Character and Critique in the Ethics of War

As its title suggests, Nigel Biggar’s In Defence of War offers a strong response to pacifists who argue that the use of armed force can never be morally justified. However, though it is cogently and convincingly made, this argument is not really the heart of In Defence of War. Indeed, it constitutes only one chapter of the book, which is primarily dedicated to the defense of a particular kind of war—the justified war, whose characteristic features are described and debated in the centuries-long conversation most often called the just war tradition. In this endeavor Biggar has two primary sparring partners, neither of them pacifists: philosophical critics of the just war tradition (represented chiefly by David Rodin) and just war thinkers (such as Michael Walzer) whose version of the just war idea is strongly influenced by the modern traditions of liberal individualism, absolute human rights, and legal positivism. Biggar defends a particular tradition of reasoning he refers to as the “early Christian just war tradition.” One of Biggar’s primary concerns is to draw a distinction between just war thinking in its Walzerian and early Christian forms. This strategy is key to the success of his defense; Biggar denies that many of Rodin’s criticisms of liberal just war thinking apply to the early Christian just war tradition.

This effort to provide nuance and context, to complicate the landscape rather than to force material into rigid, preexisting categories, characterizes not only Biggar’s description of the forms of just war reasoning but also his normative arguments concerning the content of that reasoning. His work is a welcome response to the all too common tendency among modern just war thinkers to simplify and absolutize. While for many modern thinkers, just war reasoning is best described as a single “theory” that issues in universal and absolute rules, Biggar’s approach makes more room for the complexity that necessarily accompanies discussions of morality and warfare. As he puts it in the book’s early pages, “Moral thinking seeks to make sense of human conduct by ordering it in terms of normative principles and rules. This is as it should be. The danger, however, is that intellectual tidiness with its careful logic, clear concepts, and nice distinctions ceases to do justice to the intractable messiness of flesh-and-blood human experience—that it buys clarity at the expense of reality” (2013, 4). This awareness of messiness plays out in varied ways in Biggar’s book: in his aforementioned recognition of the diversity of approaches to just war reasoning, in his rejection of positivist approaches to international law (chap. 5), and in his insistence that proportionality cannot be measured in terms of simple arithmetic (140, 147), among other examples.

Biggar characterizes this quality of his work as indicative of his “realist” orientation, one that arises not only from his observations of the complicated nature of human life but also from his theological conviction that the combination of sin and goodness characteristic of the human person prevents human beings (whether as individuals or as members of groups and institutions) from acting in ways that can be classed as simply good or bad. In this sense, Biggar is profoundly interested in the concept of character. His understanding of human beings as morally complex creatures leads him to reject the marginalization of character that is a recurring feature of many contemporary discussions of war. The tendency of modern just war thinkers to overlook character can be explained variously as a result of the move toward law, which does not concern itself with character, as the framework for regulating war; as a consequence of the related adoption of a moral framework based in absolute rules and rights that do not allow for the kind of nuance and context needed to take character seriously; and as a reflection of the modern tendency to privatize and interiorize character, rendering it immune to the moral judgment of others. As Biggar points out, however, moral character was a central concern to many of the classical just war thinkers, including the great representatives of...