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Honzo April 7th, 2005
Is a war, fought for the wrong reasons ever justified? Say, for
arguments sake that a country goes to war for reasons J, P, and Q. Lets
also say that under a valid just war theory, wars can be valid for
reasons A, B, C, J, P, Q, R. Now, the reasons given to the public for
going to war by the government were J, P, and Q. These reasons turn out
to be unsubstantiated.
However, there were reasons A, C, and R that were true for that war that were not given.
Is the war justified?
Lets use an analogy to a math problem. Say a student works out a
math problem on his calc test. His work is detailed, lengthy, but
flawed. He comes to the correct answer anyway.
Is not the answer to the problem still correct even if the work is
not? You cannot use the bad work to justify calling the answer wrong.
You can still doc points from the student for the work though.
Back to the war question. We can draw from the example that if a war
is fought for public reasons that are invalid, but also has nonpublic
reasons that validates the war under the just war theory; then the war
is justified.
However, this does not excuse the people giving the wrong reasons for going to war. Only the war is justified.
- Personal
- Comments(11)
I think the notion is interesting, but doesn’t this neglect elements of
the just war theory? Specifically, circumstances must be present(i.e. it’s a last resort) and without them any other support is nullified.
And on reread, I notice it’s “a valid just war theory”. Perhaps there is more than one.
I am simply assuming that there is a just war argument and that A, B,
C, J, P, Q, R each can satisfy the requirements of the just-war
argument.
I am just trying to show that a something can be justified even if the public reasonings are false.
Actually, in your example of the calc test, the kid should get the
problem wrong, because he doesn’t know how to solve it. He simply
arrived at the answer by accident. I remember similar questions like
this when I studied Epistemology (the study of knowledge). When
somebody accidentally arrives at a correct statement through wrong
reasoning, we can’t say that he actually knows that fact to be true.
Here’s an example from some philosopher (I forget who): A man is
driving past a field full of what appear to be barns. In truth, they
are almost all fake movie backdrops. Not barns at all. He wrongly
believes they are real barns. He points to one and says, “That’s a
barn.” Purely by chance, he happens to be pointing at the one real barn
in the field. Technically, his statement is correct, but we can’t say
he truly KNOWS it is a barn, because he is operating on faulty
information.
I don’t necessarily think this actually has anything to do with war, but I thought you would be interested as a philosophy buff.
but the fact itself it true. The person is wrong in the reasoning, but the answer is still true.
That is what I am driving at. The person can be wrong (or just wrong
with the public reasoning given) while the actual action is correct.
You have a very good point, esp if that was the only reasoning that the person thought was the case.
I guess then the example is flawed.
A better one to illustrate my point would be that the person thought
there were two ways to arrive at theanswer and only wrote down one,
which happened to be incorrect. The other one that he had in his mind
was correct.
good point I did not add that clarification.
Say a person thinks there are two justifications for the war. He believes both to be true.
Let’s explore your hypothetical situation a bit more. What if reasons
A, B, and R had been given originally instead of the reasons that
turned out to be bogus? What if Bush has said in 2003 that we have to
invade Iraq because he’s a tyrant and the people will be better off
without him? Would you have supported the war in that case? Would the
public have supported it as much as they did when they thought Iraq was
an imminent threat to the US? I don’t think they would. There are a lot
of countries with bad leaders, a lot of populations that would benefit
from a regime change. That doesn’t give us the right to invade the
country. There may be countries that think America could use a regime
change, but they have no right to roll tanks into Washington and set up
a new government. So, would we and should we have gone to war if
reasons A, B and R were the only ones given? Or did the impetus for war
come from the FUD created by 911, WMD and the idea of imminent threat?
I have continued this discussion in another post.
Technically, the Gulf war of 1991 has never ended. Yes, Saddam’s troops
were forced out of Kuwait and many of them died on the Highway of
Death, but it was a tenuous cease fire ordered byU.N. mandate and a no-fly zone enforeced by the U.S.
and Great Britain. As Iraq continued to violate the no-fly zone
(created to protect both the Kurds in the north and Basra in the south)
theU.S. had every legal right to wage war again in 2003 to force
compliance. Perhaps that is where Bush went wrong. He waged war on
faulty (but history shall decide that) intelligence instead of more
concrete and unarguable citations of breaking the cease fire. All this
said, I am not convinced that there were not weapons of mass
destruction. Talking to a Egyptian friend has convinced me that there
is more than meets the eye. It wasn’t until the end of WWII that we
learned of Hitler’s advanced atom bomb efforts. I believe that many of
Saddam’s weapons have been spirited away to Syria and perhaps in the
next 10 to 15 years this fact will be proven beyond a doubt.
On the other side of the world, the Korean War has never actually
ended. We have been under a state of cease fire with North Korea and
China for 50 years. What does that portend for our foreign policy today?
By the way, does anyone have a link to a good pro-democratic Iranian blog–one from inside Iran?
Blogs by Iranians Directory of weblogs that Iranians write in English language, either from inside or outside Iran.
Iran: Weblogs English/Perisan Directory.
IranBlogger.net Blog Aggregator for Iranian Blogs in English.
Got that from wikipedia