Just and unjust withdrawal
Because they say so.
Michael Walzer and Nicolaus Mills write an interesting, but ultimately vapid piece in The New Republic not on just and unjust wars, but rather on just and unjust withdrawals. The topic of the piece is fascinating; it’s a moral question with real policy implications (re: Iraq and Afghanistan). The content is mostly empty, however, because Walzer and Mills make moral assertions, not moral arguments. Below are their moral claims, including all their justificatory reasoning (or lack thereof).
Their macro concern:
Nations carefully plan for wars. They mobilize support for them. But typically they rush into withdrawals, which they commonly see as signs of failure. Think, for example, of Great Britain’s hasty retreat from India in 1947 and the estimated one million people who died following partition.
Their general moral claim:
We need to acknowledge that when one country occupies another, it acquires obligations–and this is true whether the initial occupation was a good idea or a bad one. In either case, social life has been disrupted. Even the displacement of a brutal and repressive regime brings death and destruction in its wake, uproots many people, damages the economy, shuts down schools and hospitals, subjects the local population to foreign rule, if only for a time. When foreigners depart, they must make sure that their departure doesn’t produce further disastrous disruptions.
They assert two principles to fulfil these obligations:
First, Make a good-faith effort to leave a stable government behind. Occupiers commonly claim that they are acting for the benefit of the country they are occupying. But even if they can’t make good on that claim, they must try to leave the country no worse off than it was before they came. They don’t have to, and often can’t, establish a liberal or social democracy, but they should aim for a government that is legitimate in the eyes of its own people and that is capable of providing basic services–including law and order.
And:
Second, do whatever is possible to safeguard the people most at risk in the country now on its own. Years ago, the philosopher John Rawls argued that distributive justice requires paying close attention to the least well-off people in your society. By analogy, justice in withdrawing requires paying close attention to the safety of the most vulnerable people who remain behind.
The authors don’t prove any of their claims. That an occupying country has obligations seems self-evident to a degree, but in order to understand the content of those obligations, it would be helpful understand where they come from in the first place. Is it the duty not to harm people; to respect basic human rights without which people lose their status as free, autonomous beings; to maximize future welfare; some mix of theories? As is, the authors’ two principles come across as intuitively attractive, but in the end nothing more than bare assertion, certainly not good philosophy.
They seem to want some mix of stability and some bare respect for human rights, such that the people “most at risk” aren’t treated heinously. On what grounds to they draw those lines where they do?
Why is there no obligation to leave behind stable liberal democratic institutions when it’s possible to do so? Who are “the people most at risk”?
One crucial point they ignore is the opinion of the people in the invaded country. Don’t they have something to say in the matter? What if they want the occupying nation to leave immediately; what if they want it to stick around the help set up a liberal democracy? What if a stable government can only be made after 10 years of expensive commitment-what counts as a “good faith” effort?
I’m not being fair to the authors. They had only a limited number of words and they are apparently co-editing a book, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq, which I imagine will provide more detail. This article standing on its own, however, is a good example of why many people think moral philosophy (and public moral philosophy) constitutes a wishy-washy game, a place where people come to sheath their biases in the rhetoric of truth and necessity. At least I imagine that’s how one who disagrees with the authors’ intuitions might feel.
-Jake
Related posts:
- Just and unjust withdrawl continued . . .
- For Sale: Acropolis
- Assassination!
- Violence and just borders in the Middle East
- Life-without-parole for juveniles
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BEfoXr I want to say – thank you for this!