Is pragmatism/chauvinism the only good reason to oppose war?

[Cycloneman]

This is sparked by reading some old threads from the 2003-2005 era, so if board culture has changed severely in the past 5+ years and nobody believes this any more, that's fine.

But reading through old threads from the early Iraq war, I saw a lot of really awful opinions on what constitutes a valid justification for invading another country and what is a valid justification for opposing such an invasion.

Basically the thinking was that there are only two "valid" reasons for being anti-war: pragmatism and national chauvinism.

In the first case, the assumption is that military invasion is justified if one does some sort of cost-benefit analysis which discovers that the number of Iraqis we will murder in the course of the war is less than to the number of Iraqis that would otherwise be murdered. The flip side of this idea is that opposition is justified if the number of Iraqis we will murder is greater than the number of Iraqis that would otherwise be murdered. In other words, it would be great if we could just help out those poor Iraqis by barging into their country and killing everyone there who opposes us (and, whoopsie, some people who don't), but alas, math shows that we can't do that and be a positive moral force.

The second case is a little more abstract, but the idea is that as a citizen of a country (e.g. the United States), one has the right to put his particular nation above the "correct" and "pragmatic" justifications for imperialism. That is, it's okay to be anti-war on the principles that US soldiers will be killed, and I don't want them to be killed for some inferior Iraqis. But this national chauvinism goes out the window once the war has started, though I'm not entirely clear why.

Personally, I believe that a show of military force is only justified in the defense of a nation or its allies. Intervention in a country for "pragmatism" or "humanitarian worries" has historically just been an excuse for imperialism (e.g. Spanish-American War and hugely exaggerated accounts of genocide; US occupation of Haiti in 1915), so why should it be any different today? Every war that couldn't be justified (and many of those that could) as a war of self-defense has had a heaping helping of spurious propaganda to support the war. This makes private citizens trying to come up with some ethical calculations to math out the positive or negative elements of military intervention is not really possible (and nobody in charge actually does it).

What is wrong with that view point? It certainly seemed like any sort of universally-applied belief in anti-imperialism or the right of national self-determination was derided at the time.

[Feil]

You can personally believe whatever you like. There's nothing wrong with it as long as it doesn't lead you to harm other people. You seem, however, to be asserting that other people should believe what you believe. That means you're either a preacher or the proponent of a logical argument based on commonly agreed-upon premises. In the former case, the best you can hope for is a shouting match, because if all you have to work with is some nebulous system of ethics, and somebody else has a different nebulous system of ethics, you both have impervious, unassailable positions that cannot, by any feat of logic, interact. One hopes, therefore, that you are the latter. If so, we need premises. I'll pose a few.

1: An action may cause harm and benefit to humans, in the short, mid, and long term.
2: The harm and benefit to humans may be assigned approximate relative values.
3: Aversion of harm is equivalent to benefit; aversion of benefit is equivalent to harm.
4: An action which does net positive benefit is just.
5: A decision to make war is an action.

The first argument in your post is a fairly straightforward (and simplistic) application of the above premises (sufficiently simplistic that I think you may be misrepresenting it). Assign death a 'harm' value so large relative to all others that all other considerations become inconsequential, disregard external influences, and assume that a war's impact on the death rate may be predicted to within an acceptable margin of error, and the conclusion becomes self-evident: a just war is one which causes fewer deaths than it averts, Q.E.D.

A more nuanced version of that argument considers the effects of a war outside of the people directly affected and includes non-lethal effects in the consideration of the moral arithmetic, includes very wide margins of error in its estimations, and advocates careful study before action wherever possible in order to narrow those margins sufficiently for a guess as to the justness of an action to be determined. (One also notes that leaders of nations are prone, for whatever reason, to being disreputable, gutless, dishonest, and wicked, and that therefore any attempt to sell a war should be regarded as suspect. Weapons of Mass Destruction, anyone?)

Your assertion, if one draws it from the above premises, looks to me something like this:

-There is no greater benefit than national sovereignty, nor harm than its loss.
-Ergo one may make just war in the defense of national sovereignty, because if sovereignty is sustained, then any harm done by the war is justified, and if sovereignty is lost, then even the chance that sovereignty might have been sustained, or the preservation of sovereignty for a little while longer, justifies the harm done. AND
-One may not make just war except in the defense of national sovereignty, or beyond what is needed to maintain national sovereignty, because this would infringe upon the sovereignty of others.

If my understanding is accurate, I invite you to support that 'there is no greater benefit than national sovereignty, nor harm than its loss.' If not, please correct me.


PS:
One notes that, in the mainstream theories of just war, the moral arithmetic argument considered to make wars of self-defense unjust, even if undertaken against a vicious and evil oppressor by a good and decent nation, if they are most likely doomed to failure and would therefore cause only the added harm of war to the inevitable harm of conquest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_War if you are interested.

[Cycloneman]

A more nuanced version of that argument considers the effects of a war outside of the people directly affected and includes non-lethal effects in the consideration of the moral arithmetic, includes very wide margins of error in its estimations, and advocates careful study before action wherever possible in order to narrow those margins sufficiently for a guess as to the justness of an action to be determined. (One also notes that leaders of nations are prone, for whatever reason, to being disreputable, gutless, dishonest, and wicked, and that therefore any attempt to sell a war should be regarded as suspect. Weapons of Mass Destruction, anyone?)

I would say that the bolded bit is the problem with attempting to qualify a "just war" as any war where the cost-benefit analysis is positive. It isn't possible to accurately craft an accurate cost-benefit analysis of military intervention, in large part due to government-originated propaganda (even if it is distributed by nominally private interests, e.g. news media) on the subject.

Even if it were, it would thus become a moral imperative to get into the highest cost-benefit war in the world, whatever it would be, not simply a war where the moral arithmetic makes it a "net positive."

Since a person cannot actually determine the long-term moral character of such an act, one must err on the side of caution, which is to not suppress the governments of other countries simply because we dislike them. That is my position.

[Einzige]

I would argue that there is a strong economic reason to oppose war, or at least to deincentivize it for any nation capable of waging one: during war, money which might otherwise be spent towards the public good or towards building durable institutions must instead be spent producing objects which have no other purpose save war - bullets, bombs, fighter jets, guns, tanks, and so forth. The costs of war lie, not merely in its human and material costs, but in the very nature of the materials needed to conduct it.

[Feil]

Since a person cannot actually determine the long-term moral character of such an act, one must err on the side of caution, which is to not suppress the governments of other countries simply because we dislike them. That is my position.

Questions:
-Temporarily suppose a falsehood for the sake of argument: one accurately and precisely determines that the total cost-benefit for a given potential war, and finds it to be net-positive. Would such a war then be just?
-If so, then war is sometimes just and sometimes unjust. How can the side of caution always be 'not war' as opposed to 'war'?
-If the side of caution (to which we should err) is sometimes -even if only in very rare circumstances- 'war', is this not an explicit concession to the moral arithmetic model?

[Cycloneman]

Questions:
-Temporarily suppose a falsehood for the sake of argument: one accurately and precisely determines that the total cost-benefit for a given potential war, and finds it to be net-positive. Would such a war then be just?

It would have to also be the greatest cost-benefit result, i.e. be the most "just" war around.

-If so, then war is sometimes just and sometimes unjust. How can the side of caution always be 'not war' as opposed to 'war'?

There are somewhere around 195 countries in the world. Even if one can safely rule out some wars (like an Anglo-American war) as having a positive effect, there are still many other possible competitors (Iran, DPRK, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc). Using a utilitarian model like you've proposed (aversion of benefit is equivalent to harm) only one of them is can be the best "just war" at any given time. Well, unless you invade multiple countries, then it's a declining list from the top.

The cost-benefit analysis of a war also relies on opportunity cost: what wars am I not starting by starting this one? How many warm bodies and how much hard currency would I be spending here that could go towards a less violent resolution to this problem or others?

[Feil]

So, yes, and yes. Opportunity costs and other externalities are, obviously, included in the estimation of total cost. Will you answer my third question, now, please?