CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

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 find also moral knowledge. … … …Hypocrisy is rife in
wartime discourse, because it is especially important at such a time to appear to
be in the right. It is not only that the moral stakes are high; the hypocrite may
not understand that; more crucially, his actions will be judged by other people,
who are not hypocrites, and those judgements will affect their policies toward
him.
In this we see not only that realists are wrong in their description of how things are but
also if we interpret them as telling us how things ought to be. There is good reason to
give moral consideration to one’s actions, because others will judge us upon them and
this will affect their policies towards us. This issue will be explored in greater depth in
the next chapter but for now let us just consider that even a full-blooded realist might
like to consider the possibility that his state, or its sponsor, might not always be in the
position of the Athenians – that of the dominant power. Allowing, even assisting, the
development of broadly accepted conventions based on ethical, or at least apparently
ethical, concepts whilst imposing some self-restraint now, might be a valuable insurance
policy for the future.
To this we might add David Welch’s argument (see p5) that the realist insistence on
‘national interest’ for foreign policy guidance lacks depth. Must the guidance be
‘national interest’ to the exclusion of all else? Or might it not be national interest within
the bounds of certain general moral principles; would anyone really want to live in
world where unrestrained national interest was the only guiding principle for nations’
behaviour? Would this not indeed be Hobbes’s state of nature? In any case when any
of a number of actions are in the ‘national interest’, what calculus is to be used to
determine the best course? At very least the arch-realist might concede, with
Montesquieu, that ‘The right of nations is founded on the principle that the various
nations should do to one another in times of peace the most good possible, and in times
of war the least ill possible, without harming their true interests.’ 108 We might also add
that for a government to act in the national interest is in itself a form of ethical motive;
it is simply saying that the moral duty of a government is to act in the way that best
serves the interest of its citizens. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that this is best (for
38