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In 1977, much recent work on justice in war was by Christian theologians (see especially Ramsey 1968). In part, this reflected the Christian roots of the subject: as far back as Augustine (354–430CE), Christian thinkers had grappled with the dilemmas of political sovereignty by arguing that the use of force is justified in defense of a Christian community. Christian thinkers in medieval Europe, such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), invented the division of just wars into two parts, one focusing on the outbreak of war (jus ad bellum) and the other on the conduct of war (jus in bello). Early-modern thinkers such as Hugo Grotius applied military ethics to the European wars of religion and voyages of conquest (for overview, see Orend 2013: 14–18). Christian just-war theory rests on the idea of natural moral law that applies at all times and in all places (Anscombe 2006: 623). Christian thinkers have typically held that there are seven criteria that must all be met for resort to war to be justified: just cause, right intention, just means, reasonable hope of success, last resort, proportionality, and declaration by a competent authority (for example, Anscombe 2006: 624–9). Violating any of these is absolutely prohibited, which led Anscombe to argue in 1939 that British consideration of bombing Germany cities made World War II – for Walzer, the paradigm of a just war (Walzer 1971b) – unjust. Christian just-war theory is a type of deontological ethics, because it stipulates a set of principles that are binding in all cases.

Secular thought on war in the 1960s was dominated by realist theories of international relations. Realism holds that moral judgments about war are meaningless. We might not like certain military campaigns, but that is a question of taste equivalent to dislike of foods or colors. As the saying goes, all’s fair in love and war. The realist argument asserts that states are motivated only by considerations of national interest, that they lack the freedom to make moral choices, and that there is no fixed international morality with reference to which they might make choices (see Orend 2000: 62–3). Added to the influence of realism was the dominance of utilitarian moral thinking. Utilitarianism judges morality by considering consequences, and is skeptical of the sort of absolute prohibition invoked by Christian just-war theory. Before he can advance a theory of just war, Walzer has to refute realism by establishing that judgments of justice in war are meaningful. By basing his theory on defense of human rights to life and liberty, Walzer provides a secular anchor for a non-Christian audience, while he attempts to balance reliance on the deontological notion of rights with some elements of utilitarianism, taking just-war principles to be binding in almost all cases (see his doctrine of “supreme emergency,” Walzer 2015a: 251–68, discussed in Chapter 2).

Realists hold that war is a realm of necessity in which states and soldiers are engaged in a struggle for survival such that they have no meaningful choices concerning their courses of action. Because of the moral principle that “ought implies can,” in the absence of choice, it follows that no actions can be wrong. If combatants do what they must, it is impossible to criticize them morally. In analyzing this argument, Walzer focuses on the version that the Greek historian Thucydides advances in his History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides 1954). The crucial part of the text is the “Melian Dialogue” (400–8), in which Thucydides tells the story of the attempts of colonial Athens to persuade the small island nation of Melos to submit to Athenian rule. Melos was an ally of Sparta, so the Melians refused to submit in the hope that Sparta would come to their aid. As a result, Athens invaded and conquered Melos. Commenting that this is a “classic account of aggression” akin to, say, Nazi Germany invading Poland, Walzer notes that the dialogue in which the Athenians seek to persuade Melos to submit is the “climax of [Thucydides’] realism” because he puts into the mouths of the Athenian generals party to the debate speech that is unusually frank about the impossibility of justice during war (Walzer 2015a: 5). The Athenians make no moral claim to deserve their empire, nor any pretense of Melos having harmed them. Rather, they insist that such matters are irrelevant because “the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel … the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept” (Thucydides 1954: 402). As Walzer notes, this claim is not just a descriptive one: Athens has to conquer those territories that it can, because failure to extend its empire would reveal weakness and encourage rebellion. Mighty Athens, like tiny Melos, must face up to the “burdens of necessity” in war (Walzer 2015a: 4–6).

The interesting thing about the Melian Dialogue is that, although in much of the rest of his History, Thucydides “set himself a standard of accuracy … [that] was quite extraordinary in the fifth century,” (Thucydides 1954: 19), the Dialogue is his invention. What Thucydides has the generals say is not what he thought they said in Melos but what he thinks is the necessary true meaning of combatants in their position (Walzer 2015a: 6–8). Criticizing this notion of necessity, Walzer notes that Thucydides does not report on the debate in the Athenian assembly about which policy to adopt with regard to Melos. This is significant, because it allows Thucydides to blur the fact that, in ancient Greek as in modern English, “necessary” may mean either “inevitable” or “indispensable” (8–10). This is a crucial distinction, because the realist position relies upon defining military actions as “inevitable,” yet the Athenians could hardly have argued in their assembly that invading Melos was inevitable. If it were, no discussion could take place. In the Athenian assembly, Walzer insists, the question must have been, “What should we do?” (9) While the invasion of Melos might indeed be considered indispensable, defining necessity in terms of indispensability enables the question, “Indispensable for what purpose(s)?” In other words, while Athenians may have felt that it was indispensable that they maintain their empire, they cannot have taken it to be inevitable that they do so. Once we are involved in discussion of purposes, we are squarely within the world of moral argument, a core aspect of which is debate over goals and ends. Once we reject the view that military action is inevitable, it becomes clear that it is in fact an intentional human activity about which it is possible to make choices. If choices are possible, then the realist argument fails, and space for consideration of justice opens up. If action in war is not inevitable but is in some respects chosen, then realists cannot claim that states necessarily act only with regard to considerations of power or national security.

Walzer concludes that moral discourse about war is rather more similar to military strategy than we usually think. Each can be abused for nefarious purposes, but they share a common referent that is broadly understood by combatants (13–16). In both cases, the rules are often honored in the breach: just as just-war theorists know that ethical principles are often violated, so too must strategists be aware of the ubiquity of “confusion and disorder in the field” (14). However, given that, on Walzer’s argument, participants have at least some scope for making free choices, they must be perceived as people responsible for their actions, not as either victims or instruments. Moreover, Walzer argues, when we study the history of war, we see that we do in fact hold participants responsible for their actions. We have built up over time a “moral reality of war” (15); that is, a “set of articulated norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements” (44). Walzer grounds his just-war theory in this set of informal conventions created over time by human participants in military conflict, and calls it the “war convention” (127–221).

In appealing to the war convention, Walzer insists that both realism and relativism – the idea that norms are specific to particular times and places – underestimate the degree to which moral discourse about war is shared by different cultures separated by vast swathes of time and space (16–20). This is not to say that combatants and their civilian leaders always or even often abide by the convention, but that they know of and understand it. Moral terms about war – slaughter, brutality, cruelty, aggression, benevolent quarantine – are in fact broadly recognized by combatants, the evidence for which is the hypocrisy of those who act immorally (19–20). There would be no need to dissemble if war criminals did not know that their actions would be taken as criminal if honestly revealed. Walzer argues that, “The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy, we also find moral knowledge” (19). Walzer concludes that the realist claim that morality has no fixed reference in war is wrong: moral judgments are “socially patterned” rather than idiosyncratic (45), which makes it possible for just-war theorists to appeal to the convention and insist that breaches of it are unjustified. Given that living in our societies brings us awareness of the tenets of the convention, its principles have a stable meaning. There might indeed be people in “other worlds” to “whose inhabitants” Walzer’s arguments would be incomprehensible (20), but Walzer insists that nobody in our world can coherently claim ignorance of the general tenor of the war convention. There is a moral reality of war because moral precepts about war are an aspect of everyone’s experiences that are relatively stable across different societies.

Walzer considers the version of realism that attempts to describe the behavior of states in the anarchic international system, but it is important to note that his critique simply does not address all versions of realism. There is also a “prescriptive realism” that stipulates that states ought to act out of concern for national survival, because any attempt to wage just wars will increase military destructiveness by encouraging secularized crusades (for discussion, Orend 2000: 66–8, 2013: 257–68). On the prescriptive realist view, an amoral policy motivated by national security is the best that we can hope for in a world marked by moral disagreement and because just-war theorists “fill people’s head with talk of aggression” (Orend 2013: 258; for a similar argument, Calhoun 2001). Indeed, realism is not by any means always a militaristic doctrine. Hans Morgenthau, one of the major realists of the 1960s, joined Walzer in opposition to Vietnam, largely because of concern that the USA would overstretch itself (for discussion, Rafshoon 2001, Zambernardi 2011). He and Walzer even co-authored an article in Dissent on American responsibility for the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978).

Walzer does not address this position, so his case for just-war theory does not do as much as it might to assuage concern that notions of just war increase the humanitarian costs of war. On the prescriptive-realist view, just-war theory makes war more bellicose than it would otherwise be, rather than showing that it is possible for wars to maintain a modicum of moral decency such that they are not, as realists suggests, simply hellish (for Walzer’s discussion of the view that “war is hell,” see Walzer 2015a: 32–3; for critique of prescriptive realism, Orend 2013: 259–68). However, this omission is less significant than it might appear. Walzer’s intention in criticizing realism is not to refute all objections to just-war theory but to make a case for its meaningfulness and coherence. In this regard, prescriptive realism’s critique is rather different than the descriptive version, for it does not claim that talk of justice in war is a meaningless chimera but, rather, that it is wrongheaded. In other words, prescriptive realism’s challenge operates within the world of morality to which Walzer appeals, for it accepts the role of choice in human action, but rejects the particular set of moral prescriptions for which just-war theorists argue. So, Walzer’s writings on just war taken as a whole should be seen as an extended critique of the view that amoral behavior minimizes the havoc of war.

The most significant feature of Walzer’s critique of realism is what it tells us about the bases and method of his just-war theory. It is because moral judgments are shared across cultures and epochs that moral arguments about war are mutually comprehensible and just-war theorizing possible. So, although Walzer starts Wars by stating that he will not appeal to moral foundations, or “expound morality from the ground up,” but simply assume universal rights to life and liberty (Walzer 2015a: xxvi), the critique of realism reveals that the theory has a foundation. It is an interpretation of the discourse about war developed over centuries of military history. What Walzer means when he says that he will not consider the foundations of morality is that he will not seek to establish his premises in logical or abstract argumentation. Rather, he assumes that the tools needed for military ethics are immanent in the world and that, starting with a set of conventional understandings, it is possible to develop a coherent theory that is, often, critical of practice. This occurs by systematizing principles and juxtaposing them both to each other and to military events. That is, the moral reality of war does not consist of shared conclusions but of shared language and problems (xxviii). Walzer’s just-war theory uses conventional understandings as its starting point but seeks to reform them by exposing their incompatibility with other deeply held commitments. The method is at once interpretive and critical.

As just-war theory suggests that some actions in war are permissible, making the case for it requires Walzer also to address pacifist non-violence. Yet while Walzer starts Wars by addressing realism and builds his answer to it into the structure of his theory by virtue of the notion of the moral reality of war, he delays responding to pacifism until the six-page afterword (329–34). Walzer assimilates pacifism into Gandhian satyagraha or the direct action of the American civil-rights movement (Gandhi 1997, King 2011). The crux of Walzer’s critique is that, while non-violence is an attractive ideal, it is unrealistic, as it is “no defense at all against tyrants and conquerors” such as the Nazis, who are willing to do whatever is necessary to crush opponents (Walzer 2015a: 332). Against such opponents, nonviolence is “a disguised form of surrender” (333). To Walzer, the Nazis were “evil objectified in the world, and in a form so potent and apparent that there could never have been anything to do but fight against it” (Walzer 1971b: 4). So, the dream of a nonviolent world in which disputes are settled politically relies on ensuring the success of just-war attempts to forbid aggressive war (Walzer 2015a: 334).

Orend notes that Walzer does not attempt to address recent philosophical pacifism (Orend 2000: 70–2). While much of this work postdates Wars, Walzer does not devote sustained attention to it in any of his subsequent just-war theorizing.⁴ The challenge is that, like Walzer, pacifists point to conventional ideals, but suggest that, when properly understood, they point toward outright rejection of war. Orend suggests, rightly I think, that Walzer’s best response to pacifism comes in his account of jus in bello, in particular in the argument that civilians are entitled not to absolute immunity from harm but rather to “due care” such that combatants accept risks in order to minimize the threat they pose to civilians (Orend 2000: 74–5, Walzer 2015a: 152–9). What this points to is that Walzer’s real critique of pacifism is parallel to his critique of prescriptive realism: he argues that both are at odds with our deepest commitments expressed in a refined version of the war convention. While we might appear to be committed to a blanket ban on harming non-combatants, and while that would indeed suggest that pacifists are right that no contemporary war can conceivably be justified, we are also committed to combating aggression. Yet that requires that some civilians be harmed, however much a state tries to avoid such harm, so pacifism is at odds with the best interpretation of the war convention. As a result, Walzer’s critique of pacifism is the overall argument of Wars: he holds that just-war theory better encapsulates the ideals constructed by our moral reality than does pacifism.