The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought

Chapter Four: But Is This War Just?

23 As w e hav e r eca lled, the Ita lia n milita ry action involves the violation of several treaties; if we abstract from actions prior to Ethiopia’s entry into the League of Nations, three treaties still forbid Italian troops to enter the Mareb: the Covenant of the League of Nations, the 1928 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928. This is more than is necessary to create a presumption of injustice. Some people will think that the term presumption of injustice is too weak, that the violation of a treaty is enough in itself and independent of all circumstances to render a Chapter Four Bu t Is T h is Wa r J us t ? 24 | The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought war clearly criminal. True morality, in our opinion, does not entail such rigidity, and its concrete decisions do not allow themselves to be discovered at so little cost. Just as there exist limit situations when insurrection against the established power is legitimate, so there are limit situations, rare though we may think them, when a treaty arrived at in good and due form ceases to be obligatory.1 It will be necessary therefore to take the trouble, before declaring a policy involving the failure to observe a treaty as unjust, to be sure that we are not dealing with one of the limit situations. Realist morality demands, when confronted with every new situation, a new effort at analysis, adapted to all the particularities of the situation, an effort of an intelligence always free, always available, ready to receive everything that the unrepeatable historical moment presents by way of unforeseen novelty. Such an attitude is in no way to be confused with empiricism or opportunism; the true men of action are simultaneously very careful about doctrine, principles, constant rules, and very careful to maintain in their minds that open space where, in the concrete, decisions that are highly detailed arise. What, then, is that absolute morality that is deemed incompatible with the necessities of political action? Thierry Maulnier reproaches the Manifesto2 by some Catholic writers of employing, against civilization, “the weapon of absolute morality”; Julien Benda wants the absolute moral positions to be energetically recalled; both declare that temporal life has some demands that do not accord with those of absolute morality. The universe of human action thus would admit of a polar opposition in which it is easy to recognize a Manichean essence; what might be gained through absolute morality would be lost by trying to make temporal bodies live by it, and vice versa. But Is This War Just? | 25 We believe we can recognize in this phantasmagoria an idealist conception of morality. In the sense that the word idealism bears in modern philosophy, metaphysics is idealist to the extent that it considers the objects of our knowledge as simple products or simple moments of mental activity . For a realist philosophy, perfect cognition is the faithful reiteration in the mind of things that are the measure of the mind; for an idealist philosophy, perfect cognition is the wholly conscious construction of an entirely transparent universe. In the perspectives of a realist philosophy, the moralist’s task consists, quite humbly, in putting oneself in the presence of human reality to discover in that reality some lines of perfectibility, some definite tendencies toward a fullness always imperfectly achieved. The essential tendencies of human nature, the lines of perfectibility resulting from man’s specific nature, are expressed by the body of natural laws, by natural right; born from the investigation of essential realities, the formulas of natural right need to be further developed through formulas relative to contingent circumstances where the essential tendencies operate. For the living reality that needs to be guided to its perfection is a compound of necessity and contingency, of essence and history , of nature and adventure. The immediately regulatory judgment of the act is only fully moral when it takes account of all the circumstances affecting, in whatever way, the play of the essential tendencies of the human reality and the application of natural laws. Among these circumstances there may be some that are unsettling, in such a way that the concrete moral judgment would take the form of an exception to a law, by virtue of the demands of a higher law. In the classic example, the general law: one must...