It is an enormous pressure painter and she seems very unpromising.
He's the director of the Liberal Way of War program at the university and sounds very familiar.
It's a cycle and he's living evidence that there is actually life in search for life going on.
I thought I was sitting in the other place. My son was whether there's a university there at school and currently there is.
And here he is as a scholar of true thinking and that focus.
And I think I should say, one,
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,
even constitutionality politics. He's working with members of rights based politics and I'm writing I'm still hoping to get back
to 17th century was taking this diversion for four years into war in the most significant
works event promises written by sir Matthew Hale not not in my life and he would like for
instance hopes and the revolution of the 17th century was actually where I began my.
Such a remarkable point to say I send you flowers. Well, I didn't. This was the people who stopped it.
And his interests are in the ethics of wonderful civil history alongside his issues about war.
He's going to talk to us today about the last successful conference in July this year on the liberal way of war.
Thanks so much for that as well. Tactfully said, my qualification for talking about war is that I know rather little about war,
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.
Study at road suggestion.
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,
speaking on on liberals, that character, that dynamics the reasons why they get fought.
It seemed to me as I was directing the conference that it was desirable that at some stage
someone should turn up and say something about what has happened in the world from 1900,
which wasn't otherwise represented in the conference,
and to try to bring together a number of pieces of fairly basic information that we think we know about,
the way that war is a social and cultural institution as developed, and the ways, of course, in which it might develop in future.
I reckoned when I was standing up and reading that, what I had to say was probably well known.
About 60% of what I had to say was was well known to virtually everyone in the room,
but I hoped obviously that different people would know different 60%.
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.
Anyway, this was originally called Liberalism State Violence.
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,
I've distributed a handout. My basic thesis isn't complicated, or for that matter, new.
What I'm suggesting is that Western ideas about war have until recently described the social institution that's internal to one civilisation,
the intellectual tools with which they operate, and therefore quite poorly adapted to a more complex world with a genuine plurality of values,
obviously by outlining three models of legitimate state coercion, and I offered these three models as a diagnostic tool,
they represent three patterns of thinking about war that shouldn't be seen and haven't been seen as mutually exclusive.
Most European thinkers have probably made some appeal to at least two of them,
but it's possible to draw connections between the pattern that's dominant at any given time and wider socio cultural conditions here.
And then I think I do have some original perceptions, but I want this training unduly to be original.
And the main purpose of the enterprise is to show ways of putting quite commonplace ideas into an
overarching synthesis that could of course be made the basis of discussion in a last minute paper.
I'll say something about the late John Rawls, his Law of People.
So a strange little book that has elements, I think, drawn from all three of my models of legitimate state coercion.
It is, I think, an intellectual failure.
But the reasons for its failure have an interest to people quite indifferent to the strange activity of university philosophy.
They suggest some possible reasons why we keep on fighting wars and why we're terribly disappointed with that outcomes.
I'll start with three quotations from very famous works, which you'll find on my hand out,
of course, whose purpose is to crystallise in memorable form my models of legitimate coercion.
The first is from America's genteel state, Jerry Belli, liberal trace of 1589.
Demosthenes says, Well, but boys men's against those who cannot be restrained in a judicial.
A full judicial restraint of force against those who are sensible of their inability to oppose them,
but against those who all think themselves of equal strength.
Wars undertaken. This might be called the litigation model.
The activity of warfare is understood.
In other words, as a kind of litigation substitute against you all that you all think themselves to be too powerful,
to be controlled by any other method. Second, this taken from John Locke's second treatise, published a century later in 1689.
The examples individual, not collective, but the theory that it illustrates is what I call the self-preservation model.
BLOCK A state of war exists whenever any agent is menaced by life threatening violence.
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.
This man I may lawfully kill to another I deliver £100 to halt only when I alight,
which he refuses to restore me when I'm brought up again, but draws his sword to defend the possession of it by force.
The mischief this man does me is 100, possibly a thousand times more than the other, perhaps intended me whom I killed,
while he rarely did me any as yet I might lawfully kill the one that cannot so much as at the other.
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.
And when it was gone, it was too late to appeal. The law could not restore life to my dead corpus.
Yet you legitimate violence begins when social situations escape control by ordinary judges.
But the underlying theory is somewhat different in the litigation model.
War begins when litigants are left without a sanction. In the self-preservation model, it begins when somebody is threatened by irreparable damage.
Typically, though, not as it happens, always by taking away life,
law is useless in a conflict situation, but the damage that is threatened is irreversible.
The law could not restore life to my dead carcase,
although the situation has often been described as self-defence and after creating a couple of people to do so,
the term self-defence is unhelpfully broad. In this context, the defining feature of the situation is not the fact you've been attacked,
but the fact that you face especially significant type of damage.
An interesting implication follows In the litigation model, your opponent is no more than an opponent who may for quite long periods be harmless.
You may what is more, be quarrelling over something trivial that should be fought for in a measured fashion.
It's not sensible to nuke Buenos Aires to recover the Falkland Islands, but in war conceived of as self-preservation.
What matters is not the subject of the quarrel, but the maximum extent of your vulnerability.
But litigation model can be interpreted to incorporate a rule about proportionality.
The self self-preservation model creates a privilege of extreme and disproportionate reaction.
I think religion is probably the most famous single statement ever produced by any liberal.
It's Jon Stewart Mill's Harm Principle.
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.
This principle limits legitimate coercion.
It's not always noticed, however, that the privilege of freedom from paternalistic coercion does not attach to individuals,
quote individuals or even to civilised individuals,
quite civilised individuals, but only to individuals who may or may not be civilised themselves, who belong to civilised communities.
As explained on the next page,
we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its known age.
The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them,
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.
Here, mill implies the existence of a third type of legitimate coercion, which I will call civilising or progressive modern.
Now, any culture might, of course, attack another because of some cultural practice it found objectionable.
But I take it the liberal kind of civilising war must be informed by a progressive theory.
Some reason for supposing that the illiberal act of stopping other people doing something well in the end, in some sense make them freer.
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,
in which variety was to be cherished, and societies where it didn't, in which it was not.
There was bound to be trouble when people lost their former confidence in the validity of this distinction.
So those are the three models. I don't suggest the list is necessarily exhaustive.
There's also, for example, a punishment model invented by Hugo Grotius and taken over in some moods by John Locke.
But I do believe they represent the most important options that are compatible with liberalism.
Broadly conceived, they appear to be quite simple,
but all three on closer inspection have some unexpected features that place a limit on their usefulness.
I'll start by saying more about the litigation model, which, because of its historical significance,
is actually the one that we're talking about for most of the rest of the next 40 minutes.
The achievements the litigation model was to supply more with a guiding purpose the settlement of disputes between
supreme political parties by reference to which the activities of soldiers could be both organised and regulated.
It managed to wake more susceptible of a degree of order while separating it from moralism.
Among other things, it did so by supplying a rationale for a combatant non-combatant distinction,
war, sexual disagreements between sovereigns through a contest between specialised employees.
The idea of such a contest but justified the activity and helped to limit it in time.
It stimulated the rather fruitful notion that soldiers could do all but only violent things that put their adversaries out of action.
But the model required a distinction the very sharp distinction between the soldier's ultimate employer, a sovereign state, and the society.
The sovereign governed the presupposed, in other words, that every polity would be inhabited by a single agent.
That was the ultimate court of appeal and ultimate locus of authority that could legitimately coerce but could not be coerced.
It was realised that this boiled down to an unfettered path making positive law.
In other words, it presupposed John Burden's proclamation of 1576.
In other words, just 12 years before gently that a Commonwealth, a republic is a lawful government of families,
and of that which unto them in common belonging with a peace and sovereignty.
In helpful clarification, gently himself remarked that reason shows that war was brought in out of necessity because there
cannot be courtroom dealings between sovereign princes and free peoples if they do not agree.
And these are sovereign and merit the name of public persons.
On this view, war is rational and licit because it's a requirement of a world that's inhabited by sovereigns.
The model thus treats war as a condition that subsists between two sovereigns whose purpose is to settle disagreements.
Because the very nature of supreme political power precludes those disagreements being settled in other ways.
I should say at this point that this model of sovereignty doesn't necessarily
suppose as bow down and top supposed that sovereignty is necessarily individual.
The agent that cannot be coerced can, at least in principle, be a complex agent.
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.
The rationality of the institution has the effect of bracketing off behaviour within war from
those considerations that make it right or wrong to undertake military action in the first place.
The upshot is that soldiers who fight within the rules will not face punishment for the crime of losing.
It's reasonable to levy reparations just the same way that litigants will often ask for costs but won't wrong.
Once the issue is settled to display vindictiveness, there comes a point at which the matter is closed, as in all litigation type activities.
The whole point about war is it gives you a final decision.
Continuous conception of warfare is the natural counterpart of John Bolton's.
Conception of recent sovereignty is guaranteed and guided by the same moral framework that guarantees the path of the sovereign bond,
the litigation model. It's not coincidental, nor is it simply a product of politics.
That legislation and belligerence, the making of laws and of laws are the responsibility of the same public person.
It's a logical necessity. It's definitely disastrous for the serious study of war that this boldness and sovereignty has been misunderstood.
It's been maintained, for instance, that sovereignty was meant as a response to scepticism about moral knowledge
in the context of the novel pluralism that was created by the Reformation.
In the extreme view of Karl Schmitt, the sovereign of both arms and later of Hobbes, was the ultimate source of value,
enjoying privileges so extensive, but they were unintelligible, except as a lightly secularised version of the path that's enjoyed by God himself.
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.
But it's historically absolute nonsense.
It would be true to say that Bolton was happy for sovereigns to have unfettered power of legislation because the act.
Activity of legislation was relatively.
Rather an important point is probably best explained by offering a bit more exposition of Bowden's programmatic definition.
A common weal. A Republic is a lawful government of families.
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.
The first is the third that is concerned with lawful government.
He acknowledges the existence of a criterion natural law by which a government can be unlawful.
Just like an example he knew of the government of the Aztecs would not have been a lawful government.
The second is that there is a some lawful governments that do not qualify as common wills.
A republic or common weal was a particular political form, but was in his time confined to Western Europe.
The and the Ottomans was an effective and a lawful ruler. But his dominions weren't a common weal.
This was because his monarchy was patrimonial. It didn't acknowledge the property of subjects like many people subsequently in the Western tradition.
He regarded respect for private property as the ultimate asset test of a civilised state.
The third, which is related to the second, is the three course of his definition is actually drawn from Aristotle.
You'll remember that the Common Weal is a lawful government of families and of that which unto them in common.
Belonging down to belonging has nothing new, but had taken over from Aristotelian thought.
The basic Aristotelian distinction between a public and a private sphere that is sovereign must respect this basic framework.
Other things being equal, in the Virginian world, there is a private space in which people have possessions and bring up children,
as well as a more public space that's immediately controlled by the community.
The sovereign cannot change this basic structure.
He cannot change what both I call the fundamental laws, such as the law controlling the succession and except an emergency.
He cannot levy tax without consent, under no circumstances at all.
Can he break his promises? In other words, he's not a lawful God.
He enjoys a degree of discretionary part override the private rights of subjects, but cannot actually abolish them.
In particular, he must respect his subjects property, although he cannot be coerced.
He operates within a firm normative framework that's enforced by fear of God and of rebellion.
Now, the point here for our purposes, is that Beaudin is proto liberal and that Bedouin sovereignty exists within an overarching framework,
given a degree of consensus about the models to be emulated. Point that I will soon be coming back to.
There were moreover well-established methods of giving that framework some applicable content.
A sovereign to aspire to rule a common weal would spend his leisure moments studying law and history.
This allows him to draw detailed guidance from the historic practice of comparable states and of course,
from the best men of the best times, which are things we can do.
The same could be said of Gentilly. Gentilly, who had written a book to Jerry Belli about the law of war.
And the whole point of his project was to set out a framework for the external practice of the sovereign.
He wanted to distinguish regulation of the actual conduct of belligerents in Bello from the
considerations that might or might not justify the decision to start fighting in the first place.
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.
He found them in the law of nations or you sent him.
Your sentiment was known by the consensus against him.
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
the Latin word consensus is like the English word consent incorporates a rather fruitful ambiguity.
It could be, as it were, passively construed. It could refer, in other words, the deliverance of reason as registered in human behaviour patterns.
Stop is thought to be rational because it's what actually happens.
Or it could be actively construed as a kind of tacit treaty, deliberately created by some kind of act of will.
In either case, there was an obvious problem. Different cultures notoriously evolve quite different moral ideas.
This is, of course, the age of Montaigne, amongst other things.
Even those inclined to minimise moral diversity had read of the existence of remote and deviant people's traditions Brazilians,
Germans, so on and so forth, but tolerated radical departures from what might be supposed to be self-evident principles.
The only possible answer was to privilege some peoples over others to appeal to the examples of the most civilised.
As Thomas Hobbes ironically put it, for the most part,
such writers have occasion to affirm that anything is against the law of nature do allege no more than this.
That is against the consent of all nations. The wisest and most civil nations.
But it is not agreed. Upon who shall judge which nations are the wisest.
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.
It was a commonplace that 17th century writing about international norms made relatively routine appeal to philosophical considerations.
In otherwise, natural law either had to or was at least presented as having a quite important bearing on state practice.
While late 18th century 19th century writing was dominated by collections of treaties
in which the residual natural component was the principle Patterson served under,
that treaties should be kept. The principle states respected were coming to be understood as the collective product of a society
of states working explicitly through treaty making and tacitly through international custom.
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.
But though the shift may seem to be dramatic, it didn't involve a decisive break with the previous assumptions.
It did, however, involve an intensified focus on implicit and tacit expressions of the will of a short list of states.
The various collections of treaties that were put together in the 18th and 19th centuries described the
actions of Westphalian sovereigns who formed and who were felt to form a society with shared norms.
War was an institution through which they managed and settled disagreements.
There were three obvious reasons why war was limited and why its shape was relatively stable.
One was that technological change was relatively slow,
that it was possible in principle for everyone to fight in the same way anyone could have a regiment Hessians.
A second, as Rousseau pointed out, was that military power was sufficiently fragmented that a grab for universal power would not be feasible.
Rousseau additionally, rather interestingly, remarked that this happy situation would come to an end if ever Germany were unified.
Both parties to most wars expected their opponents to survive them and fight again on subsequent occasions.
What went around would come around, especially among professional soldiers who had a repeated game, you might say.
And in repeated gains it makes rational to behave in rather more moderate fashion than it is in one shot games.
Third was that everyone subscribed to roughly the same value system, including broad consensus about the proper limits of state action.
Though an assassin writers were prone to fits of self-congratulation about their superior safeguards for private liberties,
all European countries had rule bound governments, but they interfered with property or personal liberty.
They generally presented themselves as exercising an emergency power to override popular privileges whose broad legitimacy they accepted.
In other words, when they do relatively despotic things, they accept in principle.
These are things that you should not ordinarily do. As David HUME incurred some popularity by remarking.
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.
They are found susceptible of order, method and constancy to a surprising degree.
Property is that secure. Industry encouraged, the arts flourish and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a father among his children.
The last price is obviously a tease, but nonetheless the general point is well taken.
Under these circumstances, there was little moral cost in having a firm law prohibiting intervention.
It was unlikely that a major civilised state would do anything that was particularly bad.
The commercial view of 18th century warfare may underestimate its savagery.
I've noticed that most of the often quoted remarks on the subject come from Scots living a world away from Muslims Moslems.
But nonetheless, there are reasons why you'd expect a degree of moderation.
There's a strategic logic to behaving well. Well, moreover, there's scope for incremental, reciprocal restraint,
at least within the circle of civilised sovereigns, including a starting degree of respect for private property.
Gillespie's preconditions is also, of course, to explain why War Beyond the Circle was rather different.
War against non-Europeans was increasingly technologically unequal.
Outright conquest was quite often feasible. There was little expectation of reciprocity, and there was no negative feedback against misdemeanours.
It also explains why war at sea tended to be different.
War at sea was dominated by a single superpower who didn't face adversaries of a completely equal kind,
but expected then that the litigation model would not out lost the 19th century.
It rested on shared values that made it possible to fight about particular disagreements
without envisaging those disagreements as part of a struggle between good and evil.
To use the more Clausewitz terminology, it presupposes relatively low energy wars in which the competence fell short of total mobilisation.
But 19th century attempts to codify restraint suggested that the model was in basically good shape.
We're talking here, of course, about the 1880s and 1890s.
There was a broad consensus that war could be regulated,
but the proper aim of regulation was to insist that violence be focussed upon destroying military forces,
the civilised powers permitted to do all but only the things essential to the activity of fighting.
There were other forces that had a tendency to undermine the litigation model.
As everyone knows in this room anyway. An obvious example was the problem that was posed by irregular fighters.
An advantage of the litigation model was that it made it relatively easy to defend a combatant non-combatant distinction.
But by the late 19th century, the prospect of the appearance of irregular fighters was a political reality.
And the Belgians made the error of boasting of their willingness to rely upon such
fighters with ultimately tragic consequences in the absence of agreement on the subject.
Large stakes basically were against irregular fighters. Small states, which could be overrun rather quickly, was somewhat in favour.
The Society of Nations was driven to draw back fall back on a humanitarian principle.
The celebrated Martens Clause of 1899 at whose business and of course, appeals to the usages established by civilised nations,
the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience in the face, in other words, of really serious disagreement.
There was a tendency to retreat to older understandings of the essential understandings that treated international norms, as it were,
passively as intimations of some kind of shared reality, as opposed to the deliberate creations of the shared will of a community.
The intellectual, regressive that was was could, of course, be taken further.
States that persistently refused to acknowledge or had a persistently different impression of the laws of humanity and the
requirements of the proper conscience could acquire an inferior moral status that jeopardised equality between belligerents.
A process can be seen in operation in the 1949 Geneva Convention, which declares that even explicit,
persistent objections to a new war of law shall in no way impair the obligations which the parties to the conflict shall remain bound
to fulfil by virtue of the principles of international law as they result from the use such as established by civilised nations,
from the laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.
So in his vision of the world was focussed on the excesses of conservative nationalism, were thus be driven towards moralism.
But someone who was more impressed by liberal nationalism and the potentially emancipating capacity of nationalism could be driven not so direction,
but also tended to undermine the litigation model.
If state violence is conflict resolution, if violence is dangerous, is expensive, and if states agree on fundamental values,
it should be possible to devise a collective security system that enforces, as a result to arbitration.
As the 20th century discovered. This is easier said than done, but the train of thought involved is far from obviously mad,
especially if one takes a fairly optimistic view of the civilising effects of global commerce.
Western civilisation for two centuries has had mood swings about the extent to which global commerce can be expected to civilise,
but in what you might call the upswing. When you are optimistic about what might result,
it's perfectly sensible to hope that you might one day be able to devise some sort of binding arbitration system.
These thoughts that naturally emerge from the litigation model take us onto the Territory explored to great effect by Michael Hart,
especially in his war and the liberal conscience, which I'll discuss a bit further in a moment.
Any liberal society, especially one inclined to the more rationalistic forms of purely economic liberalism,
will be tempted by a simple train of thought. War is dangerous and expensive, and no community as a whole could possibly desire it.
It follows that it must result from sinister interests that somehow distort the decision making process.
But these are native interest groups or alien imperialist sovereigns.
But all be well if the bill well could dispose of oligarchy or imperialism.
Perhaps in a once for all process of a war to end all wars that would allow
as peaceful and democratic nations to shatter a dysfunctional state system.
But litigation model that starts train of thought that tends to encourage its own abolition.
But those that did it have found themselves forced back on May 2nd or self-preservation models the 1928 Kellogg Brown Pact.
The one, of course, that outlawed the use of war as an instrument of national policy.
It was based on an unspoken understanding that non-aggressive war would be permitted.
The opponents, Frank Kellogg, held the quite extreme position that.
Self-defence is inherent in every sovereign state and implicit in every treaty.
Every nation is entitled at all times and regardless of treaty provisions, to defend its territory from attack or invasion.
And it alone is competent to decide whether circumstances justify, of course, to war in self-defence.
Now, there are obvious problems here.
If this is taken seriously, then welcoming Germany was presumably entitled to defend itself from Belgium and so on and so forth.
Presumably it is. Moreover, it's long been known that legitimate self-preservation shades imperceptibly into pre-emption.
If, for example, somebody with hostile purposes is about to build a very powerful weapon, as some of you long had put it,
with states, the right of defence carries along with it sometimes the necessity of attacking.
To make things worse. The play of self-defence has a tendency to lead to escalation.
At the very least, it's plausible to argue that the existence of a state of war has the effect of
licensing a level of response sufficient to bring the war to its conclusion.
So what you might have thought of as the great selling point of those self-defence arguments,
which is that they provide a very clear criterion for legitimate war, tends to dissolve in the face of historical experience.
Now, a full discussion at this point would take another paper. You'll note, though,
that I've assumed without an argument that Kellog and Montague's right of defence is grounded in what I've called self-preservation.
That is, of course, the rule within the litigation model that if an actor is attacked, it can defend itself.
A rule of this sort could in principle be abolished.
But I assume the argument that grounds the inherent right, irrespective of all positive law arrangements,
has something to do with the notion that an unrepaired attack can cause us an irreparable and or an infinite harm.
In practice, the harm usually alleged is not to people or property, but values.
Particularly striking example at that line of argument. I printed on the handout in the month of Ronald Reagan.
There's one particular context in which this kind of claim, a claim that war is fought for self-preservation.
Self-preservation, being understood as the preservation of an infinitely precious value has been, in practice, unavoidable.
All the leading liberal states, the by the built nuclear weapons or chosen to shelter beneath the American nuclear umbrella.
Now the point of nuclear weapons lies in the disproportion at the havoc that they threaten.
It's difficult to defend them unless they're a shield against an effectively infinite evil.
The most plausible defence of that possession appears to be some version of Michael Wallace's argument from Supreme Emergency,
which emphasises the importance of the value that is threatened in an extreme emergency situation.
The evil that threatens and that might in principle justify the use of a nuclear
bomb is the extension of a value that's embodied in the state in question.
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.
On the million views, you'll remember,
it's wrong to coerce human beings if they're if that autonomy or speaking, their freedom might lead to progress.
But the freedom that leads to progress is only found in civilised surroundings in less happy places.
The primacy of progress can and indeed should lead to any level of coercion that might kick start the civilising process,
which was doubtless the UN himself understood his day job as a diligent employee of the East India Company.
Mill thought the law of nations did not apply to the Uncivilised.
In his fascinating essay, A Few Words on Intervention.
He argued first that the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity, but barbarians will not reciprocate.
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,
that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners.
Barbarians have no rights as a nation except a right to such treatment as May,
at the earliest possible period fit them for becoming one forbidden force unfettered in singling out one strand within his thinking.
But his evident combination of extreme individualism at home with extreme authoritarianism
elsewhere does not match up to a paradox inherent in most types of liberalism.
If what is valued is some kind of freedom, and if the free individual is the unusual product of a sudden kind of culture,
then that's some kind of duty to bring people to the point at which that kind of culture comes into being.
And the individuals in question are in consequence, in a position to act freely, stronger,
the commitment to the value of freedom, the greater the temptation to make use of violence.
And this brings me over back here at last to the present. And the liberal way of war that our own generation has developed.
If only given this paper in 1975, I'd surely have had two preoccupations.
One would have been the possibility of large scale war in Europe that would presumably have turned into a nuclear war.
The other would have been the threat or promise of nationalist liberation movements.
If ideology had been a topic, discussion would surely have focussed on the cleavage between Marxists and non Marxists.
Michael Hart's War on the Liberal Conscience,
the Liberals lectures in Cambridge in 1977 gives the term liberal itself a comically tacky definition whose only purpose,
as he freely admitted, was to exclude the Marxists, basically, or a liberal who hoped to make the world a better place.
That theory of war was the one that I attribute it to gentility.
He saw it as an inherent element in a society of sovereign states which lacks any supreme and sovereign arbiter.
And the most important target of his lectures was the development from this tradition that I discussed a little earlier,
the notion that you might replace this dysfunctional state system with a peaceable
society of nations who had reason to assume that nothing much had changed.
Both he and the idealist he made fun of were focussed at the state or nation level.
They assumed, and he denied, that nations would cease to fight if only they were controlled by better people.
But in fact they already existed for quite different diagnosis,
which was attractive to the kind of people who were formerly attracted to liberal nationalism and had already started to convert them.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated that recognition of, I quote,
the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of justice,
freedom and peace in the world.
And that disregard and contempt for those rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.
The direction of the causal chain is rather interesting.
It doesn't say that barbarous acts involve contempt for rights, but rather that contempt for rights has resulted in barbarous acts.
Its vision, you might say, is granular or atomic. If we sought out individual rights, then everything else will follow.
Unlike the conventions that followed, the declaration isn't, of course, a treaty document.
It's a declaration that's set out to be a standard of achievement, which is why states permitted its existence.
But it license the impression which has strengthened ever since.
There exists a global moral consensus that that's an absolute constraint on state activities.
To put it another way, it's encouraged the view that the ultimate moral reality is the privileges of individuals.
In the last analysis, both states and nations saw what legitimacy they have from their propensity to support a human rights based order.
This has important consequences for how we think about war.
You'll remember the main presupposition of the entire gentleman tradition was
that war was rational because states were rational decision of war collapses.
If states aren't actually rational at all,
or if their rationality is contingent on respect for some deeper moral reality at work on the level conscience
today would be unable to sustain the state centred focus in any prolonged discussion of the topic.
Someone with sooner or later appeal to human rights.
Ultimate criterion to which policies must conform has come to be a real or imagined consensus about the proper treatment.
In other words, of individuals states kwe. States do not have rights, they have responsibilities.
And the nature of those responsibilities means that states are instrumental.
A state, for example, that loses control over its territory is no longer typically seen as being merely ineffective.
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.
Now, this is an extremely momentous, imaginative shift that we'll be working through for generations.
They're wrong to speculate about its full effects.
During the last 10 minutes of a paper we can have, I see some of the strain it creates by turning up last,
as I promised at the start, to John RAWLS'S Law of Peoples.
I've chosen Rawls not only because he's unquestionably the greatest liberal theorist of the second half of the 20th century,
but because his chosen method makes his ideas particularly revealing.
Rawls was committed to the view that the moral theorist task was, in a curious way, stark.
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.
These conceptions themselves can't be made a focus of study.
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.
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.
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.
In order to do this, Rawls continues in the passage of encroaching,
one tries to find a scheme of principles that matched people's considered judgements and general convictions in reflective equilibrium.
Given this general project, it would of course be mad to try to develop an ethic for the whole human race.
And Rawls, his best and earliest work, culminating in this theory of justice in 1971,
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.
The conceptions of the well-informed and highly educated.
He also worked out a theory for a liberal political order but balanced meritocracy with a commitment to redistribution.
He had produced a theory about what Americans thought that had no special bearing on attitudes swear.
Now, the subsequent political history of America strongly suggests that he misread the attitudes of his fellow Americans.
But the point is that the project was, in essence, conservative. His purpose was to tidy up existing attitudes.
His last book, NOR People from 1999, is also quite conservative in many of its conclusions.
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.
Journalists have long been criticised from the political left for his apparent
focus on justice within states at the expense of justice between nations.
In the second half of his career,
he had numerous admirers who wanted to extend his work to create a just a world by advocating transfers of resources between nations.
But the Law of Peoples is essentially loyal to the inherited verities of liberal nationalism.
He treated patriotism as an intrinsic good and offence, for example, controls on immigration.
He acknowledges a duty of assistance to societies that he describes as burdened by circumstances outside their control,
but minimises the extent to which this will involve financial transfers.
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.
He accepted the Syrian view that there are no limits to military action in conditions
of supreme emergency and even excluded pacifists from high political office.
This is, in fact the book you might expect someone to write if like rules.
They had fought with some distinction in the Pacific. Like so many figures in Michael Hart's pages, he chose, however,
to believe that war could be abolished if states acquired the right internal structures of a country.
And he believed two things. The first was that countries governed by their people will seldom or never make war on one another.
The second is that liberal and democratic cultures can indefinitely reproduce their values and that well-ordered nations that are not yet liberal.
The category he calls a decent nation. The decent peoples will tend over time to move in a more liberal direction.
The result in Law of Peoples acknowledges five categories of people.
The first is liberal peoples. The second is what he calls the decent peoples.
We're entitled to the same respect. Very important point. But you diverge in minor ways from liberal principles.
They need not, for example, hold elections. They might have an established church and so on and so forth.
But the condition of the respect they enjoy from liberal peoples is the respect they give to human rights,
which are basically the rights proclaimed in specific about this from Article three to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration.
This leaves three kinds of people that have yet to be well altered.
The first she barely mentions is enlightened absolutism, which respects for human rights but doesn't consult with its subjects.
Second is to burden peoples I've already mentioned,
to which we have a fairly limited duty of assistance, but to raise them to a fairly minimal threshold.
The last is what he called the outlaw regimes.
He tries to use the word regime policy to avoid attributing that problem to the people which are oppressive and expansionist.
And here we encounter a fascinating tension that strongly suggests he was driven towards the conclusion that he found difficulty in accepting rules.
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.
But its long term guiding purpose is more million.
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.
He excuses himself from saying much more on the grounds that the implementation of this general policy is not a matter for philosophers.
Reasonable enough point.
He also implies on a number of occasions that the rationale for fighting against an outlaw state is its inherent tendency towards expansionism.
Well, all the peoples, he says, do not wage war against each other.
But only against normal ordered states whose expansionist aims threaten the
security and free institutions of well-ordered regimes and bring about the war.
You'll note, incidentally, that it's the expansionist aims that are crucial.
This is lockean self-preservation thinking in that it is the threat that's morally crucial doesn't have to be carried into action.
Moreover, the situation is asymmetrical. Unlike a state respecting human rights.
An outlaw state has no right to fight back under the law of peoples.
An outlaw state does not possess a right of self-defence.
This isn't perhaps particularly surprising. It should have been noted that it's not very difficult to get into the outlaw category.
Rawls mentions early modern Spain and France, but entirely, it seems,
on the grounds that they fought dynastic wars that didn't promote the interests of their peoples.
Both leaves, in fact, plenty of scope for lockean or self-preservation warfare.
Now present situation day the greatest interest attaches the million or civilising fashion similarities with a fairly obvious like mill.
He denies that outlaw states have rights.
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.
In a couple of respects, though, his motives for intervention were actually more powerful than Mill's.
Mill believed that progress once started could come to a halt.
Even in civilised societies, rules, by contrast, is extremely optimistic that progress, once established can be expected to be self-sustaining.
Secondly, Mills did not believe in universal rights.
He wanted, of course, to minimise pain but had no interest in rights per say, except insofar as they tended to bring about progress.
He wouldn't have felt any reason to act if, for example, Muslims had started persecuting animists.
Wolfram People, by contrast, have some duty to step in whenever it can reasonably do so.
Of course, good reasons to be cautious. Wars typically cause more and much more serious rights violations than they're ever likely to prevent.
But if other things are equal, a rawlsian has few reasons for not fighting.
Laws recognise this logic. We can be sure he did so because he took great pains to hide it in a footnote.
If you look at my copy on page 93, you'll see that the text, which could have been written in the 1930s,
reposes faith in international pressure, international public opinion and the effects of economic sanctions.
In the footnote, though, he eventually bite the bullet.
It's interesting to note that normally speaking,
what you put in footnotes are brilliant ideas you've recently had can't quite fit into the main structure of the argument.
The argument of this particular footnote follows directly from what's been said in the paragraph before.
So there's some sort of motive going on here that is leading him to put it in slightly smaller print.
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,
even though they are not dangerous and aggressive towards other states and indeed may be quite weak.
That's a question, of course. Certainly there is a prima facie case for intervention in such cases.
Yet one must proceed differently with advanced civilisations than with primitive societies.
Primitive, isolated societies with no contact with liberal or decent societies we really have no way to influence.
It's not entirely clear to me if that's an argument in favour of or against intervention in such cases,
those that are more developed, he goes on seeking trade or other cooperative arrangements are a different story.
Nonetheless, fund limits. Ostracism may fail.
If so, if the offences against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to the imposition of sanctions.
Such intervention in the defence of human rights would be acceptable and would be called for.
In other words, they can't quite bring himself to say the word. There are circumstances under which aggressive war is actually a duty.
Now I've concentrated on expanding roles, partly for want of time, in which to speak of other things,
but mostly because these short essays extraordinarily revealing rawls's well-intentioned man of great philosophical
past who stories of the duty of a philosopher to set out in mildly idealised form the instincts of his culture.
He wanted to stay principles that would, on reflection, be seen as being theoretically attractive, given the way we are.
But does offering a feasible basis for action?
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.
He firmly held that states are good, at least if they're organised as nations.
What he added to this model, like many Liberals who have gone before him, is that litigation warfare is quite unnecessary.
It's possible to imagine a society of states whose culture and internal constitution
meant that they had no differences that couldn't be resolved by arbitration.
This. Culture work, moreover be self-sustaining.
Those who had lived in such a state would find ways of transmitting its values to their children from the self preservation model.
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.
He also explicitly stated there were circumstances,
extreme emergencies in which it was appropriate to break the normal rules, thus tacitly accepting nuclear weapons.
Lastly, he has affinities with the civilising model, but those views John Stuart Mill to illustrate this model.
It can be clearly seen, I hope, but the animating impulse is rather different.
Mill was utilitarian. He wanted to minimise pain.
But this utilitarianism allows in quite a large scope for manoeuvre.
The Rawlsian position is rather different. He agrees with Mill.
The barbarous states have no rights but lacks a set of principles to justify him in not intervening.
The criterion that guides the rules in intervened is not the minimisation of pain,
nor even the setting of progressive places on the short path of progress, but simply the prevention of egregious rights violations.
Other things being equal, it's difficult to see why the detection of such violations should ever not need to military action,
as there were practical difficulties. The only excuse for inaction would be that war was likely to cause a net increase in violations.
Mere inconvenience would not be an adequate excuse normally,
but in public consciousness is largely rules in large scale rights violations that come to its attention,
resulting demands for action that may when feasible the military.
Quite often, of course, the modern public consciousness is right.
The purpose of this paper is not to make a case for or against particular interventions.
The comparison between our situation in the past does bring out a new bias towards aggression.
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.
The litigation model is a picture of war within a privileged self.
The self-preservation model encourages a view of war as an existential threat, as a response to an existential threat to civilised values.
It pictures the opponent as one that stands outside that magic circle.
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.
There are obvious objections to the civilised barbarous distinction,
especially in a culture that's losing confidence that a broadly liberal order is the only political path that leads to economic modernisation.
It does, however, have the important virtue that civilisation and barbarism are concepts that belong in however crude,
a way to social theory that focussed at the level of whole societies.
They thus encourage further and less simplified accounts of the nature of the societies
in question that might expose the function of the biased violations we complain of,
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.
The human rights based model gives no such impetus. It simply notes bad things are happening.
Bad things, moreover, that there is a duty to stop the quite contrary to say, Rawls has no social theory,
but it takes the form of simple and optimistic claims such as the fact which he spells with a capital F,
that domination and striving for glory, the excitement of conquest and power over others do not move democracies against other peoples.
They have no point of contact with serious sociological inquiry.
And here surely is the heart of our whole problem.
The previous pictures of what I've been discussing were perfectly consistent with the most careful social thought of the periods that produced them.
But Rawls can't find the things he says in a respectable, modern social theory,
so he has to be loyal to theories that were produced in previous generations.
In essence, this means he was loyal to an old fashioned view of irreversible convergent progress.
Someone who acts upon such principles may well experience some initial successes,
but will lack the intellectual equipment to work out politically feasible solutions in complicated alien cultural settings.
He will have no defences against the panic stricken oscillation between high mindedness and ruthlessness, state building and predator drones.
It's not coincidental that this has been the history of Afghanistan and Iraq since.