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WARBLOGGER WATCH


Tuesday, August 27, 2002

 

Deliberating war as a test for democracy

The "relative passivity with which most Americans now experience the mobilization for war" is one of the "troubling sources of moral levity in the public war deliberations of the world's dominant military power," writes Talbot Brewer, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia in his article "We the People, We the Warriors".


This process has become highly undemocratic. Large groups of ''we the people" now are insulated not only from the physical risks of injury or death in war but also from the moral risks that attend any active role in the initiation of war.

What are the moral risks of war? Consider, to begin with, that one cannot responsibly choose to start a war without supposing oneself to have the capacity to discern those rare historical moments when war has a realistic chance of doing more good than harm. Overestimating one's capacity to shape the course of history raises the risk of becoming responsible for the creation of a damnable mess.

Consider, too, that one cannot responsibly choose the path of war without being certain that one's enthusiasm for fighting is not rooted at least partly in such dark psychological sources as an overgeneralized thirst for revenge or intoxication with the capacity to humble one's enemies. To overestimate the purity of one's war motives is to risk becoming responsible for evil, entered into -- as evil ordinarily is -- with every belief in one's good intentions.

Today both sorts of moral risks are in play.


About the "insulation" from the "moral risks that attend any active role in the initiation of war" Brewer writes:


If war policy is chosen behind closed doors and then conveyed to the people in conjunction with a skillful caricature of the predetermined enemy (supported, perhaps, by intelligence whose precise nature cannot be revealed), the public can be made to prefer an array of unsavory wars that it would never choose in the light of open deliberation.

• • • • •

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