Right. So we'll start the final session. We started 5 minutes late, so we'll go in 5 minutes after the end of that.
And as we'll stick to the same format as we've had before, Jeff will give a brief summary,
a brief introduction followed by Victor, who will give a not brief response.
So it's still going live.
And then if I could set it up, we might get Jeff to speak again, and then maybe everyone else will have a chance to say something to his chat.
So I apologise for the lateness of my paper.
I hope some of you had a chance to read it because I think neither one of us is actually going to summarise it.
Let me begin by quotation from Patrick's paper,
because there's serendipitously there's a nice statement of the problem to which my paper is a response in here.
Patrick says, Once war has broken out,
the international realm lacks effective institutions to determine facts of culpability for each participant soldier.
The pre-eminent, least salient and effective institution is the government of his or her state, which has ordered him or her into battle.
Only those soldiers whose culpability is settled independently of these institutional considerations, that is,
those who are themselves aware that their cause is unjust will fail to enjoy a personal defensive privilege.
So the defensive privilege rests on absence of relevant moral knowledge.
For Patrick and Toby, my paper makes a proposal for an institution to determine not really the facts of culpability,
but one possible ground of culpability, namely whether the war in which a person is fighting is unjust.
Now, this is important, in my view, because I think the morality of war.
Hinges on. I should say the morality of participation in war hinges on use ad bellum facts is in most cases, with a few exceptions.
My view is that it is morally wrong to fight in an unjust war, or at least a war that lacks a just cause.
Now, many people have pointed out, of course,
that the practical implementation of this revisionist understanding of the morality of war is subject to an important constraint.
It's the epistemic constraint. That is, how can soldiers know or be expected to know whether or not their war is morally just or unjust?
And many people have argued for the traditional doctrine of the moral equality of soldiers by appealing to this fact of epistemic limitation,
they say. But we have to have a division of moral labour.
The governments or the populations decide whether or not it's permissible to go to war.
That's properly their sphere to determine whether the people of a particular country are going to go to war.
And then the job of combatants is just to fulfil the will of the people or to obey the orders of the properly authorised government.
And some people suppose that these are the epistemic constraints that give rise to the necessity of the division of moral labour,
actually provide a permission or even a justification for people to fight in a war that is in fact unjust.
Other people think that this provides an excusing condition,
but even if it provides only an excuse and condition, this helps to perpetuate unjust wars.
Because if people believe either that they are permitted to fight, if their war turns out to be unjust, or at least if they will be excused morally,
if their war turns out to be unjust, they will lack an incentive to try to determine whether the war is just unjust,
and if they see that it is in fact unjust, refuse to fight in it.
So there's a practical aim at the heart of my paper,
which is to try to reduce the epistemic excuse and conditions that would be available to people who fight in unjust wars.
And of course, I think that, as I note in the paper,
that if one minimises or reduces the epistemic excuse and conditions than some of
the other types of excuse and condition will be reduced in significance as well.
So what I'm proposing is that there is a need and a really important need to provide people and citizens as well.
But combatants or soldiers in particular with reliable epistemic guidance about whether or not wars
in which they are commanded to fight are just uncertain how to provide this epistemic guidance.
I make a proposal in the in the paper.
I'm much less confident about the details of the proposal than I am in the need for some kind of institutions to fulfil this function.
So I tried to do a bit of the work in thinking about this,
but confidently expect that people will be able to point out all sorts of the in the proposal that I've made,
I've welcomed those because to it either I take this to be a very serious idea and if
I'm making mistakes in thinking about how to give practical shape to this this idea,
then I need to know about that. So and I'm sure I'm making mistakes and I'd be happy to have those and very happy to have those pointed out to me,
because it's a case in which I think it's really important to try to get it right to do the very best that one can.
What I say suggests we need in the first instance is a new and better understanding of the morality of you
sat down the history of thought about the just war is not terribly good on this war was very different
in the day of the classical just war theorist as international society evolved and changed the focus in the
theory of the just war and in legal thinking about the law of nations shifted very much away from you,
said bellum, towards use in Bello,
because there is greater scope for practical regulation of the conduct of war than there was for the prevention of war.
So for a good while you said Belgium kind of dropped out of the picture.
And this is true in international law as well as in the theory of the just war.
Around the time of the 19th century, especially in the late 19th century, the resort to war was regarded as a sovereign and right of states,
something they could do for basically any reason in in international law.
So this is an area that has been neglected, the understanding of you, said bellum.
So I think and of course in 20th century international law of war, you see this very, very little there has been in the UN charter is,
as you know, to to legitimate many instances or occasions for the resort to war in the event of an actual armed attack.
And if the Security Council authorises a state to go to war when it perceives a threat to international peace and security,
not a very subtle, nuanced, complicated,
sophisticated understanding of you, said bellum, because there's a bit more in other areas of international law,
apart from statutory international law, but not much.
So we need, I think, a new or a new, richer, deeper understanding of the morality of you, said Bellum.
We need then to be able to translate a richer understanding of the morality of you, said Bellum,
into some kind of code that can be understood by the agents of State as a guide to practice.
And then after we get such a code,
we need some kind of body to interpret it in particular instances and apply it to particular
wars to facilitate our understanding of whether a particular war is just or unjust,
permissible or impermissible. And I suggested two possibilities in the paper.
We could have an unofficial code with no particular.
Standing. Could have some kind of interpretive body again, with no particular official status.
Maybe something along those lines could conceivably be enough.
Certainly be better than nothing. But I suggested, you know, ideally the code would be a new law of you, said bellum,
a new understanding of the law of you, said bellum, and a new legal instrument.
And ideally, we could have some kind of official court whose mandate was to interpret and in some states and administer that body of law.
So in my view, not for enforcement purposes, but for purely epistemic purposes.
I suggested in the paper the possibility of a special chamber within the ICJ that would deliver advisory opinions.
It wouldn't be binding on states.
No idea of whether that suggestion is in any way realistic.
There's a question, you know, Simon Connor raised with me earlier, and that is why why a court?
Why would one want a court? And one of the reasons is that courts can have a particular kind of epistemic function.
That is, if you look at what ordinary criminal courts do, a large part of what they're doing is epistemic.
They're trying to figure out whether someone is guilty or innocent.
And they we have devised procedures for criminal courts that are actually pretty good
at determining whether a particular person is guilty or innocent of an offence,
certainly more reliable epistemic than in any individual's private judgement.
So that's one reason for trying to produce something like a court that is a body that would be constrained in
its reasoning by conformity with a particular code that it would itself have a certain epistemic authority.
And for the operations of this body, its deliberative procedures would also be constrained in a in a certain way.
You'd have deliberative procedures that were marked out in advance as being reliable for generating.
Authoritative answers to the questions submitted to it.
So that's, you know, one reason for looking at the court as a kind of model for deliberation about these issues.
There's also just been the need for authority quite generally.
So people will pay attention to the judgements of this body.
And I am assuming that, you know,
if judgements have force of law that gives them a kind of authority in people's minds that they wouldn't otherwise have.
I suggested to Simon during the break, it just occurred to me while we were talking,
that might be better if it might be more effective if one could have the use ad bellum code within a holy book, you know,
some sort of holy, holy scripture, and instead of a court,
you could have a kind of priestly caste that would be charged with the task of
interpreting the the understanding of the morality of war in the particular holy book.
And then the judgements of the body wouldn't have the force of law, rather they'd have the force of the Word of God.
And that would be even better if we could convince everybody that this was the Word of God and it was actually epistemic.
They're reliable. But second best would be some kind of court whose judgements would have something like the authority of law about matters of you,
said bellum, where the courts could actually pronounce on a war was in progress,
and that would then provide combatants in the war on both sides with with with
reasonably reliable guidance about whether what they were doing was wrong or not wrong,
certainly in most cases more reliable than their own private judgement and I think more
reliable from an impartial point of view than what they were being told by their own state.
Because as we all know, states do just lie to their soldiers and their populations, particularly when they want to fight wars.
They're very good at concocting all kinds of lies and so on.
And we have a history of this even in democracies, and then we know it happens in non-democratic societies,
but amazing how easily people are lied to and accept the lies,
even in democracies, even when they people know they have a history of being lied to over and over and over again.
They still believe the next round of lies.
Was that for me this time, ladies and gentlemen, time.
So I'm finished.
And now I and I welcome Victor's ludicrous remarks on a little bit further, so to say thank so much to say for organising such a fantastic conference.
I'm the last speaker because no one gets a chance to speak up.
And this would be a good opportunity to never knew that talking about mass killing could be so much fun.
So let me reconstruct the first part of Jeff's argument and then address to issues in it.
Okay. So many people endorse the permissibility of participation,
which is the thesis which holds that it's morally justifiable to kill in the course of war,
when one's political leaders, acting on behalf of the state, has declared the war on the state of those killed to be just.
And they believe there's a duty of positive reasons, usually of obedience, to fight in accordance with such a declaration.
And Jeff rejects this view rightly.
We can call it the stupid view of those who hold that even though we should be cautious about even though this is true,
we should be cautious about blaming and punishing those who fight on the other side for war,
for the reason that people are often excused and may act even in a praiseworthy manner by being courageous.
I bracket this and tell you this is the fishy idea that people can be courageous for doing horrible things, and I'm not sure about that.
And courage might depend on goodness, but let's say so even though we should,
we shouldn't blame or punish these people because they not the excuse or they might even be praiseworthy.
In some ways we should hold them permissible. Their participation is false.
Furthermore, endorsement of the permissibility of participation causes more people to fight for the unjust side in a war of claims
and endorsement of the permissibility of participation does not cause people to fight on the just side of the war,
or if it does, which could cause them to fight.
From the tough side of the war in other ways were people to reject the permissibility of participation.
And so it seems to follow that it would be better if well, obviously, it would be better if fewer people fought on the unjust side of a war.
Were there to be few effects on people fighting on just sides of war.
And therefore it would be better if people in general were not to endorse the permissibility of participation,
because that would have more effects on people who are fighting on the unjust side that on the just sides,
it would be good if people didn't believe in the benefits of participation.
So the practical effects of rejection, general rejection of the principle of participation would be enhanced if people were to make
accurate and confident judgements about whether the war declared by their state was just.
And what's required then is authoritative guidance about whether the war is just.
So it would be nice if we had someone to tell us which wars were just and which was were unjust.
Just so let's think about how we can get good guidance about this.
Let's set off a body of really smart people who know a lot about war and they can think about it a lot,
and then they can form some judgements about what the conditions are for.
A just war would not be good, and then they could make declarations about particular wars and say,
Well, this one's allies and this one's dodgy, so don't go into that one.
And then when we have a rejection of the permissibility of participation, then people would be less likely to participate on the unjust side.
They might still participate on the justices. And so the just would win and that would be good.
So sounds nice. That's the argument.
And Jeff has given you an outline of some of the practical considerations that might determine how we should set up these courts.
I'm not going to get into that. Okay.
So I don't want to obviously doubt Jeff's rejection of the possibility of participation, which is which is obviously right.
But I want to address two questions. One is the question preliminaries of the set up of this court,
which is the question about whether it would be better if people generally rejected the permissibility of participation.
That's obviously something which is independent of its truth, right.
It might be really nice if lots of people hold this stupid view because maybe that would make things turn out better.
So I want to try and give some reasons why we might think that it's better when people endorse the stupid view, even though it's stupid.
And then the second question is whether we think that Jeff's court could provide
the kind of authoritative guidance on hardline considerations that we need.
Okay. So would it be better if people generally rejected the permissibility of participation?
Well, widespread rejection of the permissibility of participation would help to dissuade the
morally motivated from participating in wars that they believe or suspect to be unjust.
But they might also always be decisive because sometimes there'll be prudential considerations
for them to go into these unjust rules which override their moral motivations.
Assuming, though, that some people sometimes act on them all judgements,
which might be true, then it's plausible that at least some people are going to join in.
On the unjust side, rejection of the permissibility of participation will result in the person not fighting in a war under two conditions.
The person believes that the unjust war is unjust,
and prudential considerations don't motivate the person more profoundly than their moral judgements,
and so sometimes lead a person not to fight in a war that's in fact unjust.
But it will sometimes lead a person not fighting a war. That's just it.
Sometimes I make mistakes about the justice of the war, and Jeff tends that.
It'll tend to have the former effects more often than the latter.
So I want to be I want to examine the extent to which these two conditions are likely to be fulfilled,
both in democratic and human rights compliant states and states, which are non-democratic and less human rights compliant.
So we've reason to suspect that citizens of democratic and human rights compliant states are less likely to
follow the declarations of their states than citizens of non democratic and human rights non-compliant states.
Despite the fact that democratic and human rights compliant states are more likely to form
the correct moral judgements than non-democratic and human rights non-compliant states.
Why should this be?
Well, first, non-democratic and human rights non-compliant states do much more to foster an attitude of compliance among their citizens.
Secondly, non-democratic and human rights. Non-compliant states restrict access to information and a broad range of views that tends
to undermine critical attitudes and tend to educate their citizens less effectively.
So although non-democratic in human rights,
non-compliant states will likely make worse judgements than democratic and human rights compliant states, citizens will tend to trust them more.
I think that's something we might at least make. And furthermore, citizens of non-democratic and human rights,
non-compliant states will tend to trust international institutions less and less because those states will
tend to restrict access to information about these institutions and try to undermine their credibility.
Hence, rejection of the permissibility of participation will tend to have less effect in non-democratic and human rights non-compliance.
It states that it will have in democratic and human rights compliant states, even in force supported by credible international institutions.
It will tend not to undermine participation in unjust wars in those states, and those states are more likely to start and participate in unjust wars.
And this will also undermine the effectiveness of rejection, of the permissibility, of participation in preventing unjust wars.
Furthermore, the rejection of the permissibility of participation will have less effect in non-democratic and human rights.
Non-compliant states for the reasons that those states will tend to provide people with more profound prudential reasons
to participate in such wars as much more draconian measures to punish people who don't go and enjoy the conflict.
Some of those measures may even be sufficiently powerful to render participation in an unjust war admissible.
In contrast, in democratic and human rights compliant states,
rejection of legitimacy of participation may have more profound effects for people in those states are encouraged to have
critical attitudes toward the policy of their government and will tend to have great confidence in their own judgement.
Furthermore, as the measures used to punish non-compliance will be less draconian,
people are more likely to act on those judgements and not go to war.
But whilst the rejection of the permissibility of participating will tend to undermine people's willingness to participate in unjust wars,
it will also undermine their willingness to participate in just wars.
And that's not only because they'll tend to form mistaken judgements that a just war is unjust despite institutions telling them otherwise.
These are critical issues, but also because they'll tend to be criticised and condemned for going to war by their fellow citizens,
some of whom will say the war is unjust, even when it's just who may also make the mistaken judgements about the admissibility of war.
Despite these institutions, we still tend not to trust.
So this suggests the rejection of the permissibility of participation is likely to weaken the war making capabilities of democratic and human rights
compliant states much more profoundly than it will weaken the war making capabilities of non-democratic and human rights non-compliant states.
This may well be that the tendency of non-democratic and human rights, non-compliant states to perpetrate unjust wars will increase in the field.
And for the reason the left feel that they more confident about not being
resisted by these democratic states where all citizens choose not to go to war.
10 minutes. More than half of this war is down, but it is down.
Okay. So given that comparative war making capabilities that matter, then we might think this is a bad effect.
We reduce the overall number of people participating in the wars, but it's the comparative strength that matters in terms of likelihood of winning.
And we want the unjustifiable to win. Right.
So this creates one question for Jeff about whether this is going to increase the asymmetry between itself,
states that and their war making capabilities. Now I want to talk about the capacities of the court and whether the Court suppose
this is false and that we should get people to reject this policy of participation.
Now let's think about how good the court is likely to be. We might have some doubts about the legitimacy of the court.
So the court is not going to be sufficiently representative, and it's not just going to have any kind of democratic kind of authority.
We just pick people who we think are good experts rather than try to get representatives of different cultures and so on.
That might undermine the legitimacy of it.
I think that the legitimacy might increase its effectiveness to some good reasons to try and bolster legitimacy.
Just from a pragmatic point of view.
I don't think that these reasons are decisive, though, because one for one thing, just courts are not intended to be binding anyway.
And also, even if it were, we might think as long as it improves the situation over what we have at the moment,
then that's obviously a really good thing. And the lack of legitimacy isn't faithful to the proposal.
The question is whether this court would have the capacities that he claims for it.
And we might think that the tendency of a decision making body to make judgements depends
on two capacities that it might have the capacity to make good moral judgements,
but also its capacities to evaluate a set of facts.
And the thought that I have here is that Jeff school might be really good at developing a set of moral capacities.
Is all of these really smart people to think about you something?
And of course it's going to be lots of fighting and disagreement and Casper and Gerhart
are going to try and fight for the board and other people are going to reject that. And so somebody's got to fight the other.
Let's just suppose that somehow the people kind of get to some sort of consensus and this does really improve its moral capabilities.
I think that's at least plausible. That might be true.
But then it has this epistemic problem that it doesn't have very much access to facts about the effects of war and what it's going to do.
So we think that whether the war is just going to depend on lots of facts about
things like security and how well the state is likely to do after you've invaded,
and whether insurgents are likely to come into the country and all this kind of security stuff.
And so I worry that Jeff's court is is not going to be very well suited to
gathering the kind of information that you need about the decision to go to war.
So very often, the court is going to think to itself, well, if I knew more about the security situation,
I had all these facts, then I'd be able to make a confident judgement about whether the war was just.
But I don't know very much about the facts. And so it's going to be really hard.
And we see this in national security situations, war time.
So when courts in the United Kingdom think about whether detention without trial is justified in human rights cases,
they often come to the conclusion that although we have some doubts about whether the security situation is sufficiently bad to justify this,
we're going to defer to parliament because parliament just has a lot more facts about this than we do.
And it's only under very special situations where the court's willing to say that that's an abuse of human rights here.
And those are usually situations where that decision doesn't depend quite so, especially on the facts.
So the courts have been very, very deferential to parliament when it comes to thinking about security situations where the information is complicated.
There's lots and lots of rights that are in cases. And some of the information is secret forces tend to be very deferential.
I just think that's a systematic feature.
Of course, it's very, very hard to get courts not to be like that entrenched, that in criminal cases we go for a conviction.
We only get the conviction if you prove beyond reasonable doubt that the person's done it.
There's no question of declaring anyone to be innocent to the cultural background to say this person is definitely innocent.
We just say they're not guilty.
But if you don't have and then there's a element of innocence that might create some sort of attitude that we should have towards people.
Once we don't convict them, we don't really declaring anyone to be truly innocent.
We just we just couldn't prove that they were guilty. That's what we really say when we fail to convict a person.
But just court needs to say both that a war is just all that is unjust.
But very often who's going to say, well, well, that's just the information to tell, whether it's just one north.
And so that seems like a worry here. That's going to be very many cases where we just say, well, the courts is going to say, we're not sure.
And furthermore, you might get the worry that some sceptics about protect the institutionalisation of human rights,
worry about the some sceptics about human rights, think that when you put human rights in the court,
what they do is they tend to legitimise the actions of both of their governments by declaring what they've done human rights possible,
even though there's good spousal suspicion that they're not the courts not sufficiently confident to say that they're not.
And this court might have a similar kind of problem that it tends to declare some
wars as being not clearly unjust because the court's felt confident enough.
And that gives people grounds to say, well, actually, it's just because the court didn't say that it wasn't.
And so it actually might turn out to play this kind of unfortunate legitimising
function for war that many people actually want to resist through political opposition.
So let me wrap up there. Thanks very much for that.
Well, I've already got Henry started, a sort of stealth war hand raising before Viktor opened his mouth.
So I've already got 13 people on the list. And it'd be nice if everyone could be as disciplined as Viktor was,
because with 13 people and 60 Minutes, that means an average of roughly 4 minutes per person.
So let's be let's stick to that. Henry, take it away.
Confession. I've tried to prepare for the shock.
I like this. And I'm sure other people are going to point out ways in which it's utopian.
But I take you at your word that you're trying to do something practical.
And I want to quickly give you a couple of precedents that I think you suggested.
Maybe he's not totally hopeless and then make one constructive suggestion.
But there have been other sort of eminent blue ribbon panels that have actually had really significant influence on the public discourse.
There another examples. One is the Brundtland Commission, which coined the term and defined the term sustainable development.
And now it's just impossible to talk about development without claiming it's sustainable.
The commission that produced our two P is clearly had a major impact.
There's now, you know, bureau at the bureau, but, you know, institute connected with the UN and so on.
And everybody's talking about how to be another example that's actually more like your court,
because as Victor points out, you're talking about really judging cases is Amnesty International.
Nobody asked Amnesty International its opinion.
It just started saying you're violating human rights. And by implication, the people are.
It was so careful and so responsible that it got a lot of credibility now as Human Rights Watch copying it.
You know, these haven't ended human rights abuses, but they have a lot of authority and a lot of impact.
So just to me, one crucial strategic question is exactly what question your group would try to answer first.
And I think the first thing you probably do agree and I think you don't want to ask about legality
because I think the lawyers are already locked into a doctrine about basically the UN doctrine,
and that's going to probably get the answer you don't want.
And in any case, I think what you want to ask is, is about the last thing which was a moral and the thought is start with how to define aggression.
Now I know that you think there are other just causes besides resistance to aggression, but the thing about aggression is the lawyers are interested.
The ICC is immobilised until they get permission from Russia.
And so there's a sort of ready market for it.
And I think that the humanitarian interventions that it's actually reasonable to back and the
very few preventive wars that it's reasonable to back can actually be construed as defensive.
And so I think a good place to start would be there if, you know, deep in your heart you want to get other causes advance.
I just think you should save that and and start with this.
But that this would be a place that you would think you would answer a question that people are asking what's aggression?
And you would still be saying, here's the moral basis for deciding which aggression.
You would be saying it's legal. The people would find that useful.
And there's some hope.
I think that the sort of people you're talking about could actually make a contribution to that and would notice and pay attention.
Well, I thank you for that. Yeah, I am concerned with morality rather than law,
but I'm also concerned with taking a richer understanding of morality and trying to codify it in a way that we can kind
of reduce it to a set of rules that could could be action guiding where some of the nuances would have to be left out.
And maybe you're right that it would be prudent just to start with aggression.
But I, I have something more ambitious here where I would really be able to judge, for example,
whether an instance of humanitarian intervention, which looks like aggression according to traditional definitions, is actually just war chest.
You could do that. Fine. You just sign on the right understanding of aggression.
Do well in that. Yeah, I wouldn't want to say that because that looks like, as in gerrymandering,
a concept in order to be able to use the approved term and I don't want to call things by
their proper names and aggression is usually one state kind of invading another state and,
and so on. By the way, the in August, the ICC committee or whatever did did reach agreement on a definition of aggression.
So that that has actually happened I'm just DC Simon in the back yesterday I think maybe a finger is this a finger.
It is just fingers are going to have to be near instantaneous.
Yeah the the definition of aggression is a crime now in the ICC statute.
And there are issues about when it will become effective in the ICC statute.
But there's a criminal definition of aggression now.
And just on that point and a little bit about the last one session, and one thing that struck me, Jeff, was now there is a crime of aggression.
And that crime is clearly, as all crimes are ones on the statute books intended to have a deterrent effect.
Is that not really a starting point? Rather than looking to a new judicial institution which won't have that type of deterrent effect?
Because it's not that any sanction that the ICC does have now beyond the point that it's individual criminal responsibility for the ICC.
But clearly that's aimed at those in power, which is the same people I think you're aiming at in the court and.
You know, in a way, not really. That is in the more of the moral territory.
International criminal law can cover in a reliable and effective way the better.
But I do see international criminal law speaking mainly to leaders, you know,
and high ranking officers and so on, people who and potential war criminals,
you know, and so on, rather than just people who may end up fighting in unjust wars, but fighting by whatever rules are in operation at the time.
So I really want something that speaks to to the conscience of individual combatants.
That's the primary point. I mean, it's good if it speaks to civilian populations as well,
and even better if it speaks to political leaders and and high ranking military officers.
But the primary audience is individual combatants, usually.
Yeah. Okay. I mean, it sounds pretty scary, but I'm a bit suspicious about the practicality of it.
And since you are looking for a practical solution, for one thing, the ICJ already gives advisory decisions, so I don't think it will be unique.
It will if it will give another one. But this kind of decision can take time to decide.
What you want is 8.00 plus hours to allow the soldiers on each side to know whether they should contribute to the war or not.
It doesn't happen so quickly.
If you are thinking in terms of each state, the state and states we will come to the court will have to present their case.
But the whole thing is something that we'll get if we do it very quickly in months.
I mean, at the very least, if not, I mean,
this kind of things take years sometimes after the fact in court until a decision is being made in terms of compensation and things like that.
What you're looking for is something that will come very early. The other thing is things often change.
So take the war that you left Iraq, your war.
So let's say that there was weapons of mass destruction that would possibly make a difference as to whether the US should have engaged in war or not.
So if the U.S. really believed this and at the beginning, the U.S. could produce the evidence they had for the suspicions,
and then later on they found out that actually there isn't right. And then there is a question that comes up.
So what you want them just to clear up? Now. So now, I mean, at which point do you stop?
Can you stop in the middle of a war because things change?
Can you then just say to all the American soldiers, okay, no more the war.
Now it became clear the war is unjust. Now you all have to take your thanks for your weapons and go away.
Leave the country. And whichever solution it is, even if there is a major attack, happened in the first few days and then the devastation is so,
so severe that they can't just leave because it would destroy the main powers in the main government institution.
It just seems to me like the kind of decision. It's really nice if we can have this.
And then how do you can we try to limit the supplementary question, something that's two, two or three.
Okay. There's a little something in the paper about each each of those problems,
I think I say in the paper that on the on the issue of time, that there is this kind of dilemma here.
There's a trade off that is the the the longer the deliberation, the more reliable the verdict,
but the less effective the judgement can be in limiting the wrongs that are committed.
The shorter the term of deliberation, the more effective the judgement can be in limiting the wrongs,
but the more likely it is that the judgement is going to be unreliable.
So yeah, I mean, that's just a that seems to me unavoidable problem.
But again, the question is whether something's better than nothing.
And so obviously when one would seek some kind of reasonable trade-off between reliability and effectiveness,
I also mentioned the problem that the moral character of a war can actually change.
So I think that it's just judgements would have to be revisited in the light of changed circumstances.
What was once an and just war can become a just war and what was once a just war can become an unjust war.
They won't be different war. So, you know, a war that continues beyond the achievement of the just cause can be unjust.
It may well be utopian to think that a country might be persuaded by a moral judgement to abandon a war in progress.
I don't know of any examples of that, though. I don't know much about military history.
Graham was saying here he knows, you know, you read about military history as was as a child and so on.
But wouldn't it be wonderful if if a political leader could ever have the courage to say, you know,
I just I just realised that this war in which we're fighting is really not morally justified anymore.
We should just stop. I mean, I think that's what President Obama should do right now in Afghanistan.
It's just hopeless in Afghanistan right now.
You know, whatever the merits of the initial invasion, I think some kind of military response to Afghanistan was indeed warranted.
But the thing has dragged on now for for for ten years. And yet it's politically impossible for a leader to say there's just no point in this anymore.
Anymore. It's, you know, it's a bad idea. Let's stop.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you for the existence of this course implies declaration that the voting progress was unjust and illegal.
But the protest was amended to be very interesting and suspect because it is very fluid.
What is the essence of the war? The warning signs accepted.
The war was decision making primarily because of two things.
First, there is no other way to solve the conflict.
All other ways has been exhausted.
And second, which is crucial, is that they do not want to leave the conflict.
And so. So the board is directed to itself.
This is happening before the end of the rule. So there's a different question, a.
How would its devised function?
There are two possibilities, it seems to me.
First, it at the foot of its population in some presumably very bad cases,
condemning one side, authorising innovation without intervention against that.
So. But there is other possibility to do that at the regular routine like basis,
in which case all divorce would be assessed and that the business of the court would be
determining which side should be conferring rights to rent ones and condemning others to defeat.
So it could become a kind of business of of issuing licenses to the victory.
History licenses to the victory. Okay.
I don't think wars are accurately characterised as two sides, having agreed that war is going to be their decision making procedure.
That is when it's not always the case that there is some pre-existing quarrel.
It is just the case sometimes that one side invades the other because it wants to achieve some aim.
And in those cases, it's not true that when the war ends, that leaves the initial problem unresolved.
In those cases, for the victim of the unjust attack.
The problem is largely resolved by the ending of the war.
That's and that's all that it takes.
I do think that the problem, what you see is the problem of a court licensing victory by one side or another is something that we already have.
It is the United the United Nations can claim that a war is being fought by one side is illegal.
The problem there, the problem there is that nobody thinks of the UN Security Council as having any kind
of epistemic authority with respect to the justice or even the legality of war,
because they are so heavily full that it's such a heavily politicised body.
It is not a deliberative and impartial, deliberative body.
Just not for those wars. Well, because that's one of the things you don't want to forbid, just wars.
I mean, we're all. Well, but then what happens when somebody disobeys that and you have an unjust war?
Then you don't want to forbid the just war in response to the unjust war.
Okay. Thank you both. So you've had a lot to say in anticipation of a lot of people.
Getting just problems about the other stuff appears not to be the sort of thing that survives.
I will say that I think that Jeff is taking the right tack.
But it is often overplayed. You have to study.
The conditions of the soldier are so utterly fixed.
Don't think that they can overcome them. And I think the proper question is to ask what happens when we overcome the other stumbling block?
And the other thing about the epistemic argument is I think there's actually went out there on a pretty strong case to make
that we can't have such an epistemic wall and this sort of reasoning trying to justify why we're doing what we're doing.
And the outcome is the sort of thing that soldiers do every day,
regardless of what we think about their access to information is what figures in how they reconcile their actions.
It's what figures and how they plan operations. And I think that.
This is a nice proposal to see how we can. Maybe at least do better by giving us the sort of information we need to make these sorts of decisions.
Some things against voters. Arguments try to limit it to a couple of.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's going to be tough.
Yeah. I think the idea that the rights respecting army would be somehow stopped by the removal.
The epistemic log is wrong in that it's at least possible to conceive.
It would lead us to a smaller set of wars so that we wouldn't exhaust ourselves over these long and intractable things.
And then the other one is.
What we're talking about here is more rights respecting government and U.S. soldiers to fight in these things.
And they need real resources to come back from these sorts of campaigns without being sort of not sort of shattered.
Broken. And the problem is that on the other side, moral equality of soldiers really turns out to be comfortable.
And if we take ourselves to be a rights respecting regime, I think it's probably need to figure out is how we can have soldiers that fight.
And I don't have time to lay it out. I think the writers, the future.
Before. This is professional armies. Doo doo doo doo.
Thank you very much. I just would defend myself.
Give me a chance. It was like all I thought was just that it wouldn't stop.
The Army maybe wouldn't tell the army that much,
but it would take the army to some extent in human rights facing democracies because it was taking more physical lassitude.
Some people would decide that the war wasn't chaos, even in that it was, in fact, just right.
Well, I think, you know, that's right. I'm just a general sceptic about what institutions tell me.
So I take it a lot of other people are also going to be sceptical.
The more we give up the first greater participation we just do this US will destroy it.
Tells you what is going to form the judgement about the war which you know,
that's I'm just I'm just I'm I'm not just going to be less true in these other countries where people don't.
It is critical that you send officers this question especially very seriously.
I, I think that the point would be that it's an open question as to what's what's worse for the for the rights respect government.
Is it a sort of slavish military that just runs it, does whatever it's told to do, the forces involved.
It's always better to have a slavish military. So you've got the slavish military that will just do whatever we want.
And then we know that what all the other countries have this deterrence,
that when they know that they're going to attack us, we go to slavish military,
which we could just get a piledriver if they think they always have these critical tubes and they're going to hit us, what else is going on?
We can we can just test the boundaries of this. We know only people with physical assets.
She's not going to join in it, that if they've got this suspicion that the war is not going to be just, that they're going to not join in as much.
So we just got to test the boundaries, just invade the Falklands, the base and you know,
and they know that all these anti Thatcher critics are going to say, well,
we're not going to participate in the wolves during the Falklands War is just and
we don't do the fact our government told us to go and fight as a reason to fight. So.
So let's just let's just not fight in that case.
I mean, the whole that was at least plausible that I might have for the Falklands War might have been justified on deterrence grounds.
I love the fact that the author and professor of philosophy at West Point, he trained for this method.
Can I just. Yeah, yeah. 5 seconds on this. Most of our Israelis have left limits here.
And I think of Israelis as a counterexample to what you're saying.
That is, you find actually more dissent within the IDF than in probably any other military organisation, at least that I know of.
More kind of active dissent and refusal to participate in certain missions and so on.
But nobody thinks that they can just walk over to the IDF and hiding them.
That's my question. Oh, great.
That's very understanding. Patrick Emmerson, as the suggestions for your for an expert panel of institutional suggests from the ICJ,
if the human rights bodies under the ICCPR and the other human rights treaties, I think they're not binding.
The experts make decisions. Okay. On the issue of the capacity of the court, I think it victimised the boardroom viewing party.
I think it also raises issues about the extent to which a competent legal authority can issue moral related directives.
I think some reference to that in the future. But ultimately, the case is going to be their litigated.
And I think both in your paper and in this empirical findings,
which I think justification of the notion of policies are less aggressive than non democracies,
what I think is the fact of history and a good reason to decline people in functioning
democracy is to mobilise people for war and why the other two countries can't.
And in the issue of where the democracies, with respect to the judgement of this body, at least when I come from Australia,
incredible disregard for human rights bodies and when you look like the UN against ability of those bodies.
So there's something in the paper that gives us some thoughts.
Okay, good. I would have argued with Victor about democracies too, but I didn't get a right of reply, which is fine.
I'm not complaining, but I would have I would have said something in.
Okay, Jane. I think that doing what you're describing, Jeff, would be a great thing to do.
So this is not an argument that it's a bad thing to do. But but I do see.
The problem I see in what you're saying is not that it's utopian, but it's sort of halfway utopian.
And what I mean by that is that when we first see proposals for international arbitration mechanisms and stuff emerge in the late 19th century,
it was based on the notion that the world can get more enlightened because states can get more and more in.
And it seems as if a lot of your argument is we need an enlightened world entity because the states are absolutely hopeless.
And it just strikes me that there's kind of a tension there between the thinking
that there must be something about the institutions of the individual state,
that that's going to stand in the way of letting them make make these judgements more accurately, but then setting up a world body,
which among other things, won't work unless it has the consent of the states to deliver information.
And I'm saying that partly because. What would you say about someone and they're not mutually exclusive?
We said, Why don't we just work from the ground up rather than the top down?
The United States Constitution already has features that were meant to achieve just the sorts of things you're saying that the
mechanisms for making the decision to go to war was based on the notion that you should have much discussion as possible.
Get all the facts on the notion of a citizens army was based on the notion that if you jack up the cost of going to war for the average person,
they'll take it more seriously, whether they wage war. The problem, of course, is that all of these things have been forgotten about or thrown away.
You know, they were they were there at the start. And wouldn't it be equally as realistic to people to say, let's take these Republican mechanisms,
let's make them meaningful in the cities or in the countries where they exist, and let's try and just plant them more and more places.
I understand that's utopian proposal too, but I think strikes me as might be equally a viable solution as the one.
Well, I'm not sure what to say about that. It certainly seems to me that the constraints on the resort to war in the United States are
incredibly feeble and don't actually require conformity with any kind of moral principles.
They are that they are feeble institutional constraints that don't guarantee any kind of moral reflection on the resort to war at all,
much less imposing any kind of institutional obligation to engage in moral reflection about the resort to war.
And they don't mean those principles.
They're to to which legislators or executive members can appeal in trying to determine whether or not it would be principled to go to war.
If the question about whether or not the kind of institution I have in mind could work without the consent of states, I think is is an open one.
It depends on what. What form it would take, if it's going to if it were to take form within some pre-existing legal institutions,
if it were to have some official standing within international law, then it would have to be subject to the consent of states.
And it may well be that states don't ever really want to be told.
Right. It may be that the costs to powerful states of being told that potentially being told
that they're fighting an unjust war would outweigh for them in a prudential calculation,
the benefit of their adversaries being told that they were fighting an unjust war.
So you might find at least a cabal of powerful states that would object strenuously to such a court ever existing in international law.
Certainly, I can't imagine the Bush administration ever signing on to anything like this.
That may be true of other powerful states as well.
In which case the idea of getting something along these lines implemented in international law is pretty hopeless.
So one would then have to go outside international law and pursue the kind of alternatives that Henry was suggesting, something, you know,
that would have the kind of authority and credibility of Amnesty International or the ICRC or something like that,
which wouldn't have any kind of particular legal authority behind its judgements.
So there's this worry also that I would say the Americans are going to try to influence the total changes
composition or totally that the court will try and appease the Americans because they need to get them on board.
And we know this happens in international criminal law.
I think a piece the Americans are not trying to hold them accountable for the things they've done because it's really important to get them on board.
So the long term future of the institution survives to go with these kinds of problems without injury as well as the use of the drugs.
Yeah. So part of what I wanted to say in response to Cheney is I would add the ideal here is to in a way, to have maximum distance from states.
That's the whole point. And therefore, states are going to be unlikely to be happy about such a thing.
But you don't you certainly this thing is not going to work if it's subject to if it's going to crumble in the face of pressures from powerful states.
And so it's not going to work. So the whole idea is independence from states.
This is something that this is to counteract the actions of states when they're behaving badly, which they often do.
And they may not like that. And this is also about the idea that we'll have to worry more about the kind of how that might impact.
And sometimes these judgements are always going to be retrospective.
We get the evidence when we have the ruling, which is going to be based on the evidence.
So I look to go to this is just one, but that's not necessarily going to tell soldiers anything about what they should be fighting here now.
So I wonder why they want to kind of open the doors. The idea that the judgements are always sometimes conditional.
They might be revised, they might think there might be another rule,
and that's going to perhaps significantly undermine the ability to give advice a lot.
Yeah, I, I agree that there are problems in the area you're gesturing towards.
It's not the problem is not just that the character of a war may change over time,
but also that even at a given time, there may be unjust dimensions to a war and some dimensions to a war.
That is, it may well be the case that the campaign that some soldiers are fighting in is one in which it's permissible to fight so that,
um, if, if, if this kind,
if a body of the sort that I'm envisaging were going to be, were to do its job in,
in a way that aligned its judgements to the greatest possible degree with the judgements of morality.
The unit of analysis would not be a war, but might be something like, you know,
a mission or a campaign or an aim that might get, you know, sort of like, you know, the achievement of a certain aim.
If the court could identify a certain aim,
they could say this aim is unjust to the extent that what soldiers are doing supports the achievement of this aim, it's wrongful.
The other hand, if the aim is best in such, and if what they're doing reasonably supports that aim, then it may not be something like that.
I mean, I haven't I haven't worked up on this.
This is really complex. I mean, as you know, the morality of war is terribly complex.
If if at least some of us are right, maybe it's relatively simple if some other people are right.
But I think that we don't understand the morality of war terribly well yet there's lot more to be done.
This this study is in its infancy, and the more complex the morality is and the more complex the legal judgements
may have to be or the judgements of whatever kind of body this could be.
And you know, what can I say?
It's not my fault. What we we should do the best we can, you know, whatever that is,
we should be striving to provide people with reliable guidance so that they can make
decisions about matters of extreme importance with that kind of maximal reliability.
And I think that's, you know, a point that I haven't made and I probably don't make in the paper is that I think
this is something that that and this is a point that I think Cheney would make.
Um, I think I'm speaking for Cheney here. We owe it to the combatants themselves to provide them with this kind of guidance.
It's not just for the sake of the victims of unjust wars,
but it's also if we are going to be asking people or commanding people to go out and kill other people on our behalf,
we owe it to them to ensure that they've got the kind of moral tools that they need to be able to determine
whether what we're demanding that they do for us is actually something that they're permitted to do.
Thank you. As you've noticed, we're not taking fingers now.
So. Massimo okay. Just a brief, but mostly just about cases where the war is already taking place is about to take place,
and the court declares that the war is just unjust, that people should act accordingly.
The court also issued opinion when no war is taking place.
Yeah, you know, but but there is a justification for the war.
And so the court should encourage someone to intervene and to fight the war.
Of course, it sounds reasonable. Well, I haven't I actually wasn't expecting your final sentence here to there.
I mean, I do think that there are occasions in which we can foresee a war coming.
Like, I think every body knew that the war could see that the war in Iraq was coming.
The Bush people were making noises about it before they became Bush people back in the early 1990s.
They were, you know, and this went on through the 1997.
And we noticed that all these vociferous advocates of war against Iraq found positions in the Bush administration and so on and so forth.
So one knew for a long time that this was probably going to happen and the
United States was building its case in the media prior prior to going to war.
In those conditions, I think the court could pronounce in advance.
So far, we see no case no, no.
Just cause for intervention, whether it could make judgements of the other sort.
There is a case for war against such and such a country.
I don't know. I haven't considered that. See, Simon shaking his head back.
The. Think, Rhonda, maybe the other kids as well. Yeah, I do.
And I do. That was that was the case I had in mind when you when you when you mentioned this.
And I wanted to say, I just don't know whether this is this is an appropriate function of a recall of the kind of body that I have in mind to say,
hey, anybody wants to go to war over here or that got our permission.
But I do think it would have been nice if somebody had said one should go help the the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Okay, you, Nina. And I wonder what the essence of this overwhelming intuition of everyone is, that this is unrealistic or utopian.
And I think you said it yourself, is that what you need is the maximum possible distance to stay are two states,
but at the same time you ground is an international law which obviously so obviously is constructed around states and stated.
So let me just make like two points for why you should drop the law and with Henry on the point and make this about morality,
I mean, what is the fact that you can't get around states in international law?
Basically, what you would want is a system that we don't have because international law is formulated in a way that you can argue both sides,
and that's deliberate. That's even for something as basic as what does it mean to have an inherent right to self-defence.
I mean, there are these three different theories about it. The ICJ case in point, which hardly ever comes to an opinion and mostly has significance.
Amount of judges on both sides. Mm hmm. So you would want a different kind of international.
Well, you say that, but, you know, it's. But as long as we have states, it's unlikely that you'll get it.
And the other part is the about the mandating system of international organisations.
And there's a variety of differences,
but for for the kinds of court authorities with epistemic purposes like Human Rights Commission, which is you have options, right?
Either the state often with the with the treaty or on hoc basis for different cases.
I mean this is the fate of these organisations tells you that the states don't wish to have that kind of authority telling them what they are doing.
So that's a sort of, I think, the essence of why this is unrealistic.
And the other point that it doesn't have to do primarily with states,
but you want to address the individual and you want to tell the individual ultimately what you're doing is immoral.
So the pool argument has. But why don't you create, like, a cognitive action if you don't tell them what you're doing?
But we're not going to punish you for it, because under international law,
there's no way it would be much more likely to actually reach the individual if you told them what you're doing is immoral.
And that's why you shouldn't be doing it if you're ultimately under don't have any legal sanctions at hand anyway.
Yeah, I think that was the point. So basically, just like the coin, you know, like I and what do you know about this?
We as teachers of international and most closely to what you're actually describing a
bunch of international law teachers in the UK saying before the board actually started,
if the Iraq war is illegal, they had all these problems about you could argue the other side didn't care.
But I think if they had been a bunch of moral philosophers, having said this war is unjust,
everyone would listen to the signs closer to the final authority.
A bunch of lawyers are a bunch of philosophers. If you go out with a joke, you realise that there's probably some some variations in culture here.
If you want to find in the United States the most derided class of individuals,
it's probably philosophers who maximally distant from divine authority United States and
philosophers are taken more seriously in Britain than they are in the United States.
Um, so actually I do I do think that lawyers have a whole lot more authority in with with ordinary people than than philosophers do.
I've been taking notes on what you. On what you've said. I.
I don't. I take all of this as helpful advice,
and I don't really have anything to say in response except to the to the last
point about what's the point of telling somebody that what he's doing is illegal,
but we're not going to punish him for it.
I mean, I do think that there's you know, there are areas of the law in which that's precisely what we say to people.
And in some of those areas of law, we say that we're not going to punish you,
but we're going to we're going to force you to do certain things so you pay compensation or whatever.
I'm not judging that you're wrong, but it seems to me that legal institutions do have a certain kind of moral authority.
And so to say to somebody, we've modelled our law on morality and what you're doing is illegal,
but there are these contingent, pragmatic reasons why we're not criminalising it.
And that can be quite explicit.
We can say what you're doing and fighting in an unjust war is actually illegal use that applies to you as an individual.
It does. It doesn't it doesn't make your action criminal, but it makes it illegal.
And the law is based on moral norms that can, I think, be quite effective.
So just on the credibility point of the detention of the courts, the interface between distancing itself from the states,
two states to avoid being corrupt, but aligning as some of the states in order to improve its credibility.
People trust their states. They think we're going to improve our credibility if we can also get the consent of
states and get the states to think that we're an authoritative body set in the courts,
going to be in such a pure position as you want it to be, it's inevitably going to have this tension.
JS Okay, I'm a bit puzzled why you've rejected the Security Council completely out of hand.
My reasoning is that in the paper you said that you're concerned with improving this current situation rather than trying to complete I don't know.
I take them for what you say about kind of your ideal court.
Yeah, I'm clearly better with the Security Council, right? I think the Security Council would at least be better than the current situation we face.
So there's a number of reasons why we might think that some one that's going to be having the Security Council make rulings on which more
than just an unjust what's going to likely to be efficacious in terms of the states are more likely to listen competence of all sides.
So this listen the the rule is less likely to be discredited by states of now we both also think
about the Security Council although of course it's often said isn't this full of partiality,
but it does have a degree of impartiality,
there is sort of some sense which is slightly impartial and doesn't mind which idea wins the war in that case.
I mean, it's less of a liability. Well how many.
Yeah. Have you. Very, very how many how many how many unjust wars have the Security Council actually authorised?
Well, I don't I can't really recall that many other forces.
So I think that's I'm a bit unsure why you've rejected it as a kind of an improvement on the current situation.
Well. But the main reason is that the representatives to the Security Council are agents of states,
their representatives of states, they have no particular credibility or authority as impartial thinkers about law and so on.
And remember, the function of the court is to say not only which wars are unjust, but also which wars are just.
And one of the problems of the Security Council is that it will it will often veto the law.
One of the permanent members will, if it were to have this function, would veto justified wars,
let's say, if humanitarian intervention against itself or against an ally or or whatever.
I mean, the United States advertised the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention in the late stages when
the claims about weapons of mass destruction and preventive war and so on were wearing a bit thin.
It resorted to a campaign to say that this was, you know, Iraqi freedom and so on and so forth.
So it presented it as a as a humanitarian intervention. If somebody had said in the Security Council.
This isn't a humanitarian intervention. This is an unjust war.
And the United States will just veto that.
And maybe you have it had a mind of an understanding of a reformed Security Council where permanent members don't exercise a veto.
So I just don't know. But as it is now, I think it's pretty hopeless.
Okay, so think about actual scenario.
Germany and Russia invade Poland. The body.
That year they implemented decrees that both thought both wars are the will of both Germany and Russia is unjust.
So the Russian army starts having revolts, people deserting and so on.
So then Germany invades Russia. Now the Russian army at this point is revolting, deserted and so on.
So it's far less able to withstand the justified war, which is issue decreed as justified by there,
by that body, as just is far less able to withstand that war at that moment.
Just one point about the IDF that you mentioned earlier. The reason that the IDF is very,
very permissive on questions of disobedience and refusal is that the amount of refusal is the level of use which is much higher than most armies,
is still so low that it never affected the idea of the ability to carry out its missions.
And what I think you have in mind is a body which will bring exactly that effect.
It will prevent unjust war by by making soldiers on the unjust side unwilling to participate.
So. Well, I think a lot depends on what happens to Soviet soldiers who refused to fight in Poland.
If they just wander off back to their homes in Siberia and the Red Army kind of dissolves as a result of the ruling.
Then your scenario is very worrisome.
On the other hand, if states were to respond to the possibility that it was now an international institution that might judge their war to be unjust,
with these the possible consequences that some combatants or soldiers would refuse to fight,
then they could adjust the nature of their institution in advance to take account of this stance and perhaps have some provisions for conscientious
objection that would that would allow their soldiers to remain soldiers and
poised and ready to fight the Nazis if they were refusing to fight in Poland.
I mean, I see what you're saying, but I don't see it as a kind of insuperable objection to the idea.
I mean,
I do take it that the idea that it would be an appropriate response to the existence of a body of the sort that I'm envisaging here for states,
then to respond by making more kind of liberal or generous provisions for conscientious objection,
retaining people within the military, within the military, and providing exemptions from certain missions.
And so. DAVIES Yes.
I mean, I think this is terrific and actually really, really employees and they're really committed to the paper.
So if it comes to the he said at the beginning that what we need to start off with is a kind of thoroughgoing reconstruction of who said that.
And clearly that will have to happen.
But I wonder whether that's something needs to happen right at the outset, because one of the things about the reconstruction,
you said this is going to depend on the development of the union of the authority.
Right. Because one of the reasons why it is so crude is because the authority doesn't exist.
Right? If this authoritative body gets stronger, you know, the stronger authority, the more sophisticated the building can be.
So I think at the very least, they have to have kind of a parallel processes.
And I wonder actually whether at the outset it shouldn't just simply use the existing international law.
I'm kind of I'm not sure about that. But the second thing was on consent, so you say it rightly,
I think that one source of consent for this country, one source of legitimacy for this body would be consent.
But then you talk about that consent, intensive consent of states, which I just I don't think you really need.
And it seems to me in a way you're envisaging it. That can be consent.
You really want to go after is is individuals. I mean, you talk about soldiers.
I think that that's one important group here. But the great thing about technology is actually you can cut the state out completely.
You can use the other. You can literally go you know, you can set up a website, our soldiers, to sign up,
make a commitment, say they'll only fields and an operation that's been endorsed by this body.
Right. You can talk to them directly and you can even you can even go to the you can go to the armies.
Right. Say, okay, US Army, you're having problems recruiting people.
Well, how about we together do a recruiting drive whereby your new recruits will have a specific contract
that says they only will be used in operations that are that are legitimised by this authority.
Right. So there's an upside for the Army. And maybe they have different rights to these to the to the regular army.
Now, that may not fly, but it's a conversation that you can have, which is about his sentencing.
Right. So you say, Chris, Casey's got a finger there. You should probably take it.
You say you have the bigger question.
You say, well, even in cases of certainty, the court would be giving a kind of guidance.
And you said in case of uncertainty, soldiers might regard themselves as being permitted to to take that.
And I'm not sure that is the right conclusion to draw.
And I wonder even whether the operational rules of the court shouldn't be something that I think would only make true kinds of determination.
It would either determine that a war was clearly justified or would determine that it was unable to reach that conclusion,
that it was clearly justified. So that would have a number of consequences. I mean, this is limited to one or two of those consequences.
And it wouldn't it would stop the court feeling it was in a position that it always
had to give and decision and very ambiguous circumstances which would kind of,
I think, would problematise and undermine the legitimacy of those decisions,
because it would only make a decision when the situation was really clear. It would also provide an incentive for states to come to the court.
Right. Because there's an upside for them. They can get, you know, the assessment or the list is that they'll get you know, we couldn't tell.
And then what I would want to do is say to the soldiers, you know, as a matter of morality, unless the court says, tick, you shouldn't be going.
Okay, that's excellent. Thank you very much for that.
If you had a chance to drop me an email, too, to help me get all of it, and the one the one comment I have is just that,
that your two possible determinations would make it the case that this court would be operating on the reverse, a presumption from criminal courts.
That is, you'd be operating on the presumption of guilt rather than the presumption of innocence, which may be the right thing.
It Sir Chris and I had to figure on that.
I've got you at the bottom of the list for four speakers, so you'll have a word and you have your say at the moment.
That been nice to submit. Thank you. We've been talking about systemic problems and people have been using the word facts that define problem.
But it isn't. It's as much about probabilities. And Donald Rumsfeld took a lot of stick for the business about.
No, no, no, no, no. But I mean, I think that's actually a very accurate assessment of the decision making in which people work.
And I think given that that's the case, the next question that raises is,
in a retrospective democracy, why should a body with a judicial representation to talk?
How would you describe it? You give it in the last word on this, rather than the democratically chosen and some of the things Cheney with.
With that, we need to go back to the Republican notion of responsible, accountable government,
which in this context specifically means removing the elements of secrecy.
And what we need is exactly we talked about deference to the legislature or it isn't such a cohesive executive,
and we take lines from our values and what we need,
I think, or mechanisms to make sure that the debate is open to the soldier, to the citizen on the basis of knowing full information to facts.
But what are the factors borne in mind by the decision maker where actually, I think to get the kind of responses you want,
it would be much more fruitful to look at domestic institutions and Republican honesty rather than international norms,
rather than simply getting states to agree to do something at a much different.
Okay. I agree with you that the idea of getting states to agree is probably implausible, but I don't agree with you that.
Democratic deliberation within a large body of people is a very good way of arriving at the understanding of any moral issue,
no matter how long you carry out debates about some complicated and difficult moral issue in a democratic country.
You're going to be dealing with large numbers of people with rather little understanding of things, full of kind of prejudices and and so on.
And if you if you're looking to kind of majoritarian decisions,
I find that a really unpromising way of arriving at something approximating moral truth.
Thank you. And we've got three more question is were Andrew and Chris, 5 minutes left.
So, you know, I think maybe the court should make three different possible determinations.
First, it could say there is no war to be fought whatsoever.
Second, it could say this war that you're fighting is completely all right.
But what is important for me is the third possibility that they say, well,
this war that is currently being fought is unjust because Vietnam is not only trying to save the Cambodians,
but also to to get the garbage dump at the Vietnamese border.
And that is an unjust goal. So strictly speaking, that is an unjustified war.
But if soldiers would not participate in that war, the the alternative would be that 1 million Cambodians would die.
So we the courts say that this is an unjust war and we will hold the state leaders accountable for the unjust aims.
However, we will permit the soldiers to participate in the war.
In fact, we even endorse the participation. Yeah, yes.
I can say just quickly,
I think that that coincides with what I was saying in response to an earlier point about the unit of evaluation not being the war as a whole,
but aims or missions or whatever. So what the court could say is the aim of of capturing the sum bit of Cambodian territory is an unjust aim.
But the aim of rescuing Cambodians from Pol Pot or something is it is adjusting and that can legitimately be pursued.
And I think you have what I think to suggest, but.
The paper is a fun authority as you anticipate something just.
Ability of participation, you know? More five.
The participants will continue to do so. So then.
It was one of the standard ways of just covering.
It's to say that. A better.
I'm treating him as a. Rather than on their own.
So my first advice to. To suggest there were two ways in which you can understand your proposal within this.
He could be counter posing an alternative authority to the authority of the state.
Let me say that. Participants have a duty to obey rather than.
People have raised problems. Cold.
This is another way that you can.
Make the argument. Is that what we.
Which is just to say that the court might show is that the participants would have a role acting on their own judgement that involves deferring.
It's appalling. It's the case that I look back at my own government's track record.
And I as nearly always fun and games.
Or at least. My government has a lower than 50% chance of being blocked.
If the court might be better off tossing a colony back.
That's the me that might then have enough just to undermine, you know, authority.
Show that I'd be better off acting on my own judgement, or at least tossing.
So that that might be a way you could respond some just by saying you're trying
to undermine the authority of the state rather than creating alternative.
The second observation I have is that this is.
In the meantime, you can say a little bit more about what your views.
Oh. I'm an instrumentalist. But the problem is so I think this authority is that as a servant to enable us to conform.
The reasons that already apply to us. Much of a minority.
Most philosophers or some other Democrats think that there are reasons to accept.
So I think it would be helpful for you to respond to that kind of position.
This. Only one of you is robust so that you might do that.
I would say that the authority of democracy has to be implemented.
There is. Such a magnificent.
We need something akin to an institution judicial.
Which is a. Something like because as you said.
The matches are not very good and no reason is independent from the other side to stop you then.
Okay. You can make some chances and do so.
I have to stop you there. Thank you. I have to go before you reply to that and have a last word.
Let's just get away from Chris. Right. I'll be brief.
I'll make you two statements that I can argue about afterwards.
The first one is that when David gave his proposal, it sounded a little bit crazy, right?
But it isn't. And we're actually looking at things similar to that,
or at least something along the lines of what David was talking about, at least in the past blogs,
or at least think about the second one being that somewhat counterintuitive way of answering
Janie's problem about going back to the Constitution and the things we already have.
And answer the question is,
Bob and I have proposed at one point that a properly construed professional army in a liberal democracy would be a check on power,
provide a check on power when the executive branch sort of overruns its.
Constitutional. And we did not get put in shackles.
So that is at least enough so I can argue about those.
Great. I would like to I'd like to hear more about your your eat your proposal and more about David's.
I don't think I have anything much to say by way of wrapping up. I,
I would want to pursue both of the aims that you're suggesting that is both undermining
people's confidence in the authority of the pronouncements of their own state,
but also trying to provide them with an alternative, more reliable source of guidance.
So I don't think it's either or. And in fact, as you imply,
I think counter posing an alternative authority in itself does something to undermine
and undermine the authority of the state if there's kind of persistent disagreement.
And I thank you also for just calling my attention to the fact that I probably should say more about the nature of authority.
It will please you to know that although I haven't thought about this very deeply, all of my instincts are instrumentalist about authority.
So I think I'm in agreement with you there. I'm a little distressed to learn that this is a minority position.
It's my. It's my position. Yeah. Okay.
Thank you. And just one quick last word as well.
Just to bolster Armitage's thoughts about democracy, you might be concessionary to the democracy people.
You say, even if it's true, that democracy is important for authority in domestic matters,
when it comes to matters where the rights are engaged across states,
then we should be less confident about the legitimacy of democratic decision making because the interests of the people
who are most affected in the war from the other country aren't going to be engaged in the decision making process,
you know? You know, if I'm an instrumentalist, you can say I'm not being neutral about whether I mean, this is about national democracy and authority.
But internationally, this isn't a runner. Good.
I agree with that, too. Thanks for all this very helpful discussion.
Thanks so much.