Tough Reading: Nigel Biggar on Callousness and the Just War

Every year I commence my undergraduate seminar on the ethics of war by playing Edwin Starr’s “War: What Is It Good For?” The answer to the titular question is, of course, “absolutely nothing.” War, Starr sings, has

Shattered many a young man’s dreamsMade him disabled, bitter and meanLife is much too short and preciousTo spend fighting wars these daysWar can’t give lifeIt can only take it away.

Yet few of the students that I encounter identify with his position. On average, each year, only two students from a class of fifty admit an affinity with pacifism. The majority, it seems, are sufficiently versed in the harsh verities of realism to know that if the lamb lies down with the lion, the lamb will have to be replaced frequently. There is, then, a ready readership for Nigel Biggar’s wonderfully argumentative In Defence of War (2013). This can only be a good thing, because books as fine as this one deserve to be widely read. However, I want to argue here that this book is also a tough read—not tough in the sense that it is hard work, but tough in the sense that it is has an abrasive edge. This edge is arguably the key to its appeal, but I wish to submit that it may also be its Achilles’s heel.

Tough Love

I am not embarrassed to say that Nigel Biggar’s In Defence of War is a beautiful piece of work. It is an honest, personal, and courageous book in which the author brings the weight of his own family history and considerable learning to bear on a subject that is far too often treated as a detached intellectual fancy or parlor game. There is a genuinely unflinching quality to the way Biggar grapples with, for instance, both the tenets of his Christian faith and the legitimacy of those wars that took the lives of his own uncle and granduncle. If John Howard Yoder (whom Biggar discusses in chapter 1) has called upon scholars to be “honest” in their just war thinking (1996), Biggar amply meets this challenge. And lest it be misconstrued as such, I should be very clear that these words of praise are not merely a platitudinous prelude to a more substantive critique still to follow. Actually, these sentiments are both sincerely meant and provide the cornerstone for the argument I wish to present in the following pages. They are sincerely meant insofar as I believe that thinking ethically about the use of military force is a subject that demands our full attention, not just in an academic or intellectual sense, but also on a spiritual or existential register (see O’Driscoll 2013). To give it any less than this is not only to run the risk of trivializing the challenges posed by thinking about right and wrong in relation to war and killing; it also invites that strain of hypocrisy wherein scholars are tempted to publish provocative arguments that even they must struggle to agree with. By contrast, Biggar gives himself over to his inquiry, heart and soul.

It is the tone of Biggar’s wholehearted engagement that forms the basis of the argument I wish to develop. In particular, it is the adversarial framing of his argument. For a start, the title of the book, In Defence of War, implies an element of confrontation. Beyond this, the first two chapters—“Against the Virus of Wishful Thinking” and “Against Christian Pacifism”—seem almost to be picking a fight. This tone continues in chapter 5, “Against Liberal Positivism and Liberal Individualism”—a robust rebuttal of David Rodin’s claims that just war theory is both a moral and practical failure. All this is, of course, fair enough. Academia is, after all, a contact sport, and jousting is an essential and sometimes beneficial part of it. Indeed, it is in this spirit that aspiring doctoral candidates are often asked to identify the “enemies” whom they seek to refute. But I would like to consider for a...