Ep. 373: Michael Walzer on Just Wars (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Enrollment is now open for my fall political philosophy online course. Spots are limited, so go to partiallyexaminedlife.com class now to read about it and follow the link to enroll. You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 373 is when, if ever, is war justified? We read chapters four through six of Michael Walzer's book Just and Unjust wars, Originally published in 1977. This is Mark Linsenmayer, whose international intervention is always welcome in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, always the aggressor in Nantasket, Massachusetts.

0:50 Wes: This is Wes Alwan Justly Afraid in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:54 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey intervening to support self determination in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: All right, are you close together in Massachusetts? I don't understand the geography.

1:05 Seth: So sky is going to go to an overnight camp. It's near Springfield, which is in the center of the state. So we flew into Boston, but we don't drop her off for a couple days. And so we decided to spend a couple days here on the coast around Boston. This is a little beach town, about 30 minutes, I guess south. And then from here tomorrow we're going to drive to central Massachusetts.

1:31 Mark: And as listeners can tell, your good mic did not go on vacation with you.

1:35 Seth: Yes, my good mic, because after we drop her off, we are flying to Portugal.

1:41 Mark: Well, we've been wanting to do something contemporary for a while. There are wars going on. Did you know? Just war theory is the historical thing. And there's lots of good historical stuff. Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, many, many Hugo Grotius, many people in history. But apparently this fairly recent book, it was again written not too long, sort of in light of the Vietnam War, but then updated. We read the fourth edition, 2006. I'm not sure if he updated the content. Do you guys know there's a new intro?

2:12 Dylan: He said that in his intro that it had not needed to get updated much less than he had hoped.

2:20 Mark: Yes. I've also listened to some interviews with him. I know there was a 2002 article where he talked specifically about Israel so we could see what he thought in general of that conflict that we looked at. It's the four wars of Israel and Palestine from 2002. Did you guys get to that?

2:38 Wes: I didn't read all of it. Read the first few pages, which are kind of illustrative of his overall argument.

2:46 Mark: Yeah, yeah. So it's just another example, of course, One that we would be very keen to talk about. I think as far as a. We need to do an episode, to do a contemporary moral problem. The fact that we only read half the book on the excuses, the morality of going to war, what constitutes just war, the other half of the literature on this. So that's called jus ad bellum, justice for going to war. jus in bello is just conduct during war. So are you targeting civilians and things like that? And of course, if you want to talk about right now, you know, the Israel, Palestine conflict, you'd want to address both.

But we're going to just restrict ourselves sort of artificially to the first and most pressing one. Right. Should we go to war at all? Should we intervene when we see a country is abusing its citizens? Or should we intervene to help when there is some kind of civil war going on that we either think should just be calmed down, or we favor one side or the other? Should we ever intervene at all? And what, you know, the short answer is war is pretty much only justified when somebody is being an aggressor, and being an aggressor is an international crime, is bad.

And we want to either defend ourselves against that or we want to intervene to help someone defend themselves against that. And then there's some exceptions and complications that he gets in of. How do you figure out when there's a civil war or something going on, in general, you don't want to get involved. But what if some other foreign country has already gotten involved, is already tipping the scales? Can you get involved to counter that influence, et cetera?

4:24 Wes: Yeah. So aggression war under what he calls the legal paradigm. Yeah, I think it's the legal paradigm or the domestic analogy.

4:32 Seth: Legalistic.

4:33 Dylan: Legalistic paradigm.

4:35 Wes: So under the legalist paradigm of the domestic analogy, you can only go to war against an aggressor, which is to say someone who's attacked your country or has crossed your boundary line, crossed an international border. But that's a paradigm that he's going to progressively. He starts off the reading by giving us that paradigm as a baseline, and then he will progressively revise it over the book to say that paradigm is not enough. There are circumstances, for instance, in which, as Mark pointed out, you can intervene on behalf of one party in a civil war.

You could intervene for humanitarian reasons, and you could even do preventive war in very strict circumstances where there's a real threat and it doesn't have to even be an imminent threat in the sense that someone's got the trigger, got the trigger cocked. And is about to. The gun cocked. What's cocked? Something's cocked and is about to pull the trigger. There just has to be a justifiable fear on your part. So a real threat which will say he has very specific criteria for what that means. And this, the reading we did for today is full of nice examples where he can get into some very complicated cases and say, okay, what are we going to say are the criteria here?

And it's important because they can be abused. Obviously, the risk of all of this, the risk of going beyond the legalist paradigm, is that aggressors can always abuse them and make excuses, as Hitler did, for instance, in the Sudetenland with Czechoslovakia saying he's just protecting the German, the ethnic German population there. That's a very popular excuse for aggressors.

6:23 Dylan: Well, in fact, I mean, I read it as. It's the. Those reasons are in fact, the confirmation of the paradigm, because the paradigm ends up revealing the truth of the moral distinctions that he's making. Because everybody understands that those distinctions are the ones that you need. You need to be justifying that your actions on the basis that you were engaged in a just conflict and those reasons for doing so, you might be not being in good faith making those reasons or in fact outright lying about those reasons, but those reasons are the ones that are the frame for the moral justification of those actions.

7:06 Wes: Yeah, I just want to say, he will say that Mill would like to see those, these amendments as kind of following from the legalist paradigm. This is page 90 to 91. But he would prefer to think of them as exceptions to the general rule, just because they can be used as excuses. So he wants to think we should always think of them as exceptions and we should always think there's this onerous burden of proof.

7:29 Dylan: Yeah, but we should say what the domestic paradigm is.

7:32 Seth: Yeah, I was just about to say that.

7:34 Wes: Yeah, this is just our little intro.

7:38 Dylan: Fair enough.

7:39 Mark: But I think that's a good introductory point, is that you could think of states as like, individual people. And so insofar as there is, you know, we know that international law is a rather defanged thing, that there's not a enforcement mechanism. The UN is supposed to be an enforcement mechanism, but it doesn't really work very well. So, you know, we know there's going to be limits to this. But let's, you know, imagine that we were in a regular society, that the whole world is a society and each state is a person. What kind of, what would be considered to be just action, again, given that it's different given that there is no police that you could call.

8:15 Dylan: Exactly.

8:16 Mark: You have to be our own policeman. Like you have to get your neighbors to be your policeman, you know, so how you react to it is a little different. But what is actually just to do is, at least on this analogy, very

8:26 Wes: much comparable under, in the legalist paradigm. So in it, right, we treat states as if they were individuals and with rights which once we start getting into the amendments, into the revisions, then we're making those revisions because we're starting to think of the states as collections of individuals creates this weird, really weird problem.

8:47 Seth: Well, the analogy goes, yeah, and the analogy is a little more to just carry out the detail a little bit more. So if he says we think of individuals as having human rights, whatever those are, he's like, I don't know where they come from. I'm not going to get into what a human right is, because that's how we think about it. And so on the domestic analogy, we think of states as having a kind of rights to, not human rights, but a kind of rights. What are those rights, if any? And it's territorial integrity and protection of sovereignty. In other words, the respect for the geographical boundaries of the state and respect for the state's almost absolute jurisdiction over what happens within those boundaries, given the limiting cases that we come up with later.

And so he says that the problem that the legalistic framework comes up to try to solve is exactly what you mentioned before, which is if we were within a state and an individual's rights were violated, we would have a police force or some sort of governing body and a judicial system and all that to take care of it. But there's nothing supra the collection of states. So the question is, if one state violates another state's rights, what would be the basis for international law? If we just say there's no international police force, so nothing can be done, that would be, I guess, dissatisfying.

10:08 Wes: And we know it changes things, right? Because if you are attacked by someone and there's a civil authority, right, you're attacked and then they run off. Let's say you survive the attack, but you're hurt in the state of nature, you might be justified in hunting that person down and killing them, because who's to protect you? But in civil society, there's a higher authority and you would not be justified in doing that. You'd be a murderer, you'd go to jail. So the rules change based on whether you have a higher authority who can do enforcement and this is what has led some theorists to be quote unquote realists, which we're not going to really discuss today.

He starts his book off by discussing that and he's an anti realist because realism in a way says, well, there is no morality to war. There's just a big every. You know, there's all these powers in a state of nature and they are doing what they need to do to serve their own interests. It's a dog eat dog world. And the application of morality to that situation is misguided. He wants to show us how the paradigm is in fact applicable. And just because there's an analogy to the state of nature with nations doesn't mean that it's not applicable.

11:22 Mark: Yeah, I think realism. So. Right. This is something that comes up in the first three chapters, which we were not a part of our official reading. I did get the audiobook just so I could get through those three. But it comes up in our. So we read three chapters out of the four of part two, the Theory of Aggression, focusing on this. And even in, in this there's this Hobbesian idea that justice is only something that is created within a state when you have a leader that has a way of sanctioning people who violate it. So there is no justice on the international level and everybody should just assume that everybody else is going to be a bad actor.

And so justifications for war in the past were not just an imminent threat or they were, well, oh, my neighbor's getting too powerful. Eventually they're going to do something, you know, because it's the nature. He actually Edward Wilson is EO Is the famous biologist EO Wilson. Right. That he refers to here. I didn't actually make sure it was. Yes, he talks about E.O. wilson talking about the Civil War. It's like sea slugs that just. If a sea slug is slightly bigger than its neighbor, it'll just eat its neighbor and absor. And that's the way states are.

Just the nature of states. And Walter just thinks this is ridiculous. This is not why we form states. We do not. But this is the way he talks about the 18th and 19th century Bismarck saying, oh, these annoying regular citizens that they don't understand that war is just, it's a prerogative of statecraft. If I think as the leader that, you know, will be advantaged or whatever. My reason, my internal reason is really none of the citizens business. And the citizens just keep insisting on thinking of in terms of like, well, but me and my relatives and I will have to actually go and fight and die.

And come on, don't take it that personally. It's something that's bigger than any one individual.

13:11 Dylan: It's just business.

13:12 Mark: Yes. And Walzer's like, no, it is actually all ethically about individuals that, you know, until we are actually just fighting with drones or, you know, some sort of simulated, you know, pawns that are not human beings, then this is the core of the moral argument is, you know, that the fact that people's lives are going to be at stake so all this realist talk of war is just going to happen anyway. No, it doesn't have to happen.

13:38 Dylan: Yeah. And we don't have to go down it right now, Mark. But I don't think that the drone example is actually an example, is an exception that he would admit of. I don't think he would say until

13:47 Mark: then if the drones were fighting drones, which is not the way drone warfare works now.

13:52 Wes: Well, if the results were going to be loss of autonomy and territory.

13:55 Mark: Exactly.

13:56 Dylan: No, that's exactly, exactly right. Because in the end the war, war is about, it's war is about domination and the harm inflicted is not just the death of the combatants or even the damage, the death of civilians. Right. It has to do with the contravening of their autonomy. Right, yeah.

14:11 Wes: This is a good segue into just the very first few pages where he says what aggression is. So it can be, you know, and he leaves it quite vague because it turns out it can mean a lot of things. I mean, the most obvious case of aggression is just someone's army crosses your border, you get attacked. But ultimately, yeah, as Dylan points out, this is about what compromises political sovereignty ultimately. So the territorial boundary is a convenient material representative of political sovereignty. But this isn't just a legalistic argument about who holds title to land.

It's about independent political communities that are self determining. I'm getting a little ahead of us here, but we'll get into this more. But individual political communities that are self determining and an aggressor intervenes in that. And because he does that, he forces, you know, there's not a lot about pacifism in here, but I know people who pretend to be pacifists, at least on behalf of Ukraine, and really make these arguments that you should just lay down your arms and let the invader come in because it's not worth the loss of life. But in his account of aggression, Walzer will say the rights of individuals within that community, which you can't count on being protected by the invader.

Those are some things that, things that you might think are worth fighting for even at the risk, the risk of life, which is one of the things that makes this such a crime, is that you force people into this decision to actually have to lay down their lives and die to protect their communal autonomy.

15:55 Dylan: And you see the domestic analogy going on, right? So you can take the same analogy with somebody has their home and their home is getting invaded and you know, do they just, do they resist that or not? And you can even see how the context of an alternative authority, right? You know, you'd have somebody, you know, the advice if you're getting mugged is just give the mugger the money. And part of that is based upon the fact that you live in a civil society that has other methods for dealing with that. But even in our society, right, somebody coming in and invading your house and threatening you, the notion that you would just let somebody come and beat you and rape your family and steal all your stuff and leave you destitute doesn't pass muster from the notion that you ought to just not resist that at all.

The only way that I would say that you get away with saying that you don't resist that at all is if somehow you think that you're going to be made whole at the end so that you can flourish. And I think that you can come up with a lot of examples where that's not going to happen.

17:01 Seth: Yeah. And he points out specifically in that particular instance that what you're doing is creating a calculus where you're trading life for rights. So he says you're basically saying the loss of life or the amount of destruction or destitution, desolation that's going to happen is worse than the trade off of sacrificing the state's right to individual sovereignty. But theoretically, also cascading down on the domestic analogy, the individual's rights you're going to sacrifice probably like for example, poor Czechoslovakians at the time, Czechoslovakian people didn't just the state lost sovereignty and territory, but the people themselves also lost rights because they're basically turned into second class citizens.

They lost the right to vote, they lost their individual land. So Czech farms were taken over and given to German farmers and things like that. But I think he's questioning, he's saying that's the logic, but he's questioning whether that ever makes sense. And I, even though people do do

18:07 Wes: it, we might treat it as a utilitarian consideration, right? So we compare the devastation of war with loss of rights and loss of autonomy and all that stuff. And one might think, well, maybe the aggressor will come in and be an enlightened dictator. Or maybe because of cultural similarity, Ukraine in some sense belongs to Russia and because it's been part of the USSR historically, which I think are just very historically ignorant cases. But what Walzer will end up saying, and I think he's right about this, is that those calculations are very, they're just impossible.

You don't, there's too much uncertainty. And so you revert from the utilitarian position to the more rights based deontological position. You say, look, this is just wrong. And the level of uncertainty is such that I have to approach this really as a moral issue and fight. Although it's not to say that you couldn't given. So the Finland is a good case of that. Right. When Stalin wanted to go to war against or really he wanted Finland to trade land with him because he had a legitimate worry that Germans could occupy Finland and be too close to Leningrad.

And so the Finns had a difficult decision to make because of course Germany is much more formidable military power at that point. And they made the decision to fight and they ended up ultimately they thought Russia to kind of a draw, but they ended up with a negotiated peace where they lost more land than they would have if they had just agreed in the first place. But Walzer's point is that they vindicated their autonomy and their rights. And as you just get, if you just give in, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, which is really the international community gave in.

The Czechs couldn't fight by themselves. It was handed over to them, to Hitler by Chamberlain and other people. That of course did not satisfy Hitler and he just took all of it eventually. So if you do just let someone in, they may ultimately see that as an invitation to take all of it if there's no resistance.

20:04 Mark: Right. He has an interesting way of, you know, he's very black and white in his condemnation of aggressors. But do you have a duty to fight back? Well, no, it's sort of up to you as the attacked country or what can you put up with. But it's definitely, we think it's admirable if you do fight back. We think somebody should fight back. We think actually just like if your neighbor is being attacked, it would be good for you to help, but it's. You don't have to. You're not necessarily condemned if you don't. You might have lots of internal reasons that you don't want to put Your, your own citizens at risk saving someone else's bacon.

20:41 Seth: Yeah, well, he makes this point, it's funny, it's kind of like a little throwaway comment, but there's a lot of, a lot of really interesting little nuggets in this thing that he doesn't expound upon. But I guess maybe it's just the topic, you know, he brings it up and he's like, well, that's, you know, kind of a philosophical point. Whatever he says, you know, we just naturally, we think it's heroic when a smaller, weaker, overmatched group decides to fight back or to. He's like, it's almost like it's built into. It tells us something about how we think about the morality of war, but also about how we think about protecting our own rights.

And protecting sovereignty is like you would almost never. He says it's something to the effect of appeasement, which is the strategy that he's talking about, where you give in or negotiate instead of fight back. Appeasement is almost always seen as a negative way out. And if you decide to resist, resistance is almost always applauded, is almost always supported, you know, in some respect. And you know, part of that is, speaks to how we think about these things as individuals, human beings, morally. But part of it's also about supporting the legalistic framework around the domestic analogy, thinking that like, we believe so deeply in the sovereignty of nations that you would never fault somebody for fighting back to protect themselves in that respect.

In the same way that you would never criticize anybody for self fighting in self defense of their own individual person if their life was threatened.

22:17 Wes: Yeah, he says that part of what the Finns are defending in that case is the moral order. So we might think that realism strictly defined, you just think about utilitarian consequences and material terms and you wit and exclude these factors of loss of autonomy and all the rest of it. But on page 71 to 72, he'll say there's also a kind of realism to rights and the defense of rights and to. There's the defense of certain values that the aggressor is attacking. Those are real considerations. So we applaud resistance because it's important to fight for those things, even at the cost of life.

22:59 Mark: Yeah, of course, there's this section on appeasement that we've been referring to that's quite a bit ahead of where we are in the text. But he, you know, even in the first few pages of chapter four here, so he mentions Carl von Clausewitz, who we read a little before our terrorism episode. I think if you read things about war in Philosophy World, you run across Clausewitz on war. And he, Walzer quotes him on page 53. Here a conqueror writes, clausewitz is always a lover of peace, as Bonaparte always asserted of himself. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed.

In order to prevent this, we must choose war. So that's, you know, a conundrum about the, the ethics of war is that the aggressor is not necessarily the one who fires the first shot. They might just like, we're just going to move in here. Is that okay? You know, we're more powerful. Make this easy on yourself. So it seems like the rebels, the people reacting to that, are the ones actually starting the war. And Walzer wants to say, no, no, morally, clearly the aggressor, whether they're actually using violence, just the capability, the threat of violence, the thing that they're doing.

So even just, you know, again, we're going to set up settlements in this area, the Israel case that we do not. So that part, the expansionist part of the Israeli conflict, Walzer is not in favor of.

24:14 Dylan: Well, and that's also all very easy to understand on the domestic analogy as well. Right. So, you know, whether you talk about extortion of your store in your neighborhood where the local gang thugs come in and say, well, it would be really good for you to give us 10% of your profits because otherwise something bad might happen here. Well, no violence has happened. But I think Walter would say, well, of course, that's aggression. And that's why he uses this word aggression. The page that Wes was talking about is really a great page about this on 72.

He was pointing out at the top there about the difference between that. They're referring back to the realist position that there is no such thing as morality. In war, international conflict does not admit of morality. It just admits a power struggle. And he just to reiterate, Walzer says that the Finnish example gives the view that realism, there's an alternative view that rights are real. So there is realism in those rights, even to people who must die and defend them. And second, the defense is possible. And that's a preamble to this following paragraph, which I think sums up a lot of the position that's going on here.

The defense of rights is a reason for fighting. I want now to stress again, and finally that it is the only reason the legalist paradigm rules out every other sort of war. Preventative wars, commercial wars, wars of expansion and conquest, religious crusades, Revolutionary wars, military interventions, all these are barred and barred. Absolutely. In much the same way as their domestic equivalents are ruled out in municipal law. Or to turn the argument around once more, all these constitute aggressive acts on the part of whoever begins them and justify forceful resistance, as their equivalence would be in homes and streets and domestic society.

So this point that everything turns on the notion of aggression and that aggression is a act against autonomy that can be resisted, that's the moral foundation for the whole thing.

26:13 Wes: Yeah. And that paragraph, he's outlining what the rules are under the legalist.

26:18 Dylan: Yes.

26:19 Wes: Paradigm. He's just. And he's setting us up to say, well, we actually have to qualify that there's some qualifications. Right. The next paragraph will say, this is not yet a complete characterization of the morality of war. So he's going to go on from there to tell us that. Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.

26:36 Dylan: In fact. Yeah, maybe I can. Let me just read that just so we don't get too. It's not a complete characterization of the morality of war. Though the domestic analogy is an intellectual tool of critical importance, it doesn't offer an entirely accurate picture of international societies, hence the revisions. States are not, in fact, individuals, and the relations among states are not like the private dealings of men and women because they are not framed in the same way by authoritative law. These differences are not unknown or obscure. I've been ignoring them only for analytical clarity. And then he's going to, as Wes has pointed out, he's going to.

27:09 Wes: Does your version have. States are not like. Are we using the same book? States are not in fact like individuals because they are collections of individuals.

27:17 Dylan: Yes, I just skipped over that parentheses.

27:19 Wes: I just became curious whether he had actually revised this.

27:22 Dylan: No, no, okay. No, you're right. I skipped over that.

27:24 Wes: Parenthetical. No worries.

27:25 Mark: Well, let's talk about that sentence you skipped over.

27:27 Wes: So this.

27:28 Mark: The rights of political communities was the section, the first major section after the beginning. I found this really interesting of, you know, to what extent the domestic analogy works. Why do we think, you know, I, as an individual, I understand. And he says, look, I don't know if they're natural rights. I don't know whether they're socially agreed on. That's all meta ethics stuff, just. Except that people have rights. And somehow from that rights, states rights are simply the collective form of individual rights. He says on 54. Yeah. What do you all think of that?

Because I'm not really sure about that. Like, the question immediately comes up, well, what constitutes a legitimate Collective. And he's going to get into this when he talks about civil wars and wars of independence that you know, if you've got two populations, two ethnic populations, two religions, something like that, do those constitute. So a collectivity is something that he thinks just naturally occurs. It's a way of life of a group of people being together. And somehow just by living together then we acquire a collective right to self determination to elect our own leaders and have our own laws that, you know, then if our little group is swept up into some empire that prods on that, then there's something unjust about that.

What do we think about this? It just seems like way more problematic than he's making out. This idea of individual rights can somehow be collectivized.

28:48 Wes: It is problematic, but it, you know, you can understand why he didn't go into it because it becomes almost like a thorny metaphysical problem. You know, what is a collectivity and how can it have rights? And there are, you know, I've talked to socialists who scoff at this idea that states could have rights, that they kind of revert to realism in a sense here. But it's a very Marxian sort of position. Right? Marx was not, as Walzer will point out in this. Marx kind of, when it was convenient, said, well, morality is too spooky. And this idea that states have rights is just, is ridiculous.

So one can always point to the kind of metaphysical problem here and use that to become a skeptic when it's convenient. But of course the same people will talk very moralistically when it's convenient as well. But for Walzer, you know, this, this all begins on page 54. I think he will give us some good ideas about what this means. Right. So the rights of states will rest on the common. He'll call it this. There are people who live together and have shared experiences and have cooperative activity that shape a common life. And this is true even in states where.

Right. There's no freedom. We'll learn later that self determination and freedom are two different things. So it may be quite a perverse common life in some sense. It may be oppressive, but the point is that they are doing it together. You know, ideally this is about liberty and freedom and the freedoms of individuals, but not always the case.

30:17 Seth: So yeah, I think there's a couple aspects that we kind of want to delineate here. So Wes is right to point out, he says if you want to talk about how collectivities make a commitment to the state or become beholden to a state or participate in A state. He says you kind of just have to sort of think about the traditional philosophical social contract theory. He's like, because of course people don't explicitly consent. He says that's complicated. But as Mark mentioned, it gets more nuanced because he talks about groups that self organize. And you remember that the two parts of the domestic theory, it's the geographical integrity and it's the sovereignty, the self determination.

I think he changes to use the term self determination determination by the end of what we read. So that allows for an example, like having an ethnic minority within a state that wants to have some form of self determination and then is, for example, oppressed by the state. It's going to set up that conflict, a conflict there where you would normally think, well, the state has autonomy within the boundaries of its borders, but in this case because that ethnic minority is a community that is aspiring for self determination. So interestingly, the whole state of nature and state thing kind of, I don't want to say it falls apart, but it reaches a limit in the face of the notion of a self determining community, even if that's a minority within the state.

And I think you're right, Mark, that's where it becomes very problematic.

31:55 Wes: It does, but we get to that later in the revision. I think it's important just to lay out the simplified legalist paradigm. He says, I'm going to put fractures and divisions within the state aside for now at this early Stage on page 54 to 55, because it's important to point out that. So, for instance, where does a territorial right come from? Is it because there's some sort of legal deed to a property? That's something that we might scoff at and say, you see, international boundaries are arbitrary and they were defined by violence. Why should we respect them?

But their basis is not in that kind of mere legality. Territorial boundaries are important because the community basically needs a physical space safe from intrusions. A common life has been made on the land. So the moral justification for those boundaries is in the common life of a collective. And that's really important. I think this is something people often miss when they are discussing war because they want to use this idea that a state has been unjustly founded or that boundaries are arbitrary, this or that, to say, well, there is no right to self defense in this case, there is no right to defend against an aggressor.

There's always a right where there's a real community.

33:14 Dylan: Well, and if you think of. When I think about other ways in which people would talk about the founding of states and communities. I start thinking about older societies where you have a mythology or a self accounting that amounts. What is it in? I forget if it's in the republic or which one it is, but that the people understand themselves as growing up from the ground.

33:38 Wes: Autochthonous.

33:39 Dylan: Autochthonous, yes. And I think again that's in a lot of ways pursuing a kind of domestic analogy. We came from this place and we're naturally derived from it. And that's our connection. Now that's not quite the same as what Walter is saying. He's actually making it broader than that, saying that it's those connections between that community. And as Wes pointed out, you have to live somewhere. And he says the right of a nation or people not to be invaded derives from the common life its members have made on this piece of land. It had to be made somewhere and not from the legal title they hold or don't hold.

34:17 Wes: It gets tricky. Right?

34:18 Mark: Yeah, there's an opening here for sort of talk of blood and soil.

34:22 Wes: That's what I was about to.

34:24 Mark: Right. And so yeah, first he punctuates this theoretical stuff, which we should totally read a whole book or something, you know, have a whole episode on states as having rights distinct from individuals and how those relayed. Because he deals with the whole thing in the first pass in like three pages here. But he gets to the case of Alsace Lorraine, which we referred to. And of course, you know, I think of that just in terms of the Nazi aggression.

34:49 Seth: Right.

34:49 Mark: Wasn't that one of the first places that they claim that Hitler expanded to. But he's talking here in 1870 of. You know, I didn't realize that there was such a long history that this was originally part of. Well, Germany wasn't even a country at the point, but you know, it was German lands and that the French had taken it. And so the question of, you know, are we allowed to take it back? Well, according to Walzer, in this. Well, by this point of particular conflict that he's thinking about, the question is what did the people forget about the history?

What are the people that are there now? How do they identify themselves? And they identified themselves as part of France. So actually no, it was illegitimate for Germany to try to come in and take it back, even though, even if it was taken illegitimately in the first place, you can't point to things that happened 200 years ago and say, oh well, this gives us a historic claim on the land. It's a matter of like, who is there now and how do they? What sort of society is there? How do they identify? Basically, let them vote if you can. There shouldn't be like these greater units deciding, oh well, we have dominion over you because of historical or cultural things like let them decide.

35:59 Wes: And this is a case. It's not just that Germany had legal title to this land, although that in a sense is true, it's that there was, these are culturally and linguistically German people, but they still had loyalty to France. So in that case, that's who it belongs to. It belongs to France by virtue of that loyalty. The land follows the people is the phrase that Walzer used. It's a matter of political allegiance really, when it comes down to gets tricky because that can change, right? So after 50 years or maybe even fewer years, that loyalty may shift and then it may be the case that. So for instance, if Germany unjustly goes in and takes over, after a few decades, the loyalty may shift to Germany, in which case it is now Germany's rightful possession, even though it's an ill gotten gain. This is a point he makes a little bit later on in this chapter.

36:53 Seth: Yeah.

36:54 Mark: So just to throw in another Israel tidbit, you know, according to Walzer, it does not matter if the Egyptians or whoever were correct that, oh, the state of Israel was founded illicitly or something, the fact that there are people there, living lives, then yes, any state, by the very fact of its existence there has a right to continue to exist. So you need to let the Arab countries surrounding it need to just let that whole we should just wipe Israel off the map because it was founded unjustly. That's illegitimate. Like that is an illegitimate complaint. Of course they have a right to be there because they are there.

37:28 Wes: Not to mention the fact that every nation is founded illegitimately through violence.

37:33 Mark: Should we read through these? He lays out 61, 62, the domestic analogy, using the legalist paradigm. He has six points that he says, you know, if you want to understand what this legalist paradigm is, this is

37:46 Seth: actually the theory of aggression.

37:47 Dylan: Yes, yes, but it's the section legalist paradigm, theory of aggression.

37:51 Wes: Yes, which is what the legalist paradigm is about. Right. So the general idea is we only fight when there's been an aggression against us. Again, which will get revised. But these are the six principles.

38:02 Mark: Yes, there's an international society of independent states. The international society establishes the laws of its members. They have territorial integrity, they have national sovereignty. Number three, force or imminent threat by state against another is criminal aggression. Number four, aggression justifies self defense and a war of law enforcement by other nations. Number five, only aggression can justify war, not differences in religion or politics. And six, aggressors can be punished after being repulsed. So those. He goes on some length about each of those, but those are the points that make up the legalistic paradigm here.

38:39 Wes: Right. And so to call out just one thing. Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state can constitute aggression. And that word imminent is going to become important later on because it turns out is not, just under the revised theory, an imminent threat of force that justifies resistance where imminent in the way

38:59 Dylan: you just used it would be interpreted as there's a gun pointed at your head.

39:03 Wes: Yeah. He defines what's more like a clear and present danger standard and it doesn't have to be just right about to happen. So he'll use, in fact, Israel and Egypt will be an example of that later on because Egypt probably did not want a war, but they did mass troops at the border and set up a bunch of alliances and make threats, put Israel into situation where they were justifiably afraid of a much larger army and probably thought they could easily be wiped. Wiped out. So that he will say, justified a preventive attack. Yeah.

39:37 Dylan: And just for context, you're referring to the Six Day War.

39:40 Wes: Yes, although I want to say seven for some reason, but you must be right.

39:47 Mark: Well, on the seventh day they rested, of course.

39:51 Dylan: Wow.

39:52 Wes: It's like a biblical thing.

39:54 Mark: So, yeah, we're nearing the end of our first part here, so we didn't want to really start on a new whole topic here, but any sort of last thoughts on the domestic analogy, on these points? On what? I mean, the fact that there is no international society, as he says, he compares it to. Well, it's like a crumbling building. Like there is an international society. It's just not in good working order. So it's like we can see the telos of what it's supposed to be. So we can think in moral terms as if there were an international society. But you know, somebody, again, somebody like Hobbes just says there is no such thing.

This is silly. You know, states are going to do what they're going to do and we have to accommodate. And that's the truth, you know, the truth of the un why do these big states get to be the Security Council? Because they're big and they can. Right. It's just you make deals based on the cards you have. As a Trump would say.

40:46 Seth: Yeah, well, if we're just trying to set the stage for part two where we kind of go into this, he has a nice little sentence paragraph on page 72 that kind of. He says the defense of rights is a reason for fighting. I want now to stress again and finally that it is the only reason the legalist paradigm.

41:06 Wes: Dylan read this whole paragraph, didn't he?

41:08 Dylan: No, he's repeating himself, actually. This is a different place.

41:13 Seth: On page 72, the legalist paradigm rules out every other sort of war. Preventative wars, commercial wars, wars of expansion and conquest.

41:20 Dylan: Oh, I did read this.

41:21 Wes: Dylan read this whole paragraph and the next paragraph.

41:24 Dylan: I did, I did read it.

41:25 Mark: Worth reemphasizing?

41:27 Seth: Yeah, it comes on. But anyway, again, one of the things that I struggled with reading this was coming in on chapter four and not really knowing what the first three chapters. I didn't have time to kind of get the context, but the structure is just to reiterate. He's talking about an accepted, a common view. There's the realist view, which he doesn't agree with. Then there's this. He's establishing what the legalistic framework is, and then he's going to argue about ways in which that framework should be expanded. And it's sometimes not always clear, not understanding the context. You know, it took me about, I don't know, 20 pages before I was like, okay, wait a second, that's not his view. He's just putting it out there to try to explain and then, you know, or. And use an example. So.

42:12 Wes: Well, it's a useful baseline.

42:14 Seth: It is.

42:14 Wes: It's like starting with a simplified equation in science or some right. Theoretical characterization where we know there's going to be a lot of confounding variables and factors and then we introduce those.

42:26 Seth: What I don't know about what he's arguing is, does he feel as though expanding the legalistic framework in the way that he's going to strengthen it with respect to being an anti realist position? Like, in other words, is he an anti realist? And these are the types of criticisms that realists pose for the legalistic framework

42:47 Dylan: or what have you.

42:48 Seth: Or is he just saying, look, this as a rubric is just too stiff because there's the reality. History is full of examples of punitive and preemptive wars and things like that that we would want to say are justified. So this, you know, I'm not 100% sure about that, but anyway.

43:05 Dylan: Well, I think the short answer to that is that he is trying to strengthen it against the realist criticism by making it more flexible and answer the challenges of those special of the various individual Circumstances. I mean, to me, in a way he's the realist point of view is very similar to the problem that we had in just talking about whether morality exists or not in previous episodes. And the foundation of morality. And one argument would be, well, look, morality doesn't exist. Those distinctions are just conveniences that we have and we spend a lot of time going through what is the foundation for moral distinctions that we make and how do they have import as those distinctions.

And he's doing the same thing here. And that's part of the power of the domestic analogy is it's bringing across our understandings of where our own individual moral distinctions would come from and then applying them. Now he doesn't do the metaphysical piece of it. He's basically granting that there are moral distinctions that we'd make as individuals and then bringing them over into our communities and then having to acknowledge or wanting to make it stronger by acknowledging the distinctions that come up when you're talking about groups of individuals rather than individuals,

44:27 Mark: I think that is a great way of, yes, setting people to go think about this more where the rights of groups come from. Do you want to be a moral realist about this? He wants to. Walzer just wants to not be, not get into these meta ethical issues. Like of course, you know, everybody uses moral critiques when they're deciding whether to go to war or not. It's not just a matter of pragmatism or self interest or something. So let's take them seriously. Let's try to actually characterize what our moral intuitions about are on these, whatever your meta ethical views may be.

So please come back for part two where we'll discuss more of this book. If you are a Partially Examined Life supporter through our website or through Patreon, you can hear that should be the next thing in your feed either now or very soon. If you're supporting us through Apple or you're just listening on the public feed, then you'll get that episode next week. If you want to become a supporter, go to partiallyexaminelife.com support. Thanks everybody for listening.

45:22 Wes: Thank you.

45:23 Dylan: Thanks. Good night.