In Defense Of Justice. - Review - book review

Morality and Contemporary Warfare
James Turner Johnson
Yale University, $25, 256 pp.

James Turner Johnson of Rutgers University is a standard reference for scholars who address the moral and legal problems of modern war. A student of the late Paul Ramsey, Johnson has both extended Ramsey's legacy and revised it in his efforts to shape an adequate ethic for the late twentieth century. In Morality and Contemporary Warfare, Johnson offers a synthetic summary of the just-war ethic and engages new issues of politics and strategy. This book, like several before it, will enrich the normative analysis of politics and war. I recommend it highly, even though I differ with Johnson on some issues of theory and judgment.

Johnson's objective is best summarized by the title of his concluding chapter, "Reshaping and Affirming a Consensus on the Purposes and Limits of War." A principal theme of the book is that building a consensus is necessary because contemporary warfare presents problems quite different from the kinds of conflict that moralists have addressed for much of the past fifty years. While he is surely correct to stress the shift from interstate to intrastate warfare which occurred in the 1990s, I find quite overdrawn his judgment that "Moral analysis has been slow to react to this changed empirical face of war and when it has reacted, it has done so on the basis of dominant assumptions of the moral debates of the 1980s."

Unless one uses a very restricted definition of who can contribute to moral analysis of war, a quick literature search of the 1990s produces a range of authors engaging the moral, political, and strategic significance of the very conflicts Johnson wants to analyze. At the center of these "new wars" lie the issues of internal conflict and international intervention. These issues have been addressed by Bernard Williams, Michael Walzer, Pierre Hassner, Stanley Hoffmann, Ernest Haas, Bruce Russett, Adam Roberts, Joseph Nye, John Langan, Drew Christiansen, Kenneth Himes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and George Weigel, among others. Their conclusions are not identical, but these authors have neither ignored the newness that evolved in the 1990s nor addressed it from outdated political or moral assumptions.

While dissenting from Johnson's description of the status questionis, I find his own contribution to the ongoing wider discussion carefully drawn and constructive. His first two chapters summarize and analyze the legacy of just-war thought and bring it into dialogue with both the realist and liberal traditions of international relations, illustrating how the just-war ethic relates to and differs from each tradition. His statement of the normative tradition is characteristically well documented and lucid, and provides the reader with a solid sense of the continuing vitality of the just-war ethic.

In light of this normative framework, Johnson proceeds to analyze two issues: the problem of intervention, and policies which target civilians. Johnson develops his own position on intervention in dialogue with four other sources: Ramsey, Walzer, the U.S. Catholic bishops' statement of 1993 (The Harvest of Justice), and the resources of international law. In the end he comes to a carefully drawn position for humanitarian intervention, one which goes beyond inherited norms of international law but recognizes that advances in this area must be incremental. Johnson does not ignore the cautions of realism in advocating an interventionist policy, but he nicely captures the fundamental moral issue of the 1990s after discussing Rwanda and Bosnia: "Intervening to help the victims of such conduct in war, then, is not simply a humanitarian action oriented to the good of those victims; it also serves the cause of international peace and stability. In such cases, not acting is the worse evil."

Johnson's analysis of Bosnia and Rwanda in the chapter on "War against Noncombatants" stands in direct relationship to Ramsey, who did more than any other scholar to establish "the principle of discrimination" or noncombatant immunity at the very heart of modern just-war doctrine. Johnson invokes his four sources to refute the assertion that the character of modern war has rendered the principle of discrimination obsolete. A lapidary sentence summarizes his case: "In moral terms, the argument that allows warfare to be intentionally directed against noncombatants in such conflicts as those in Bosnia and in Rwanda-Zaire is simply wrong: what combatants do may make them liable to have armed force used against them, not what they believe or who they are ethnically or religiously; likewise, what noncombatants do not do- participate in the making of war-means that they should not have war made against them, whatever their beliefs, ethnicity, religion, or sympathies." That states a basic truth with the clarity and power it deserves.

Johnson's final two chapters arise directly from the conflicts of the 1990s and highlight key aspects of his scholarship. The chapter "Conflicts Inflamed by Cultural Differences" draws heavily on his recent work on the relationship of Islamic and Christian moral doctrines on war. His chapter on "War Crimes and Reconciliation after Conflict" is the best of the book. His mastery of both moral and legal literature equips him to provide a solid historical background for efforts to establish war-crimes tribunals today.

While strongly endorsing many of Johnson's policy conclusions, I differ with him on a theoretical point. Here and in other writings he has opposed the position both of Protestant ethicists (Jim Childress and Ralph Potter) and of Catholic bishops in their formulation of the just- war ethic. All have used an approach that begins with a presumption against the use of force, which, then can yield-in specific, rule- defined cases-to an exception endorsing force. Johnson has often stated his view that such a construct is detrimental to the use of the just- war tradition and cannot be found in the classical authors. I think all would concede the last point and contest the first. Childress explicitly noted in his formulation of the requirements of the just-war ethic that he was using categories of modern moral philosophy to interpret an ancient tradition. To say Augustine and Aquinas did not use the categories does not demonstrate that using these corrupts their theories of legitimating war in defense of justice. Moreover, the substantive reason for placing a presumptive restraint on war as an instrument of politics is, in my view, entirely necessary. Both the instruments of modern war and the devastation of civilian society which has accompanied most contemporary conflicts provide good reasons to pause (analytically) before legitimating force as an instrument of justice.

Johnson finds systematic hesitation about endorsing "just wars" in modern papal teaching. He is surely correct about this. He is much less convincing when he identifies the roots of this position as a form of papal pacifism. The idea that either Vatican I or Pius XII was influenced by pacifism is, in my experience, an idiosyncratic reading of the Catholic tradition on war and peace. But these are controversies among scribes. This is a very good book on an important topic; it advances the normative debate.

J. Bryan Hehir is professor of the Practice in Religion and Society at Harvard's Divinity School and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

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