --> 00:03:13,700 I've distributed a handout. My basic thesis isn't complicated, or for that matter, new. 32 00:03:14,180 --> 00:03:21,770 What I'm suggesting is that Western ideas about war have until recently described the social institution that's internal to one civilisation, 33 00:03:22,400 --> 00:03:30,110 the intellectual tools with which they operate, and therefore quite poorly adapted to a more complex world with a genuine plurality of values, 34 00:03:30,530 --> 00:03:37,820 obviously by outlining three models of legitimate state coercion, and I offered these three models as a diagnostic tool, 35 00:03:38,360 --> 00:03:44,240 they represent three patterns of thinking about war that shouldn't be seen and haven't been seen as mutually exclusive. 36 00:03:44,600 --> 00:03:48,230 Most European thinkers have probably made some appeal to at least two of them, 37 00:03:48,830 --> 00:03:55,790 but it's possible to draw connections between the pattern that's dominant at any given time and wider socio cultural conditions here. 38 00:03:55,790 --> 00:04:00,620 And then I think I do have some original perceptions, but I want this training unduly to be original. 39 00:04:00,950 --> 00:04:06,139 And the main purpose of the enterprise is to show ways of putting quite commonplace ideas into an 40 00:04:06,140 --> 00:04:11,870 overarching synthesis that could of course be made the basis of discussion in a last minute paper. 41 00:04:11,870 --> 00:04:14,800 I'll say something about the late John Rawls, his Law of People. 42 00:04:14,810 --> 00:04:22,160 So a strange little book that has elements, I think, drawn from all three of my models of legitimate state coercion. 43 00:04:22,490 --> 00:04:24,560 It is, I think, an intellectual failure. 44 00:04:24,770 --> 00:04:31,190 But the reasons for its failure have an interest to people quite indifferent to the strange activity of university philosophy. 45 00:04:31,370 --> 00:04:38,960 They suggest some possible reasons why we keep on fighting wars and why we're terribly disappointed with that outcomes. 46 00:04:39,800 --> 00:04:43,400 I'll start with three quotations from very famous works, which you'll find on my hand out, 47 00:04:43,400 --> 00:04:49,430 of course, whose purpose is to crystallise in memorable form my models of legitimate coercion. 48 00:04:50,090 --> 00:04:55,520 The first is from America's genteel state, Jerry Belli, liberal trace of 1589. 49 00:04:55,700 --> 00:05:01,130 Demosthenes says, Well, but boys men's against those who cannot be restrained in a judicial. 50 00:05:01,280 --> 00:05:07,880 A full judicial restraint of force against those who are sensible of their inability to oppose them, 51 00:05:08,240 --> 00:05:11,510 but against those who all think themselves of equal strength. 52 00:05:11,810 --> 00:05:16,640 Wars undertaken. This might be called the litigation model. 53 00:05:17,150 --> 00:05:19,219 The activity of warfare is understood. 54 00:05:19,220 --> 00:05:25,879 In other words, as a kind of litigation substitute against you all that you all think themselves to be too powerful, 55 00:05:25,880 --> 00:05:34,760 to be controlled by any other method. Second, this taken from John Locke's second treatise, published a century later in 1689. 56 00:05:35,360 --> 00:05:41,570 The examples individual, not collective, but the theory that it illustrates is what I call the self-preservation model. 57 00:05:42,170 --> 00:05:48,590 BLOCK A state of war exists whenever any agent is menaced by life threatening violence. 58 00:05:49,070 --> 00:05:57,890 In his excellent illustration, a man with a sword in his hand demands my pass in the highway when perhaps I have not 12 points in my pocket. 59 00:05:58,340 --> 00:06:04,640 This man I may lawfully kill to another I deliver £100 to halt only when I alight, 60 00:06:04,700 --> 00:06:11,600 which he refuses to restore me when I'm brought up again, but draws his sword to defend the possession of it by force. 61 00:06:12,410 --> 00:06:18,649 The mischief this man does me is 100, possibly a thousand times more than the other, perhaps intended me whom I killed, 62 00:06:18,650 --> 00:06:24,080 while he rarely did me any as yet I might lawfully kill the one that cannot so much as at the other. 63 00:06:24,530 --> 00:06:32,090 The reason of is plain because the one using false which threatened my life, I could not have time to appeal to the law to secure it. 64 00:06:32,510 --> 00:06:38,720 And when it was gone, it was too late to appeal. The law could not restore life to my dead corpus. 65 00:06:39,320 --> 00:06:44,930 Yet you legitimate violence begins when social situations escape control by ordinary judges. 66 00:06:45,230 --> 00:06:48,800 But the underlying theory is somewhat different in the litigation model. 67 00:06:49,100 --> 00:06:56,929 War begins when litigants are left without a sanction. In the self-preservation model, it begins when somebody is threatened by irreparable damage. 68 00:06:56,930 --> 00:07:00,260 Typically, though, not as it happens, always by taking away life, 69 00:07:00,770 --> 00:07:06,080 law is useless in a conflict situation, but the damage that is threatened is irreversible. 70 00:07:06,350 --> 00:07:10,010 The law could not restore life to my dead carcase, 71 00:07:10,760 --> 00:07:15,440 although the situation has often been described as self-defence and after creating a couple of people to do so, 72 00:07:15,740 --> 00:07:23,390 the term self-defence is unhelpfully broad. In this context, the defining feature of the situation is not the fact you've been attacked, 73 00:07:23,840 --> 00:07:27,860 but the fact that you face especially significant type of damage. 74 00:07:28,370 --> 00:07:36,800 An interesting implication follows In the litigation model, your opponent is no more than an opponent who may for quite long periods be harmless. 75 00:07:37,160 --> 00:07:42,649 You may what is more, be quarrelling over something trivial that should be fought for in a measured fashion. 76 00:07:42,650 --> 00:07:50,150 It's not sensible to nuke Buenos Aires to recover the Falkland Islands, but in war conceived of as self-preservation. 77 00:07:50,360 --> 00:07:55,100 What matters is not the subject of the quarrel, but the maximum extent of your vulnerability. 78 00:07:55,670 --> 00:07:59,990 But litigation model can be interpreted to incorporate a rule about proportionality. 79 00:08:00,350 --> 00:08:05,810 The self self-preservation model creates a privilege of extreme and disproportionate reaction. 80 00:08:07,060 --> 00:08:11,720 I think religion is probably the most famous single statement ever produced by any liberal. 81 00:08:11,870 --> 00:08:13,940 It's Jon Stewart Mill's Harm Principle. 82 00:08:14,090 --> 00:08:22,100 The only purpose which park and rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. 83 00:08:22,490 --> 00:08:24,890 This principle limits legitimate coercion. 84 00:08:25,460 --> 00:08:32,480 It's not always noticed, however, that the privilege of freedom from paternalistic coercion does not attach to individuals, 85 00:08:32,480 --> 00:08:36,350 quote individuals or even to civilised individuals, 86 00:08:36,410 --> 00:08:44,450 quite civilised individuals, but only to individuals who may or may not be civilised themselves, who belong to civilised communities. 87 00:08:44,870 --> 00:08:46,640 As explained on the next page, 88 00:08:46,940 --> 00:08:54,890 we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its known age. 89 00:08:55,340 --> 00:09:02,840 The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them, 90 00:09:03,200 --> 00:09:12,560 and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. 91 00:09:13,340 --> 00:09:19,630 Here, mill implies the existence of a third type of legitimate coercion, which I will call civilising or progressive modern. 92 00:09:20,270 --> 00:09:26,270 Now, any culture might, of course, attack another because of some cultural practice it found objectionable. 93 00:09:26,930 --> 00:09:31,670 But I take it the liberal kind of civilising war must be informed by a progressive theory. 94 00:09:31,910 --> 00:09:40,970 Some reason for supposing that the illiberal act of stopping other people doing something well in the end, in some sense make them freer. 95 00:09:41,600 --> 00:09:49,430 This is certainly the case in Mills, and thinking at the heart of his thought was a very sharp distinction between societies where progress happened, 96 00:09:49,820 --> 00:09:54,920 in which variety was to be cherished, and societies where it didn't, in which it was not. 97 00:09:55,490 --> 00:10:00,620 There was bound to be trouble when people lost their former confidence in the validity of this distinction. 98 00:10:01,430 --> 00:10:06,200 So those are the three models. I don't suggest the list is necessarily exhaustive. 99 00:10:06,470 --> 00:10:13,370 There's also, for example, a punishment model invented by Hugo Grotius and taken over in some moods by John Locke. 100 00:10:13,760 --> 00:10:18,260 But I do believe they represent the most important options that are compatible with liberalism. 101 00:10:18,260 --> 00:10:20,900 Broadly conceived, they appear to be quite simple, 102 00:10:21,140 --> 00:10:27,560 but all three on closer inspection have some unexpected features that place a limit on their usefulness. 103 00:10:27,950 --> 00:10:33,469 I'll start by saying more about the litigation model, which, because of its historical significance, 104 00:10:33,470 --> 00:10:37,580 is actually the one that we're talking about for most of the rest of the next 40 minutes. 105 00:10:38,990 --> 00:10:44,660 The achievements the litigation model was to supply more with a guiding purpose the settlement of disputes between 106 00:10:44,660 --> 00:10:51,050 supreme political parties by reference to which the activities of soldiers could be both organised and regulated. 107 00:10:51,380 --> 00:10:56,960 It managed to wake more susceptible of a degree of order while separating it from moralism. 108 00:10:57,440 --> 00:11:02,420 Among other things, it did so by supplying a rationale for a combatant non-combatant distinction, 109 00:11:02,990 --> 00:11:08,240 war, sexual disagreements between sovereigns through a contest between specialised employees. 110 00:11:08,690 --> 00:11:14,659 The idea of such a contest but justified the activity and helped to limit it in time. 111 00:11:14,660 --> 00:11:22,550 It stimulated the rather fruitful notion that soldiers could do all but only violent things that put their adversaries out of action. 112 00:11:23,210 --> 00:11:32,180 But the model required a distinction the very sharp distinction between the soldier's ultimate employer, a sovereign state, and the society. 113 00:11:32,360 --> 00:11:39,020 The sovereign governed the presupposed, in other words, that every polity would be inhabited by a single agent. 114 00:11:39,170 --> 00:11:46,760 That was the ultimate court of appeal and ultimate locus of authority that could legitimately coerce but could not be coerced. 115 00:11:47,210 --> 00:11:50,990 It was realised that this boiled down to an unfettered path making positive law. 116 00:11:51,470 --> 00:11:55,100 In other words, it presupposed John Burden's proclamation of 1576. 117 00:11:55,100 --> 00:12:02,200 In other words, just 12 years before gently that a Commonwealth, a republic is a lawful government of families, 118 00:12:02,390 --> 00:12:07,250 and of that which unto them in common belonging with a peace and sovereignty. 119 00:12:07,940 --> 00:12:15,620 In helpful clarification, gently himself remarked that reason shows that war was brought in out of necessity because there 120 00:12:15,620 --> 00:12:21,230 cannot be courtroom dealings between sovereign princes and free peoples if they do not agree. 121 00:12:21,740 --> 00:12:25,520 And these are sovereign and merit the name of public persons. 122 00:12:26,360 --> 00:12:33,830 On this view, war is rational and licit because it's a requirement of a world that's inhabited by sovereigns. 123 00:12:34,430 --> 00:12:40,490 The model thus treats war as a condition that subsists between two sovereigns whose purpose is to settle disagreements. 124 00:12:40,760 --> 00:12:47,060 Because the very nature of supreme political power precludes those disagreements being settled in other ways. 125 00:12:47,390 --> 00:12:51,020 I should say at this point that this model of sovereignty doesn't necessarily 126 00:12:51,020 --> 00:12:56,810 suppose as bow down and top supposed that sovereignty is necessarily individual. 127 00:12:57,080 --> 00:13:02,210 The agent that cannot be coerced can, at least in principle, be a complex agent. 128 00:13:02,750 --> 00:13:11,210 But in all events it's because you have a world with sovereigns in it that war is a legitimate and morally defensible kind of enterprise. 129 00:13:11,960 --> 00:13:17,120 The rationality of the institution has the effect of bracketing off behaviour within war from 130 00:13:17,120 --> 00:13:21,950 those considerations that make it right or wrong to undertake military action in the first place. 131 00:13:22,220 --> 00:13:27,770 The upshot is that soldiers who fight within the rules will not face punishment for the crime of losing. 132 00:13:28,430 --> 00:13:34,700 It's reasonable to levy reparations just the same way that litigants will often ask for costs but won't wrong. 133 00:13:34,710 --> 00:13:43,550 Once the issue is settled to display vindictiveness, there comes a point at which the matter is closed, as in all litigation type activities. 134 00:13:43,550 --> 00:13:46,610 The whole point about war is it gives you a final decision. 135 00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:51,319 Continuous conception of warfare is the natural counterpart of John Bolton's. 136 00:13:51,320 --> 00:13:57,500 Conception of recent sovereignty is guaranteed and guided by the same moral framework that guarantees the path of the sovereign bond, 137 00:13:57,500 --> 00:14:02,300 the litigation model. It's not coincidental, nor is it simply a product of politics. 138 00:14:02,480 --> 00:14:09,290 That legislation and belligerence, the making of laws and of laws are the responsibility of the same public person. 139 00:14:09,290 --> 00:14:17,720 It's a logical necessity. It's definitely disastrous for the serious study of war that this boldness and sovereignty has been misunderstood. 140 00:14:18,410 --> 00:14:23,720 It's been maintained, for instance, that sovereignty was meant as a response to scepticism about moral knowledge 141 00:14:23,840 --> 00:14:27,830 in the context of the novel pluralism that was created by the Reformation. 142 00:14:28,280 --> 00:14:33,980 In the extreme view of Karl Schmitt, the sovereign of both arms and later of Hobbes, was the ultimate source of value, 143 00:14:34,220 --> 00:14:43,130 enjoying privileges so extensive, but they were unintelligible, except as a lightly secularised version of the path that's enjoyed by God himself. 144 00:14:43,760 --> 00:14:52,580 This is completely false. I'm happy to say if you're mesmerised by the undoubted power of and thought then chills off up with the reflection. 145 00:14:52,700 --> 00:14:55,230 But it's historically absolute nonsense. 146 00:14:55,250 --> 00:15:00,950 It would be true to say that Bolton was happy for sovereigns to have unfettered power of legislation because the act. 147 00:15:01,030 --> 00:15:04,030 Activity of legislation was relatively. 148 00:15:04,120 --> 00:15:11,770 Rather an important point is probably best explained by offering a bit more exposition of Bowden's programmatic definition. 149 00:15:12,190 --> 00:15:15,970 A common weal. A Republic is a lawful government of families. 150 00:15:16,000 --> 00:15:23,980 This, of course, is on my handout, and of that which unto them in common belong with a Protestant sovereignty that three boxes are worth unpacking. 151 00:15:24,550 --> 00:15:27,880 The first is the third that is concerned with lawful government. 152 00:15:28,180 --> 00:15:33,520 He acknowledges the existence of a criterion natural law by which a government can be unlawful. 153 00:15:33,940 --> 00:15:38,950 Just like an example he knew of the government of the Aztecs would not have been a lawful government. 154 00:15:39,700 --> 00:15:44,980 The second is that there is a some lawful governments that do not qualify as common wills. 155 00:15:45,310 --> 00:15:52,570 A republic or common weal was a particular political form, but was in his time confined to Western Europe. 156 00:15:53,050 --> 00:15:58,060 The and the Ottomans was an effective and a lawful ruler. But his dominions weren't a common weal. 157 00:15:58,510 --> 00:16:05,860 This was because his monarchy was patrimonial. It didn't acknowledge the property of subjects like many people subsequently in the Western tradition. 158 00:16:06,070 --> 00:16:10,540 He regarded respect for private property as the ultimate asset test of a civilised state. 159 00:16:11,170 --> 00:16:16,240 The third, which is related to the second, is the three course of his definition is actually drawn from Aristotle. 160 00:16:16,690 --> 00:16:22,179 You'll remember that the Common Weal is a lawful government of families and of that which unto them in common. 161 00:16:22,180 --> 00:16:28,090 Belonging down to belonging has nothing new, but had taken over from Aristotelian thought. 162 00:16:28,360 --> 00:16:34,930 The basic Aristotelian distinction between a public and a private sphere that is sovereign must respect this basic framework. 163 00:16:35,360 --> 00:16:42,220 Other things being equal, in the Virginian world, there is a private space in which people have possessions and bring up children, 164 00:16:42,520 --> 00:16:46,480 as well as a more public space that's immediately controlled by the community. 165 00:16:46,990 --> 00:16:49,720 The sovereign cannot change this basic structure. 166 00:16:50,050 --> 00:16:56,740 He cannot change what both I call the fundamental laws, such as the law controlling the succession and except an emergency. 167 00:16:56,980 --> 00:17:01,150 He cannot levy tax without consent, under no circumstances at all. 168 00:17:01,390 --> 00:17:05,800 Can he break his promises? In other words, he's not a lawful God. 169 00:17:06,130 --> 00:17:11,680 He enjoys a degree of discretionary part override the private rights of subjects, but cannot actually abolish them. 170 00:17:12,220 --> 00:17:16,510 In particular, he must respect his subjects property, although he cannot be coerced. 171 00:17:16,780 --> 00:17:22,570 He operates within a firm normative framework that's enforced by fear of God and of rebellion. 172 00:17:23,200 --> 00:17:31,660 Now, the point here for our purposes, is that Beaudin is proto liberal and that Bedouin sovereignty exists within an overarching framework, 173 00:17:32,230 --> 00:17:37,090 given a degree of consensus about the models to be emulated. Point that I will soon be coming back to. 174 00:17:37,420 --> 00:17:42,820 There were moreover well-established methods of giving that framework some applicable content. 175 00:17:43,330 --> 00:17:49,420 A sovereign to aspire to rule a common weal would spend his leisure moments studying law and history. 176 00:17:49,990 --> 00:17:55,240 This allows him to draw detailed guidance from the historic practice of comparable states and of course, 177 00:17:55,240 --> 00:17:59,080 from the best men of the best times, which are things we can do. 178 00:17:59,230 --> 00:18:04,390 The same could be said of Gentilly. Gentilly, who had written a book to Jerry Belli about the law of war. 179 00:18:04,630 --> 00:18:10,090 And the whole point of his project was to set out a framework for the external practice of the sovereign. 180 00:18:10,570 --> 00:18:15,610 He wanted to distinguish regulation of the actual conduct of belligerents in Bello from the 181 00:18:15,610 --> 00:18:20,440 considerations that might or might not justify the decision to start fighting in the first place. 182 00:18:20,800 --> 00:18:28,570 If he was to succeed in this objective, he needed some historical materials to which he could appeal to get his laws of war some content. 183 00:18:29,650 --> 00:18:32,740 He found them in the law of nations or you sent him. 184 00:18:33,160 --> 00:18:36,430 Your sentiment was known by the consensus against him. 185 00:18:36,820 --> 00:18:44,979 That is by the common consent of human beings. It's important to this train of thought and to the later history that I am shortly to explain that 186 00:18:44,980 --> 00:18:51,160 the Latin word consensus is like the English word consent incorporates a rather fruitful ambiguity. 187 00:18:51,640 --> 00:19:00,430 It could be, as it were, passively construed. It could refer, in other words, the deliverance of reason as registered in human behaviour patterns. 188 00:19:00,520 --> 00:19:04,090 Stop is thought to be rational because it's what actually happens. 189 00:19:04,270 --> 00:19:10,870 Or it could be actively construed as a kind of tacit treaty, deliberately created by some kind of act of will. 190 00:19:11,440 --> 00:19:19,120 In either case, there was an obvious problem. Different cultures notoriously evolve quite different moral ideas. 191 00:19:19,150 --> 00:19:22,600 This is, of course, the age of Montaigne, amongst other things. 192 00:19:23,020 --> 00:19:29,770 Even those inclined to minimise moral diversity had read of the existence of remote and deviant people's traditions Brazilians, 193 00:19:29,770 --> 00:19:36,880 Germans, so on and so forth, but tolerated radical departures from what might be supposed to be self-evident principles. 194 00:19:37,420 --> 00:19:44,050 The only possible answer was to privilege some peoples over others to appeal to the examples of the most civilised. 195 00:19:44,410 --> 00:19:48,100 As Thomas Hobbes ironically put it, for the most part, 196 00:19:48,490 --> 00:19:53,920 such writers have occasion to affirm that anything is against the law of nature do allege no more than this. 197 00:19:54,130 --> 00:19:59,260 That is against the consent of all nations. The wisest and most civil nations. 198 00:19:59,800 --> 00:20:04,560 But it is not agreed. Upon who shall judge which nations are the wisest. 199 00:20:05,670 --> 00:20:13,230 The logic of U.S. ascension does tended to push people from an appeal to putatively natural principles to an appeal to actual state practice. 200 00:20:13,590 --> 00:20:21,030 It was a commonplace that 17th century writing about international norms made relatively routine appeal to philosophical considerations. 201 00:20:21,270 --> 00:20:29,310 In otherwise, natural law either had to or was at least presented as having a quite important bearing on state practice. 202 00:20:29,340 --> 00:20:34,290 While late 18th century 19th century writing was dominated by collections of treaties 203 00:20:34,530 --> 00:20:39,330 in which the residual natural component was the principle Patterson served under, 204 00:20:39,510 --> 00:20:46,440 that treaties should be kept. The principle states respected were coming to be understood as the collective product of a society 205 00:20:46,440 --> 00:20:52,230 of states working explicitly through treaty making and tacitly through international custom. 206 00:20:52,770 --> 00:21:00,180 And of course, the period, in other words, from 1700 to 1900, that was a shift from the passive to the active understanding of consent. 207 00:21:00,720 --> 00:21:07,560 But though the shift may seem to be dramatic, it didn't involve a decisive break with the previous assumptions. 208 00:21:08,280 --> 00:21:16,290 It did, however, involve an intensified focus on implicit and tacit expressions of the will of a short list of states. 209 00:21:16,710 --> 00:21:22,170 The various collections of treaties that were put together in the 18th and 19th centuries described the 210 00:21:22,170 --> 00:21:28,770 actions of Westphalian sovereigns who formed and who were felt to form a society with shared norms. 211 00:21:29,190 --> 00:21:33,690 War was an institution through which they managed and settled disagreements. 212 00:21:34,110 --> 00:21:39,390 There were three obvious reasons why war was limited and why its shape was relatively stable. 213 00:21:39,960 --> 00:21:42,720 One was that technological change was relatively slow, 214 00:21:42,870 --> 00:21:49,320 that it was possible in principle for everyone to fight in the same way anyone could have a regiment Hessians. 215 00:21:49,770 --> 00:21:58,410 A second, as Rousseau pointed out, was that military power was sufficiently fragmented that a grab for universal power would not be feasible. 216 00:21:58,680 --> 00:22:05,100 Rousseau additionally, rather interestingly, remarked that this happy situation would come to an end if ever Germany were unified. 217 00:22:05,910 --> 00:22:11,850 Both parties to most wars expected their opponents to survive them and fight again on subsequent occasions. 218 00:22:12,210 --> 00:22:18,960 What went around would come around, especially among professional soldiers who had a repeated game, you might say. 219 00:22:18,960 --> 00:22:25,110 And in repeated gains it makes rational to behave in rather more moderate fashion than it is in one shot games. 220 00:22:26,310 --> 00:22:33,120 Third was that everyone subscribed to roughly the same value system, including broad consensus about the proper limits of state action. 221 00:22:33,630 --> 00:22:39,840 Though an assassin writers were prone to fits of self-congratulation about their superior safeguards for private liberties, 222 00:22:40,080 --> 00:22:46,080 all European countries had rule bound governments, but they interfered with property or personal liberty. 223 00:22:46,290 --> 00:22:55,470 They generally presented themselves as exercising an emergency power to override popular privileges whose broad legitimacy they accepted. 224 00:22:55,560 --> 00:22:59,969 In other words, when they do relatively despotic things, they accept in principle. 225 00:22:59,970 --> 00:23:06,660 These are things that you should not ordinarily do. As David HUME incurred some popularity by remarking. 226 00:23:06,960 --> 00:23:16,050 It may now be affirmed of civilised monarchies. What was formerly said in praise of republics alone that they are governments of laws, not of men. 227 00:23:16,530 --> 00:23:22,050 They are found susceptible of order, method and constancy to a surprising degree. 228 00:23:22,470 --> 00:23:31,230 Property is that secure. Industry encouraged, the arts flourish and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a father among his children. 229 00:23:31,680 --> 00:23:36,450 The last price is obviously a tease, but nonetheless the general point is well taken. 230 00:23:37,020 --> 00:23:42,840 Under these circumstances, there was little moral cost in having a firm law prohibiting intervention. 231 00:23:42,990 --> 00:23:47,520 It was unlikely that a major civilised state would do anything that was particularly bad. 232 00:23:48,240 --> 00:23:51,710 The commercial view of 18th century warfare may underestimate its savagery. 233 00:23:51,720 --> 00:23:58,170 I've noticed that most of the often quoted remarks on the subject come from Scots living a world away from Muslims Moslems. 234 00:23:58,650 --> 00:24:02,760 But nonetheless, there are reasons why you'd expect a degree of moderation. 235 00:24:03,450 --> 00:24:10,200 There's a strategic logic to behaving well. Well, moreover, there's scope for incremental, reciprocal restraint, 236 00:24:10,200 --> 00:24:15,690 at least within the circle of civilised sovereigns, including a starting degree of respect for private property. 237 00:24:16,530 --> 00:24:22,800 Gillespie's preconditions is also, of course, to explain why War Beyond the Circle was rather different. 238 00:24:23,220 --> 00:24:27,180 War against non-Europeans was increasingly technologically unequal. 239 00:24:27,630 --> 00:24:35,400 Outright conquest was quite often feasible. There was little expectation of reciprocity, and there was no negative feedback against misdemeanours. 240 00:24:35,910 --> 00:24:38,729 It also explains why war at sea tended to be different. 241 00:24:38,730 --> 00:24:46,980 War at sea was dominated by a single superpower who didn't face adversaries of a completely equal kind, 242 00:24:47,820 --> 00:24:52,350 but expected then that the litigation model would not out lost the 19th century. 243 00:24:52,560 --> 00:24:56,460 It rested on shared values that made it possible to fight about particular disagreements 244 00:24:56,640 --> 00:25:00,780 without envisaging those disagreements as part of a struggle between good and evil. 245 00:25:01,300 --> 00:25:09,880 To use the more Clausewitz terminology, it presupposes relatively low energy wars in which the competence fell short of total mobilisation. 246 00:25:10,570 --> 00:25:15,790 But 19th century attempts to codify restraint suggested that the model was in basically good shape. 247 00:25:15,820 --> 00:25:19,220 We're talking here, of course, about the 1880s and 1890s. 248 00:25:19,600 --> 00:25:22,239 There was a broad consensus that war could be regulated, 249 00:25:22,240 --> 00:25:28,690 but the proper aim of regulation was to insist that violence be focussed upon destroying military forces, 250 00:25:29,050 --> 00:25:35,560 the civilised powers permitted to do all but only the things essential to the activity of fighting. 251 00:25:36,370 --> 00:25:40,750 There were other forces that had a tendency to undermine the litigation model. 252 00:25:41,070 --> 00:25:47,890 As everyone knows in this room anyway. An obvious example was the problem that was posed by irregular fighters. 253 00:25:48,040 --> 00:25:54,820 An advantage of the litigation model was that it made it relatively easy to defend a combatant non-combatant distinction. 254 00:25:55,330 --> 00:26:00,909 But by the late 19th century, the prospect of the appearance of irregular fighters was a political reality. 255 00:26:00,910 --> 00:26:04,719 And the Belgians made the error of boasting of their willingness to rely upon such 256 00:26:04,720 --> 00:26:09,670 fighters with ultimately tragic consequences in the absence of agreement on the subject. 257 00:26:10,030 --> 00:26:16,180 Large stakes basically were against irregular fighters. Small states, which could be overrun rather quickly, was somewhat in favour. 258 00:26:16,600 --> 00:26:20,350 The Society of Nations was driven to draw back fall back on a humanitarian principle. 259 00:26:20,560 --> 00:26:29,920 The celebrated Martens Clause of 1899 at whose business and of course, appeals to the usages established by civilised nations, 260 00:26:30,160 --> 00:26:37,270 the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience in the face, in other words, of really serious disagreement. 261 00:26:37,330 --> 00:26:44,110 There was a tendency to retreat to older understandings of the essential understandings that treated international norms, as it were, 262 00:26:44,110 --> 00:26:53,140 passively as intimations of some kind of shared reality, as opposed to the deliberate creations of the shared will of a community. 263 00:26:53,800 --> 00:26:57,250 The intellectual, regressive that was was could, of course, be taken further. 264 00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:05,139 States that persistently refused to acknowledge or had a persistently different impression of the laws of humanity and the 265 00:27:05,140 --> 00:27:12,770 requirements of the proper conscience could acquire an inferior moral status that jeopardised equality between belligerents. 266 00:27:12,790 --> 00:27:19,089 A process can be seen in operation in the 1949 Geneva Convention, which declares that even explicit, 267 00:27:19,090 --> 00:27:27,459 persistent objections to a new war of law shall in no way impair the obligations which the parties to the conflict shall remain bound 268 00:27:27,460 --> 00:27:34,000 to fulfil by virtue of the principles of international law as they result from the use such as established by civilised nations, 269 00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:37,630 from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience. 270 00:27:38,650 --> 00:27:45,580 So in his vision of the world was focussed on the excesses of conservative nationalism, were thus be driven towards moralism. 271 00:27:46,180 --> 00:27:54,280 But someone who was more impressed by liberal nationalism and the potentially emancipating capacity of nationalism could be driven not so direction, 272 00:27:54,460 --> 00:27:57,340 but also tended to undermine the litigation model. 273 00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:06,220 If state violence is conflict resolution, if violence is dangerous, is expensive, and if states agree on fundamental values, 274 00:28:06,220 --> 00:28:12,190 it should be possible to devise a collective security system that enforces, as a result to arbitration. 275 00:28:12,670 --> 00:28:19,570 As the 20th century discovered. This is easier said than done, but the train of thought involved is far from obviously mad, 276 00:28:19,900 --> 00:28:25,480 especially if one takes a fairly optimistic view of the civilising effects of global commerce. 277 00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:32,229 Western civilisation for two centuries has had mood swings about the extent to which global commerce can be expected to civilise, 278 00:28:32,230 --> 00:28:35,800 but in what you might call the upswing. When you are optimistic about what might result, 279 00:28:36,190 --> 00:28:41,950 it's perfectly sensible to hope that you might one day be able to devise some sort of binding arbitration system. 280 00:28:42,820 --> 00:28:49,299 These thoughts that naturally emerge from the litigation model take us onto the Territory explored to great effect by Michael Hart, 281 00:28:49,300 --> 00:28:54,610 especially in his war and the liberal conscience, which I'll discuss a bit further in a moment. 282 00:28:55,000 --> 00:29:00,490 Any liberal society, especially one inclined to the more rationalistic forms of purely economic liberalism, 283 00:29:00,850 --> 00:29:08,200 will be tempted by a simple train of thought. War is dangerous and expensive, and no community as a whole could possibly desire it. 284 00:29:08,650 --> 00:29:14,140 It follows that it must result from sinister interests that somehow distort the decision making process. 285 00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:18,310 But these are native interest groups or alien imperialist sovereigns. 286 00:29:18,610 --> 00:29:22,900 But all be well if the bill well could dispose of oligarchy or imperialism. 287 00:29:23,200 --> 00:29:27,330 Perhaps in a once for all process of a war to end all wars that would allow 288 00:29:27,340 --> 00:29:32,320 as peaceful and democratic nations to shatter a dysfunctional state system. 289 00:29:33,130 --> 00:29:38,200 But litigation model that starts train of thought that tends to encourage its own abolition. 290 00:29:38,830 --> 00:29:47,020 But those that did it have found themselves forced back on May 2nd or self-preservation models the 1928 Kellogg Brown Pact. 291 00:29:47,290 --> 00:29:51,730 The one, of course, that outlawed the use of war as an instrument of national policy. 292 00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:56,200 It was based on an unspoken understanding that non-aggressive war would be permitted. 293 00:29:56,620 --> 00:30:00,360 The opponents, Frank Kellogg, held the quite extreme position that. 294 00:30:00,620 --> 00:30:05,270 Self-defence is inherent in every sovereign state and implicit in every treaty. 295 00:30:05,720 --> 00:30:12,200 Every nation is entitled at all times and regardless of treaty provisions, to defend its territory from attack or invasion. 296 00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:19,220 And it alone is competent to decide whether circumstances justify, of course, to war in self-defence. 297 00:30:19,700 --> 00:30:21,890 Now, there are obvious problems here. 298 00:30:22,190 --> 00:30:30,170 If this is taken seriously, then welcoming Germany was presumably entitled to defend itself from Belgium and so on and so forth. 299 00:30:30,560 --> 00:30:37,430 Presumably it is. Moreover, it's long been known that legitimate self-preservation shades imperceptibly into pre-emption. 300 00:30:37,760 --> 00:30:45,350 If, for example, somebody with hostile purposes is about to build a very powerful weapon, as some of you long had put it, 301 00:30:45,680 --> 00:30:51,200 with states, the right of defence carries along with it sometimes the necessity of attacking. 302 00:30:51,740 --> 00:30:56,120 To make things worse. The play of self-defence has a tendency to lead to escalation. 303 00:30:56,420 --> 00:31:01,159 At the very least, it's plausible to argue that the existence of a state of war has the effect of 304 00:31:01,160 --> 00:31:05,720 licensing a level of response sufficient to bring the war to its conclusion. 305 00:31:05,730 --> 00:31:09,230 So what you might have thought of as the great selling point of those self-defence arguments, 306 00:31:09,230 --> 00:31:17,300 which is that they provide a very clear criterion for legitimate war, tends to dissolve in the face of historical experience. 307 00:31:17,630 --> 00:31:21,440 Now, a full discussion at this point would take another paper. You'll note, though, 308 00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:28,780 that I've assumed without an argument that Kellog and Montague's right of defence is grounded in what I've called self-preservation. 309 00:31:29,510 --> 00:31:35,840 That is, of course, the rule within the litigation model that if an actor is attacked, it can defend itself. 310 00:31:36,110 --> 00:31:38,840 A rule of this sort could in principle be abolished. 311 00:31:39,320 --> 00:31:45,260 But I assume the argument that grounds the inherent right, irrespective of all positive law arrangements, 312 00:31:45,470 --> 00:31:52,490 has something to do with the notion that an unrepaired attack can cause us an irreparable and or an infinite harm. 313 00:31:53,180 --> 00:31:58,700 In practice, the harm usually alleged is not to people or property, but values. 314 00:31:58,970 --> 00:32:04,880 Particularly striking example at that line of argument. I printed on the handout in the month of Ronald Reagan. 315 00:32:06,110 --> 00:32:13,009 There's one particular context in which this kind of claim, a claim that war is fought for self-preservation. 316 00:32:13,010 --> 00:32:20,030 Self-preservation, being understood as the preservation of an infinitely precious value has been, in practice, unavoidable. 317 00:32:20,300 --> 00:32:26,570 All the leading liberal states, the by the built nuclear weapons or chosen to shelter beneath the American nuclear umbrella. 318 00:32:26,960 --> 00:32:31,640 Now the point of nuclear weapons lies in the disproportion at the havoc that they threaten. 319 00:32:31,970 --> 00:32:37,190 It's difficult to defend them unless they're a shield against an effectively infinite evil. 320 00:32:37,580 --> 00:32:44,780 The most plausible defence of that possession appears to be some version of Michael Wallace's argument from Supreme Emergency, 321 00:32:44,780 --> 00:32:51,590 which emphasises the importance of the value that is threatened in an extreme emergency situation. 322 00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:57,739 The evil that threatens and that might in principle justify the use of a nuclear 323 00:32:57,740 --> 00:33:02,660 bomb is the extension of a value that's embodied in the state in question. 324 00:33:03,770 --> 00:33:10,370 Third and final picture of violence is what I've called the civilising model that is, in effect, the flipside of mill's harm principle. 325 00:33:10,790 --> 00:33:12,079 On the million views, you'll remember, 326 00:33:12,080 --> 00:33:19,580 it's wrong to coerce human beings if they're if that autonomy or speaking, their freedom might lead to progress. 327 00:33:19,970 --> 00:33:25,430 But the freedom that leads to progress is only found in civilised surroundings in less happy places. 328 00:33:25,790 --> 00:33:33,319 The primacy of progress can and indeed should lead to any level of coercion that might kick start the civilising process, 329 00:33:33,320 --> 00:33:39,500 which was doubtless the UN himself understood his day job as a diligent employee of the East India Company. 330 00:33:40,190 --> 00:33:43,820 Mill thought the law of nations did not apply to the Uncivilised. 331 00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:46,790 In his fascinating essay, A Few Words on Intervention. 332 00:33:47,120 --> 00:33:55,430 He argued first that the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity, but barbarians will not reciprocate. 333 00:33:55,850 --> 00:34:03,470 And secondly, that nations which are still barbarous, have not yet gone beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit, 334 00:34:03,680 --> 00:34:07,040 that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. 335 00:34:07,430 --> 00:34:13,399 Barbarians have no rights as a nation except a right to such treatment as May, 336 00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:22,130 at the earliest possible period fit them for becoming one forbidden force unfettered in singling out one strand within his thinking. 337 00:34:22,370 --> 00:34:28,069 But his evident combination of extreme individualism at home with extreme authoritarianism 338 00:34:28,070 --> 00:34:32,210 elsewhere does not match up to a paradox inherent in most types of liberalism. 339 00:34:32,750 --> 00:34:39,800 If what is valued is some kind of freedom, and if the free individual is the unusual product of a sudden kind of culture, 340 00:34:40,190 --> 00:34:45,829 then that's some kind of duty to bring people to the point at which that kind of culture comes into being. 341 00:34:45,830 --> 00:34:51,830 And the individuals in question are in consequence, in a position to act freely, stronger, 342 00:34:52,010 --> 00:34:57,110 the commitment to the value of freedom, the greater the temptation to make use of violence. 343 00:34:57,680 --> 00:35:03,850 And this brings me over back here at last to the present. And the liberal way of war that our own generation has developed. 344 00:35:04,390 --> 00:35:10,150 If only given this paper in 1975, I'd surely have had two preoccupations. 345 00:35:10,660 --> 00:35:16,090 One would have been the possibility of large scale war in Europe that would presumably have turned into a nuclear war. 346 00:35:16,540 --> 00:35:20,560 The other would have been the threat or promise of nationalist liberation movements. 347 00:35:20,980 --> 00:35:27,580 If ideology had been a topic, discussion would surely have focussed on the cleavage between Marxists and non Marxists. 348 00:35:28,030 --> 00:35:30,460 Michael Hart's War on the Liberal Conscience, 349 00:35:30,760 --> 00:35:38,559 the Liberals lectures in Cambridge in 1977 gives the term liberal itself a comically tacky definition whose only purpose, 350 00:35:38,560 --> 00:35:45,280 as he freely admitted, was to exclude the Marxists, basically, or a liberal who hoped to make the world a better place. 351 00:35:46,330 --> 00:35:49,300 That theory of war was the one that I attribute it to gentility. 352 00:35:49,420 --> 00:35:56,380 He saw it as an inherent element in a society of sovereign states which lacks any supreme and sovereign arbiter. 353 00:35:56,890 --> 00:36:02,260 And the most important target of his lectures was the development from this tradition that I discussed a little earlier, 354 00:36:02,590 --> 00:36:06,639 the notion that you might replace this dysfunctional state system with a peaceable 355 00:36:06,640 --> 00:36:12,130 society of nations who had reason to assume that nothing much had changed. 356 00:36:12,490 --> 00:36:17,380 Both he and the idealist he made fun of were focussed at the state or nation level. 357 00:36:17,710 --> 00:36:23,830 They assumed, and he denied, that nations would cease to fight if only they were controlled by better people. 358 00:36:24,490 --> 00:36:27,399 But in fact they already existed for quite different diagnosis, 359 00:36:27,400 --> 00:36:34,480 which was attractive to the kind of people who were formerly attracted to liberal nationalism and had already started to convert them. 360 00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:40,000 The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated that recognition of, I quote, 361 00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:47,409 the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of justice, 362 00:36:47,410 --> 00:36:49,240 freedom and peace in the world. 363 00:36:49,570 --> 00:36:58,960 And that disregard and contempt for those rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind. 364 00:36:59,530 --> 00:37:02,260 The direction of the causal chain is rather interesting. 365 00:37:02,380 --> 00:37:10,990 It doesn't say that barbarous acts involve contempt for rights, but rather that contempt for rights has resulted in barbarous acts. 366 00:37:11,410 --> 00:37:18,730 Its vision, you might say, is granular or atomic. If we sought out individual rights, then everything else will follow. 367 00:37:19,850 --> 00:37:24,190 Unlike the conventions that followed, the declaration isn't, of course, a treaty document. 368 00:37:24,430 --> 00:37:30,729 It's a declaration that's set out to be a standard of achievement, which is why states permitted its existence. 369 00:37:30,730 --> 00:37:33,520 But it license the impression which has strengthened ever since. 370 00:37:33,990 --> 00:37:39,220 There exists a global moral consensus that that's an absolute constraint on state activities. 371 00:37:39,790 --> 00:37:45,610 To put it another way, it's encouraged the view that the ultimate moral reality is the privileges of individuals. 372 00:37:45,820 --> 00:37:54,130 In the last analysis, both states and nations saw what legitimacy they have from their propensity to support a human rights based order. 373 00:37:54,760 --> 00:37:58,090 This has important consequences for how we think about war. 374 00:37:58,510 --> 00:38:02,829 You'll remember the main presupposition of the entire gentleman tradition was 375 00:38:02,830 --> 00:38:07,960 that war was rational because states were rational decision of war collapses. 376 00:38:08,170 --> 00:38:11,260 If states aren't actually rational at all, 377 00:38:11,260 --> 00:38:18,819 or if their rationality is contingent on respect for some deeper moral reality at work on the level conscience 378 00:38:18,820 --> 00:38:25,120 today would be unable to sustain the state centred focus in any prolonged discussion of the topic. 379 00:38:25,240 --> 00:38:27,880 Someone with sooner or later appeal to human rights. 380 00:38:28,360 --> 00:38:34,689 Ultimate criterion to which policies must conform has come to be a real or imagined consensus about the proper treatment. 381 00:38:34,690 --> 00:38:40,810 In other words, of individuals states kwe. States do not have rights, they have responsibilities. 382 00:38:41,140 --> 00:38:45,190 And the nature of those responsibilities means that states are instrumental. 383 00:38:45,490 --> 00:38:51,880 A state, for example, that loses control over its territory is no longer typically seen as being merely ineffective. 384 00:38:52,150 --> 00:39:00,160 In an interesting expression, it is a failed state. It's instrumental in effectiveness means that it can be doubted if it's a state at all. 385 00:39:01,180 --> 00:39:06,160 Now, this is an extremely momentous, imaginative shift that we'll be working through for generations. 386 00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:08,530 They're wrong to speculate about its full effects. 387 00:39:08,800 --> 00:39:14,920 During the last 10 minutes of a paper we can have, I see some of the strain it creates by turning up last, 388 00:39:14,980 --> 00:39:19,000 as I promised at the start, to John RAWLS'S Law of Peoples. 389 00:39:19,750 --> 00:39:26,350 I've chosen Rawls not only because he's unquestionably the greatest liberal theorist of the second half of the 20th century, 390 00:39:26,680 --> 00:39:30,250 but because his chosen method makes his ideas particularly revealing. 391 00:39:30,820 --> 00:39:35,800 Rawls was committed to the view that the moral theorist task was, in a curious way, stark. 392 00:39:36,850 --> 00:39:46,840 It's far from clear that there is moral truth. But one thing I quote is certain people profess and appear to be influenced by moral conceptions. 393 00:39:47,200 --> 00:39:51,040 These conceptions themselves can't be made a focus of study. 394 00:39:51,040 --> 00:39:59,169 Which isn't that what Rawls did? It's a curious thing about Rawls, his reputation, that he's most often attacked for being thoroughly anti historical. 395 00:39:59,170 --> 00:40:06,420 And it is indeed, I think. Case that he has a rather sentimental view of what has actually been happening in the last few centuries. 396 00:40:06,420 --> 00:40:15,930 But it is not the case that he is a pure theorist whose conception of his subject involves no element of sociological or historical study. 397 00:40:17,250 --> 00:40:20,069 In order to do this, Rawls continues in the passage of encroaching, 398 00:40:20,070 --> 00:40:26,580 one tries to find a scheme of principles that matched people's considered judgements and general convictions in reflective equilibrium. 399 00:40:27,270 --> 00:40:32,380 Given this general project, it would of course be mad to try to develop an ethic for the whole human race. 400 00:40:32,400 --> 00:40:37,290 And Rawls, his best and earliest work, culminating in this theory of justice in 1971, 401 00:40:37,590 --> 00:40:45,180 was confined to working out a theory that captured the principles inherent in American conceptions, or at least which wasn't entirely the same thing. 402 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:48,630 The conceptions of the well-informed and highly educated. 403 00:40:49,140 --> 00:40:54,540 He also worked out a theory for a liberal political order but balanced meritocracy with a commitment to redistribution. 404 00:40:54,840 --> 00:41:00,930 He had produced a theory about what Americans thought that had no special bearing on attitudes swear. 405 00:41:01,440 --> 00:41:07,560 Now, the subsequent political history of America strongly suggests that he misread the attitudes of his fellow Americans. 406 00:41:07,740 --> 00:41:13,980 But the point is that the project was, in essence, conservative. His purpose was to tidy up existing attitudes. 407 00:41:14,370 --> 00:41:19,740 His last book, NOR People from 1999, is also quite conservative in many of its conclusions. 408 00:41:20,160 --> 00:41:28,350 That is its interest for our purposes. It's an attempt to adapt some quite familiar ideas to a world that's informed by Wright's best thinking. 409 00:41:29,280 --> 00:41:32,189 Journalists have long been criticised from the political left for his apparent 410 00:41:32,190 --> 00:41:37,170 focus on justice within states at the expense of justice between nations. 411 00:41:37,440 --> 00:41:38,610 In the second half of his career, 412 00:41:38,850 --> 00:41:46,620 he had numerous admirers who wanted to extend his work to create a just a world by advocating transfers of resources between nations. 413 00:41:47,160 --> 00:41:52,140 But the Law of Peoples is essentially loyal to the inherited verities of liberal nationalism. 414 00:41:52,590 --> 00:41:57,780 He treated patriotism as an intrinsic good and offence, for example, controls on immigration. 415 00:41:58,320 --> 00:42:04,590 He acknowledges a duty of assistance to societies that he describes as burdened by circumstances outside their control, 416 00:42:04,800 --> 00:42:09,240 but minimises the extent to which this will involve financial transfers. 417 00:42:09,390 --> 00:42:18,960 The reason, he insists, by some cultures, rich and others poor has little to do with levels of resources and almost everything to do with culture. 418 00:42:19,440 --> 00:42:24,450 He accepted the Syrian view that there are no limits to military action in conditions 419 00:42:24,450 --> 00:42:29,430 of supreme emergency and even excluded pacifists from high political office. 420 00:42:29,740 --> 00:42:32,790 This is, in fact the book you might expect someone to write if like rules. 421 00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:39,270 They had fought with some distinction in the Pacific. Like so many figures in Michael Hart's pages, he chose, however, 422 00:42:39,270 --> 00:42:44,969 to believe that war could be abolished if states acquired the right internal structures of a country. 423 00:42:44,970 --> 00:42:52,020 And he believed two things. The first was that countries governed by their people will seldom or never make war on one another. 424 00:42:52,590 --> 00:42:59,760 The second is that liberal and democratic cultures can indefinitely reproduce their values and that well-ordered nations that are not yet liberal. 425 00:43:00,120 --> 00:43:06,570 The category he calls a decent nation. The decent peoples will tend over time to move in a more liberal direction. 426 00:43:07,050 --> 00:43:10,710 The result in Law of Peoples acknowledges five categories of people. 427 00:43:11,130 --> 00:43:15,380 The first is liberal peoples. The second is what he calls the decent peoples. 428 00:43:15,660 --> 00:43:21,030 We're entitled to the same respect. Very important point. But you diverge in minor ways from liberal principles. 429 00:43:21,300 --> 00:43:26,940 They need not, for example, hold elections. They might have an established church and so on and so forth. 430 00:43:27,540 --> 00:43:32,609 But the condition of the respect they enjoy from liberal peoples is the respect they give to human rights, 431 00:43:32,610 --> 00:43:39,930 which are basically the rights proclaimed in specific about this from Article three to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration. 432 00:43:40,710 --> 00:43:44,160 This leaves three kinds of people that have yet to be well altered. 433 00:43:44,640 --> 00:43:51,000 The first she barely mentions is enlightened absolutism, which respects for human rights but doesn't consult with its subjects. 434 00:43:51,600 --> 00:43:53,850 Second is to burden peoples I've already mentioned, 435 00:43:54,120 --> 00:43:59,940 to which we have a fairly limited duty of assistance, but to raise them to a fairly minimal threshold. 436 00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:02,610 The last is what he called the outlaw regimes. 437 00:44:02,640 --> 00:44:09,770 He tries to use the word regime policy to avoid attributing that problem to the people which are oppressive and expansionist. 438 00:44:09,780 --> 00:44:18,560 And here we encounter a fascinating tension that strongly suggests he was driven towards the conclusion that he found difficulty in accepting rules. 439 00:44:18,570 --> 00:44:25,680 It's clear that the immediate task of foreign policy is to contain the outlaw states in the name of what I've called self-preservation. 440 00:44:26,190 --> 00:44:28,970 But its long term guiding purpose is more million. 441 00:44:29,490 --> 00:44:38,550 It's to bring all societies eventually to honour the law of peoples and to become full members in good standing of the society of well-ordered states. 442 00:44:39,060 --> 00:44:46,049 He excuses himself from saying much more on the grounds that the implementation of this general policy is not a matter for philosophers. 443 00:44:46,050 --> 00:44:47,070 Reasonable enough point. 444 00:44:47,550 --> 00:44:56,130 He also implies on a number of occasions that the rationale for fighting against an outlaw state is its inherent tendency towards expansionism. 445 00:44:56,520 --> 00:45:00,360 Well, all the peoples, he says, do not wage war against each other. 446 00:45:00,780 --> 00:45:04,979 But only against normal ordered states whose expansionist aims threaten the 447 00:45:04,980 --> 00:45:09,540 security and free institutions of well-ordered regimes and bring about the war. 448 00:45:10,170 --> 00:45:14,280 You'll note, incidentally, that it's the expansionist aims that are crucial. 449 00:45:14,640 --> 00:45:21,960 This is lockean self-preservation thinking in that it is the threat that's morally crucial doesn't have to be carried into action. 450 00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:27,390 Moreover, the situation is asymmetrical. Unlike a state respecting human rights. 451 00:45:27,660 --> 00:45:32,340 An outlaw state has no right to fight back under the law of peoples. 452 00:45:32,520 --> 00:45:36,600 An outlaw state does not possess a right of self-defence. 453 00:45:37,140 --> 00:45:43,920 This isn't perhaps particularly surprising. It should have been noted that it's not very difficult to get into the outlaw category. 454 00:45:44,280 --> 00:45:48,149 Rawls mentions early modern Spain and France, but entirely, it seems, 455 00:45:48,150 --> 00:45:53,430 on the grounds that they fought dynastic wars that didn't promote the interests of their peoples. 456 00:45:54,390 --> 00:45:58,830 Both leaves, in fact, plenty of scope for lockean or self-preservation warfare. 457 00:45:59,280 --> 00:46:08,580 Now present situation day the greatest interest attaches the million or civilising fashion similarities with a fairly obvious like mill. 458 00:46:08,790 --> 00:46:11,070 He denies that outlaw states have rights. 459 00:46:11,550 --> 00:46:20,280 Like now, he thinks that other states have got a general duty to set more primitive peoples upon the path of progress whenever reasonably possible. 460 00:46:21,600 --> 00:46:25,950 In a couple of respects, though, his motives for intervention were actually more powerful than Mill's. 461 00:46:26,490 --> 00:46:29,970 Mill believed that progress once started could come to a halt. 462 00:46:30,030 --> 00:46:38,970 Even in civilised societies, rules, by contrast, is extremely optimistic that progress, once established can be expected to be self-sustaining. 463 00:46:39,660 --> 00:46:42,450 Secondly, Mills did not believe in universal rights. 464 00:46:42,660 --> 00:46:50,160 He wanted, of course, to minimise pain but had no interest in rights per say, except insofar as they tended to bring about progress. 465 00:46:50,580 --> 00:46:55,890 He wouldn't have felt any reason to act if, for example, Muslims had started persecuting animists. 466 00:46:56,760 --> 00:47:01,230 Wolfram People, by contrast, have some duty to step in whenever it can reasonably do so. 467 00:47:01,560 --> 00:47:08,700 Of course, good reasons to be cautious. Wars typically cause more and much more serious rights violations than they're ever likely to prevent. 468 00:47:08,850 --> 00:47:13,800 But if other things are equal, a rawlsian has few reasons for not fighting. 469 00:47:14,520 --> 00:47:21,270 Laws recognise this logic. We can be sure he did so because he took great pains to hide it in a footnote. 470 00:47:21,840 --> 00:47:28,140 If you look at my copy on page 93, you'll see that the text, which could have been written in the 1930s, 471 00:47:28,380 --> 00:47:34,200 reposes faith in international pressure, international public opinion and the effects of economic sanctions. 472 00:47:34,650 --> 00:47:38,220 In the footnote, though, he eventually bite the bullet. 473 00:47:38,550 --> 00:47:40,290 It's interesting to note that normally speaking, 474 00:47:40,290 --> 00:47:45,660 what you put in footnotes are brilliant ideas you've recently had can't quite fit into the main structure of the argument. 475 00:47:46,020 --> 00:47:51,550 The argument of this particular footnote follows directly from what's been said in the paragraph before. 476 00:47:51,570 --> 00:47:55,860 So there's some sort of motive going on here that is leading him to put it in slightly smaller print. 477 00:47:56,040 --> 00:48:03,779 And this, as I've written, that is what he says. If it is ever legitimate to interfere with that law states simply because they violate human rights, 478 00:48:03,780 --> 00:48:08,930 even though they are not dangerous and aggressive towards other states and indeed may be quite weak. 479 00:48:08,940 --> 00:48:14,100 That's a question, of course. Certainly there is a prima facie case for intervention in such cases. 480 00:48:14,430 --> 00:48:19,110 Yet one must proceed differently with advanced civilisations than with primitive societies. 481 00:48:19,530 --> 00:48:27,150 Primitive, isolated societies with no contact with liberal or decent societies we really have no way to influence. 482 00:48:27,300 --> 00:48:33,480 It's not entirely clear to me if that's an argument in favour of or against intervention in such cases, 483 00:48:33,660 --> 00:48:38,640 those that are more developed, he goes on seeking trade or other cooperative arrangements are a different story. 484 00:48:38,970 --> 00:48:42,120 Nonetheless, fund limits. Ostracism may fail. 485 00:48:42,570 --> 00:48:49,800 If so, if the offences against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to the imposition of sanctions. 486 00:48:50,070 --> 00:48:55,710 Such intervention in the defence of human rights would be acceptable and would be called for. 487 00:48:56,220 --> 00:49:03,330 In other words, they can't quite bring himself to say the word. There are circumstances under which aggressive war is actually a duty. 488 00:49:03,930 --> 00:49:08,730 Now I've concentrated on expanding roles, partly for want of time, in which to speak of other things, 489 00:49:09,060 --> 00:49:14,610 but mostly because these short essays extraordinarily revealing rawls's well-intentioned man of great philosophical 490 00:49:14,610 --> 00:49:20,670 past who stories of the duty of a philosopher to set out in mildly idealised form the instincts of his culture. 491 00:49:21,210 --> 00:49:27,090 He wanted to stay principles that would, on reflection, be seen as being theoretically attractive, given the way we are. 492 00:49:27,390 --> 00:49:30,210 But does offering a feasible basis for action? 493 00:49:30,750 --> 00:49:38,580 We've seen that the theory he produced had elements that are taken from all three of my ideal types, like thinkers who drew on the litigation model. 494 00:49:38,820 --> 00:49:43,050 He firmly held that states are good, at least if they're organised as nations. 495 00:49:43,560 --> 00:49:50,190 What he added to this model, like many Liberals who have gone before him, is that litigation warfare is quite unnecessary. 496 00:49:50,490 --> 00:49:55,350 It's possible to imagine a society of states whose culture and internal constitution 497 00:49:55,590 --> 00:49:59,490 meant that they had no differences that couldn't be resolved by arbitration. 498 00:50:00,030 --> 00:50:03,070 This. Culture work, moreover be self-sustaining. 499 00:50:03,090 --> 00:50:09,330 Those who had lived in such a state would find ways of transmitting its values to their children from the self preservation model. 500 00:50:09,630 --> 00:50:17,940 He took the idea of a threat of an irreparable harm as to its people than its institutions can justify a country in resorting to armed conflict. 501 00:50:18,390 --> 00:50:20,760 He also explicitly stated there were circumstances, 502 00:50:20,790 --> 00:50:27,690 extreme emergencies in which it was appropriate to break the normal rules, thus tacitly accepting nuclear weapons. 503 00:50:28,290 --> 00:50:33,930 Lastly, he has affinities with the civilising model, but those views John Stuart Mill to illustrate this model. 504 00:50:34,170 --> 00:50:38,400 It can be clearly seen, I hope, but the animating impulse is rather different. 505 00:50:38,910 --> 00:50:42,330 Mill was utilitarian. He wanted to minimise pain. 506 00:50:42,870 --> 00:50:46,530 But this utilitarianism allows in quite a large scope for manoeuvre. 507 00:50:46,800 --> 00:50:50,570 The Rawlsian position is rather different. He agrees with Mill. 508 00:50:50,580 --> 00:50:56,190 The barbarous states have no rights but lacks a set of principles to justify him in not intervening. 509 00:50:56,790 --> 00:51:00,720 The criterion that guides the rules in intervened is not the minimisation of pain, 510 00:51:01,170 --> 00:51:09,330 nor even the setting of progressive places on the short path of progress, but simply the prevention of egregious rights violations. 511 00:51:09,780 --> 00:51:16,970 Other things being equal, it's difficult to see why the detection of such violations should ever not need to military action, 512 00:51:16,980 --> 00:51:24,480 as there were practical difficulties. The only excuse for inaction would be that war was likely to cause a net increase in violations. 513 00:51:24,480 --> 00:51:28,469 Mere inconvenience would not be an adequate excuse normally, 514 00:51:28,470 --> 00:51:33,390 but in public consciousness is largely rules in large scale rights violations that come to its attention, 515 00:51:33,660 --> 00:51:37,020 resulting demands for action that may when feasible the military. 516 00:51:37,560 --> 00:51:40,530 Quite often, of course, the modern public consciousness is right. 517 00:51:40,890 --> 00:51:46,140 The purpose of this paper is not to make a case for or against particular interventions. 518 00:51:46,590 --> 00:51:51,480 The comparison between our situation in the past does bring out a new bias towards aggression. 519 00:51:52,050 --> 00:51:58,860 All three of the models of what I've been discussing tend to encourage some appeal to the notion of civilisation, as we've seen. 520 00:51:59,100 --> 00:52:02,520 The litigation model is a picture of war within a privileged self. 521 00:52:03,060 --> 00:52:10,590 The self-preservation model encourages a view of war as an existential threat, as a response to an existential threat to civilised values. 522 00:52:10,830 --> 00:52:15,240 It pictures the opponent as one that stands outside that magic circle. 523 00:52:15,720 --> 00:52:23,310 And the civilising model, by its nature, depends on a distinction between the civilised and those who want to be coerced onto the path of fascism. 524 00:52:24,240 --> 00:52:27,360 There are obvious objections to the civilised barbarous distinction, 525 00:52:27,660 --> 00:52:35,190 especially in a culture that's losing confidence that a broadly liberal order is the only political path that leads to economic modernisation. 526 00:52:35,850 --> 00:52:42,929 It does, however, have the important virtue that civilisation and barbarism are concepts that belong in however crude, 527 00:52:42,930 --> 00:52:47,760 a way to social theory that focussed at the level of whole societies. 528 00:52:48,150 --> 00:52:52,530 They thus encourage further and less simplified accounts of the nature of the societies 529 00:52:52,710 --> 00:52:57,600 in question that might expose the function of the biased violations we complain of, 530 00:52:57,960 --> 00:53:05,340 and therefore ask us to lead us to question whether and in what sense they might form a necessary part of the least bad solution. 531 00:53:05,940 --> 00:53:10,500 The human rights based model gives no such impetus. It simply notes bad things are happening. 532 00:53:10,770 --> 00:53:17,670 Bad things, moreover, that there is a duty to stop the quite contrary to say, Rawls has no social theory, 533 00:53:18,090 --> 00:53:23,880 but it takes the form of simple and optimistic claims such as the fact which he spells with a capital F, 534 00:53:24,150 --> 00:53:31,680 that domination and striving for glory, the excitement of conquest and power over others do not move democracies against other peoples. 535 00:53:32,130 --> 00:53:35,910 They have no point of contact with serious sociological inquiry. 536 00:53:36,210 --> 00:53:38,940 And here surely is the heart of our whole problem. 537 00:53:39,570 --> 00:53:45,870 The previous pictures of what I've been discussing were perfectly consistent with the most careful social thought of the periods that produced them. 538 00:53:46,290 --> 00:53:51,030 But Rawls can't find the things he says in a respectable, modern social theory, 539 00:53:51,720 --> 00:53:55,980 so he has to be loyal to theories that were produced in previous generations. 540 00:53:56,370 --> 00:54:02,160 In essence, this means he was loyal to an old fashioned view of irreversible convergent progress. 541 00:54:02,610 --> 00:54:07,290 Someone who acts upon such principles may well experience some initial successes, 542 00:54:07,560 --> 00:54:14,850 but will lack the intellectual equipment to work out politically feasible solutions in complicated alien cultural settings. 543 00:54:15,270 --> 00:54:23,820 He will have no defences against the panic stricken oscillation between high mindedness and ruthlessness, state building and predator drones. 544 00:54:24,210 --> 00:54:31,100 It's not coincidental that this has been the history of Afghanistan and Iraq since.