PaulR | Honor Ethics
Piketty on honour
French economist Thomas Piketty has turned down the Legion d’honneur on the grounds that ‘I don’t believe it’s the role of the government to decide who is honourable.’
I’m not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was an interesting remark. Any thoughts?
We do not accord a policeman and a criminal equal status: the criminal is committing an injustice, and so forfeits his right not to be handled forcibly by the policeman; the policeman on the other hand has done nothing to forfeit his right not to be attacked. Their rights are not equal.
In contrast, one of the bedrocks of the laws of war is the principle of the moral equality of combatants. Assuming that one can objectively decide that a given war has a ‘just’ and an ‘unjust’ side, those fighting on the ‘just’ side are still bound by the same rules as those on the ‘unjust’ side. Unjust soldiers are entitled to shoot at the just ones, and they have the same protection under the laws of war. Just and unjust warriors are morally equal, and should treat each other as such.
Not everybody thinks that this is how…
This is written from a Canadian perspective. I cannot say to what extent the logic applies to other countries, but would be interested in opinions. Paul
We’re fit and well and feeling as right as rain.
Never mind the weather, now we’re all together.
Hullo! Hullo! Here we are again.
(Song by Frederick Wheeler, 1915)
Here we are again. The Canadian Parliament has voted in favour of sending the air force to Iraq to wage war against the Islamic State. This will be the fifth war fought by Canada since the end of the Cold War: the Gulf War (1991); Kosovo (1999); Afghanistan (2001-2014); Libya (2011); and now Iraq (2014). Since a few Canadian servicemen and women were also involved in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia (1995) and the invasion of Iraq (2003), one could even make that seven wars. This is an extraordinary total for a country which enjoys almost complete safety from external attack.
Not even the Canadian government pretends that it’s going to…
Why Leaders Really Care about ‘Credibility’
Posted by PaulR in political science of honor	
Read the rhetoric used by political and military leaders for wars in the past few decades, and you will be struck by the repeated references to ‘credibility’. The justification of war is very often that it is necessary to uphold our reputation for strength, without which we would become targets for attack. The Vietnam domino theory was a good example of this mode of thought, and similar thinking continues to drive foreign policy today. Yet academic studies into the origins of war suggest that upholding your ‘credibility’ does not actually make you less likely to be attacked. Would-be aggressors pay very little attention to whether you have proved willing to fight in the past. Authors such as Daryl Grayson Press in his book Calculating Credibility and Christopher Fettweis in a number of related articles, have illustrated this very well. What this means is that waging wars for reputation makes no sense. Why then do states persist in doing so? Continue reading →