Michael Walzer's Concept of 'Supreme Emergency'

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Michael Walzer's Concept of 'Supreme

Emergency'
a
Martin L. Cook
a
Department of Philosophy , United States Air Force Academy ,
USA
Published online: 28 Jun 2007.
To cite this article: Martin L. Cook (2007) Michael Walzer's Concept of 'Supreme Emergency',
Journal of Military Ethics, 6:2, 138-151, DOI: 10.1080/15027570701381948
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Journal of Military Ethics,
Vol. 6, No. 2, 138151, 2007
Michael Walzers Concept of

Supreme Emergency
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 22:24 20 November 2014
MARTIN L. COOK
Department of Philosophy, United States Air Force Academy, USA
ABSTRACT This paper critically examines Michael Walzers famous efforts to integrate a
supreme emergency exemption into the ordinary restraints of jus in bello. The author argues
that, while Walzer raises valid points about the felt responsibilities of leaders of political
communities under extreme pressure, it is a mistake philosophically and prudentially to think of
supreme emergency as granting moral permission to violate the jus in bello rules. Instead, the
author argues, any violations of ordinary restraints should remain violations. However, by analogy,
with exoneration from penalty for violations of criminal law in extreme circumstances, one might
imagine political leaders decisions to violate just war restraints to be (in very rare and extreme
circumstances) forgivable but not permissible in advance.
KEY WORDS: Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Supreme Emergency, Just War Theory
In my experience of many years of teaching Michael Walzers classic Just and

Unjust Wars, few chapters have so consistently provoked heated debate and
confusion as his chapter on Supreme Emergencies. As Walzer himself
observed about this argument, You can imagine the skepticism with which
this account of emergency ethics was greeted, especially where even the
appearance of internal contradiction is taken (as it should be taken) very
seriously (Walzer 2004: 35). He goes on to argue in that essay, however, that
his analysis, although shot through with internal contradiction, is the only
analysis that does complete justice to the moral complexity of the issue. Any
alternative, more logically coherent, analysis fails, he argues, to capture the
moral depth of the problem.
If that is the best we can do, it is at a minimum unfortunate. Brian Orend
(2006), in his excellent new book The Morality of War, points out that if
this is the best one can do with the issue, it degrades in a fundamental way
the entire purpose of just war: to provide a reasonably coherent conceptual
frame to guide statesmen and senior military officers. Advice that boils
The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the policy
or position of the government of the United States, the United States Air Force, or the United States Air
Force Academy.
Correspondence Address: Martin L. Cook, Department of Philosophy, United States Air Force Academy,
2354 Fairchild Dr., USAFA, CO 80840, USA. E-mail: martin.cook@usafa.af.mil
1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/07/020138 14 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/15027570701381948
Michael Walzers Concept of Supreme Emergency 139
down to these issues are inherently so complex that no coherent analysis is

possible amounts in the end to no advice at all. One hopes, in the end,
to do better, even in extremis. The analysis that follows will attempt to see
if we can.
In the famous chapter on emergency ethics in Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer
argues that there are extreme circumstances in war in which political and
military leaders are permitted (morally) to violate the normal moral and legal
constraints of just war. In those circumstances they may, for example,
deliberately target civilian enemy populations if that remains their only
military recourse.
Naturally, Walzer is careful to attempt to limit these permissions. He labors

mightily to distinguish a true supreme emergency from mere garden-variety
military defeats; he notes the tendencies to exaggerate the dangers of defeat in
every war and to demonize the enemy all of which might threaten to
escalate every defeat to the appearance of supreme emergency. In light of
those facts, he attempts to set out two criteria by which we are to distinguish
true supreme emergencies: . . . the first has to do with the imminence of the
danger and the second with its nature (Walzer 1977: 252). He further claims
that both criteria must be applied.
The one historical example Walzer finds that he believes meets his criteria
was the decision of the British to use area bombing of German cities against
the Nazi threat. This threat, he claims, was imminent early in the war, before
the US formally entered the conflict. Further, although he doesnt spell it out,
it appears he would also have to believe that such an invasion was likely to be
successful hardly something one should assume given the difficulty of a
seaborne invasion across the channel, as D-Day demonstrated. Such a
successful invasion would be uniquely horrific because, should Britain be
defeated, the consequences for both Britain and civilization would be
unimaginably horrific. Referring to Nazi ideology, he writes, We see it
and I dont use the phrase lightly as evil objectified in the world. Britains
loss to the Germans, therefore, would be immeasurably awful and literally
beyond calculation (Walzer 1971: 253).
Even in this case, Walzers permission is cautious: it only applies to that
early phase of World War II post-Dunkirk, pre-Pearl Harbor. As soon as
Britain no longer stands alone (and even this claim is a considerable
overstatement, given the vast resources of the British Empire over and above
those of the island itself) in formal opposition to Germany, the permission
goes away. After the US entry into the war, he argues, the moral requirement
is that Britain (and every other ally) return to respect for the war convention
which is, of course, a far cry from what actually happened, as the policy
of area bombing simply continued (deliberately, in the British case; de facto
for American daylight precision bombing, given the inaccuracy of the
technology of the age).
The fact that the pattern of area bombing (which had commonly been
acknowledged before the war to be a clear violation of the war convention)
continued and indeed increased is, perhaps, another reason why we may
hesitate before granting even grudging permission to relax the rules. It
140 M. L. Cook
suggests there is a kind of momentum to collective moral choices that makes

it unlikely that, once lines have been crossed, going back is psychologically
and politically possible.
In contrast with this case, Walzer argues that the decision to drop the
atomic bomb in Japan fails to fulfill the criteria of supreme emergency.
Rather than facing imminent defeat by Japan, the US was facing choices of
military means to pursue a policy decision requiring Japans unconditional
surrender a policy that was not necessary but a choice. Further, the decision
took place against a backdrop of an already-established pattern of fire-
bombing of Japanese cities, which was as indiscriminate as the nuclear
weapons would be.

These are, unfortunately, the only two cases discussed in the context of
clarification of the supreme emergency chapter in Just and Unjust Wars. It is
helpful (perhaps especially in the US context) to see the logic of why Japanese
atomic bombings are not supreme emergencies, as Walzer understands them.
But that leaves us with only the prospect of a Nazi victory over Britain as the
sole positive example.
There is a common saying in law in the English-speaking world: Hard
cases make bad law a phrase which Walzer indeed quotes in his
reconsideration of the supreme emergency argument in his more recent
collection of essays, Arguing about War (Walzer 2004: 3350). The point of
the saying is that it is often a mistake to attempt to derive normative guidance
from the fortunately very rare and very extreme case. Attempting to state a
normative standard for the extreme often results in creating permissions and
restrictions that will be applied in circumstances where they are not really
intended.
This is analogous to a common rule-utilitarian argument. Rule utilitarians
insist that rather than assessing the utility of individual acts as discrete events,
one rather assesses the overall utility of alternative sets of rules. The analogy
is this: is an understanding of the war convention that provides normative
permission for violation of the war convention in supreme emergencies
overall preferable to an understanding of the rules of war that does not?
Naturally, even if one rejects supreme emergency as a doctrine of moral
permission, one may still acknowledge that, in the extreme case, one might
empathize with a leader who chose to override the restrictions of just war.
The difference between the views is, of course, that the latters concern is that
any attempt to craft rules permitting supreme emergency calculation is likely,
in the real world, to be construed to be more permissive than any
conscientious theorist (including Walzer) would ever intend. This is a point
to which we will return below.
Let us begin with some preliminary thoughts about why the supreme
emergency chapter tends to spark such contention and uncertainty.
First, while many are uncertain that Walzer has correctly articulated a valid
normative account of the ethical issues at stake, most recognize at least the
descriptive correctness of his account. In other words, most grant that
political leaders facing imminent and horrific defeat are indeed likely to bend
the traditional restraints of just war in a desperate attempt to prevent it. But
if this observation is correct, it immediately points to one area of ethical

puzzlement. Are we to say that we know that political leaders in such a
circumstance are likely to resort to supreme emergencys permissions, and
that we indeed understand why they would feel obligated to do so, faced with
(from their perspective) absolute disaster, and yet withhold moral permissi-
bility from our assessment of their actions? Are we to revisit American
theologian Reinhold Niebuhrs famous dichotomy between moral man (the
morality of individuals) and immoral society (the quite distinct morality of
states and statecraft) (Niebuhr 1932)?
Another cause of concern is the status and value assigned to political
communities. At least at first glace, Walzers analysis seems prepared to

justify the sacrifice of flesh-and-blood living and innocent individuals in the
name of protection of a historical construct: the political community
instantiated in a given state at a given point in time. At any given historical
moment, individuals may feel deeply committed to a particular shape and
order to that community (especially relatively well-governed ones, as Walzer
himself argued in Just and Unjust Wars).
But historical reflection raises the caution and observation that these
identities are, at least in many cases, quite fluid. I write this in the Western
United States (Colorado), in territory that was Mexico a little over one
hundred and fifty years ago, and the land of Native Americans before that.
My favorite city park, The Garden of the Gods, was a place of great
sacredness to the Ute tribe in the area; it now serves as an excellent venue for
rock climbers and picnic lunch excursions. Each of those changes was
precipitated by the decisive defeat of the political community then extant.
No doubt each was perceived at the time as a disaster of enormous
proportions by the losers and certainly resulted in the permanent
dissolution of almost every aspect of their common life not to mention
the loss of the lives of a large number of community members (especially in
the Native American case). Such reflections at least invite the question of
whether Walzer exaggerates the importance of a particular snapshot of
political community, despite his thoughtful emphasis on the historical fluidity
of the formation of those communities. As he argues elsewhere in Just and
Unjust Wars, citing Henry Sidgwick:
We must recognize that by . . . temporary submission of the vanquished . . . a new political

order is initiated, which, though originally without a moral basis, may in time acquire
such a basis, from a change in the sentiments of the inhabitants of the territory
transferred; since it is always possible that through the effects of time and habit and mild
government and perhaps through the voluntary exile of those who feel the old
patriotism most keenly the majority of the transferred population may cease to desire
reunion. When this change has taken place, the moral effect of the unjust transfer must
be regarded as obliterated; so that any attempt to recover the transferred territory
becomes itself an aggression. (Cited in Walzer 1978: 56)
I only cite this at such length to make the point that the vast majority of
Mexican Americans in my region of the US are accurately characterized by
this account and, although the case is more complex, so are Native
142 M. L. Cook
Americans (more complex because the disruption of their societies and

common life was so much more total and irreversible).
And to pursue the Native American example a bit more extensively, one
wonders why the conquest of the Native Americans by the arrival and
expansion of the British and then the Americans does not constitute a
supreme emergency for them, exactly equivalent to the British example
especially when one considers the general brutality by which their cultures
were suppressed and deliberately destroyed. Certainly the leaders of many
of the tribes so considered it, and chose indiscriminate and asymmetric
tactics to deal with the American onslaught. One thinks of the Shawnee
Tecumsehs War against the United States in the early 1800s, or of the
Lakotas Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in their desperate resistance to
American encroachment into the Black Hills of South Dakota as
examples. Are we to assume Walzers analysis gives normative permission
for their indiscriminate attacks on settlements, railroads, and settlers?
Alternatively, are we only to note that, as an empirical matter, leaders of
such cultures will often respond in that way but that after their defeat
they will make their peace (at considerable cultural cost) with the new
order of things?
Where do such historical musings lead? Unless one thinks the Nazi dream
of a thousand-year Reich was likely to succeed, one has to do at least some
contrary-to-fact speculation about how the world might have evolved without
area bombing of German cities and the deliberate violation of the rights of
thousands of innocent civilians. One notes the invasion was not a certainty;
its success, even less so; and the ability of the German Reich to successfully
occupy all of Europe for a period of years or decades uncertain and probably
quite unlikely as well. In saying this, Im not for a minute forgetting the
enormous human cost of even a short period of Nazi rule. Those costs,
especially to communities of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others would
have been vast.
But it is not at all clear that Britains violations of the war convention did
anything to reduce those costs. At a minimum, these historical examples
should give us pause in accepting Walzers assertion that: We might better
say that it is possible to live in a world where individuals are sometimes
murdered, but a world where entire peoples are enslaved or massacred is
literally unbearable (Walzer 1977: 254). Harsh though the observation may
be, this indeed seems not to be the case: many examples of precisely that level
of destruction have been borne in the past, and unfortunately probably will be
in the future as well.
But thinking about issues in these timeframes is, perhaps, not a luxury
available to real-world leaders, forced to make choices in much shorter time
frames and charged with the here-and-now responsibility for leading their
particular communities. So, since ethics is about attempting to provide real-
world and action-guiding principles relevant to decision-makers, we circle
back to the question of whether supreme emergency can be formulated as a
coherent normative doctrine which offers discriminating judgments for
leaders of communities under extreme pressure. Can it do the two different
things Walzer wants it to do: first, to reaffirm the almost universal

admonition to conduct military operations within the constraints of just
war, even if that leads to military defeat, but secondly, to provide guidance in
light of which leaders can recognize that extremely rare case in which
imminent military defeat at the hand of this particular adversary is so
horrible as to give normative permission to drop the restraints and use any
means to stave off that defeat?
Is Supreme Emergency a Normative Doctrine?

We come now to one of the central questions in this discussion: is supreme

emergency properly to be understood as a normative doctrinal component of
a fully developed theory of just war, and one capable of providing clear
action-guiding principles for decision-makers?
Brian Orend has offered a very well-developed typology of responses
to Walzers supreme emergency proposal. He notes that Walzers view is also
to some degree shared by Churchill (who, of course, coined the phrase), and
by John Rawls. But Churchill, of course, doesnt develop the doctrine philo-
sophically, and Rawls merely apes Walzers view (Orend 2006: 140159).
In Orends analysis there are five major options for interpreting or
responding to Walzers supreme emergency proposal. Since I cannot improve
on his analysis, I will merely attempt to summarize it here.
The first asserts that there really is no such thing as a supreme emergency
and that Walzers proposal is thus a bastardization or corruption of just war
theory (Orend 2006: 147). This view recognizes the inevitable tendency to
misconstrue the adversarys capabilities and motives; it notes the demoniza-
tion of the adversary that is part of any conflict; and it stresses the inherent
unpredictability of conflict. Orend acknowledges the value of the skepticism
of this approach, applauds its rejection of lazy acceptance of the supreme
emergency doctrine apparently on little more than Walzers authority,
and endorses its perspective that merely claiming actions are justified
fails to meet the test of objective defensibility. He cant in the end accept its
total rejection of the reality of supreme emergencies. Indeed, he offers his
own review of genocides that suggest supreme emergencies really do happen.
As he summarizes his assessment of this option, Orend writes, . . . from
the fact that supreme emergencies can be hard to define conceptually, it
does not follow that we should get rid of, or dismiss, the very idea itself
(Orend 2006: 148).
The second option, Orend calls Churchills consequentialism. This view is
essentially that of American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman
that war is hell and only jus ad bellum matters. If one is assured of the
rightness of the cause, any means to its success is warranted. Orend rejects
this interpretation for four reasons: it violates human rights of non-
combatants; it boils down to the ends justify the means; it dismisses the
compelling moral reasons for having the jus in bello requirements of just war
entirely; and it is at odds with our ordinary moral convictions when
transferred to interpersonal ethics (although this begs the question of the
144 M. L. Cook
possible disparity between personal ethics and the ethic of responsibility of

political and military leaders a point to which we will return).
The third option insists on strict respect for jus in bello restrictions under
all circumstances truly fiat iustitia ruat caelum. This perspective is, of
course, typical of a broadly Kantian and Thomist approach to the question.
Orend rejects this option for two reasons. First, it simply does not provide
realistic guidance to statesmen and military leaders in extreme cases where
much more is at stake than mere military defeat. Second, it fails to capture the
genuine moral obligation of political leaders to their own communities to do
what they can to defend their lives and their rights.
Option four, Orend believes, is Walzers own actual position. This position
understands supreme emergency as irreducibly paradoxical: the same action
is simultaneously right and wrong. To his credit, Walzers insistence on the
paradox is a way of stressing the importance of the values at stake on both
sides of the ledger: the rights of those attacked in violation of the war
convention, but also the moral obligations of leaders to their own commu-
nities. But in the end, Orend argues, the position is unsatisfactory: The
upshot of just war theory, after all, is precisely to devise coherent rules that
statesmen and soldiers can refer to as they make choices under pressured
wartime conditions (Orend 2006: 153154). The other positions have at least
the virtue of offering such advice. As Orend summarizes what he believes
Walzers advice would have to come down to, he writes:
. . . in a supreme emergency you must set aside jus in bello and do what you can to stop
the supreme emergency, even though this will involve horrible wrongdoing. You actually
have a duty to do this to get your hands dirty, to shoulder personally the burden of this
crime because the function of your office is to defend your people. (Orend 2006: 154)
While this is clear advice, it is somewhat paradoxical: you have an

important moral duty to violate another important moral duty; you have
the right to do something that is not right (Orend 2006: 154).
The analysis of the problem of supreme emergency on which Orend finally
settles seems to me to be the correct one. He argues that there are two distinct
and inevitable perspectives that bear simultaneously on the issues of choice in
circumstances of supreme emergency: the moral and the prudential.
From the moral perspective, supreme emergency is a moral tragedy. By
tragedy, he means that all things considered, each viable option you face
involves a severe moral violation (Orend 2006: 155, emphasis original). The
central ethical point is that there is no supreme emergency exception, which
such is conceived as a moral exemption, permission, or loophole (Orend
2006: 155, emphasis original). The mistake of attempting to bring supreme
emergency under the tent of just war analysis is that it strives to make it
precisely such a moral exemption; it attempts to integrate the exception into
the fabric of normative just war theory.
But Orends view does give prudential permission for something like the
supreme emergency exception not, it is important to note, as a moral
permission. Rather it acknowledges that, at the outer limit of Hobbesian
struggle, political responsibility may require hard moral choices in genuinely
morally tragic circumstances where all choices available are morally bad. But
it goes farther in acknowledging that there are still shades of gray in tragedy.
The actor choosing in such limit cases, however, must do so in the full
recognition that there is no moral (or legal) permission for the choice.
Although Orend doesnt make this point, it appears the best the actor can
hope for is the somewhat grudging recognition by the world community and
history of the excusable, rather than the permissible, nature of the choice.
Orend distinguishes his way of thinking from Walzers in two fundamental
ways. First, it treats the circumstance of choice in supreme emergency as a
full-blown tragedy rather than as a grudging moral permission. As he writes:
Not everything in war can be morally justified in supreme emergency we

hit a wall where we see that, morally, we run out of permissible options
(Orend 2006: 155). Second, Orends analysis eliminates the maddeningly
paradoxical shape of Walzers treatment. In emergency conditions, you do
wrong, pure and simple understandable wrong, but wrong nonetheless.
Consistent with his effort to make sure that just war is substantial enough
to guide real-world decisions, Orend concludes his discussion with some
criteria to guide even decisions in hell. Quickly summarized, they are that
the action contemplated must at least be reasonably believed to work, that
one should publicly declare what one is going to do (alerting the adversary to
perhaps rethink his actions), appeal to the international community for
outside support so that the most extreme measure might be unnecessary, and
lastly try to maintain right intention to use the measures contemplated only
for the purpose and to the extent necessary.
Overall, of course, close attention to reasonable hope of success is
paramount. The temptation to strike out blindly and in panic will inevitably
arise strongly in extreme circumstances. But even in hell, hard questions
should be asked. Will killing innocent civilians really be likely to achieve the
desired effects? The history of strategic bombing, at least, suggests its rarely
likely to be effective. How will the adversary respond to our extreme
measures, beyond the pale of jus in bello? Will it end the emergency or slide
toward even more extreme measures on both sides?
I follow Orends analysis here so closely, of course, because it seems right to
me. The risks of following Walzers strategy and trying to shape a moral
permission for supreme emergency measures are simply too great. If just war
is meant to provide both meaningful guidance and meaningful restraint, such
permission will inevitably be employed by leaders to justify acts just war
theorists should not be willing to bless.
In making this remark, I dont wish to be misunderstood. Im not merely
noting that leaders will lie and twist whatever conceptual tools we give them
to cover the inexcusable. Rather, Im suggesting that putting this tool of a just
war permission for supreme emergency calculation into the hands of such
leaders will enable even the most sincere and properly motivated leader to
reach for it too quickly and too easily.
Letting supreme emergency rest as genuine moral tragedy, as Orend argues,
is better it seems to me both conceptually (in avoiding paradoxical
formulations) and psychologically. If leaders are going to cross the line, let
146 M. L. Cook
them do it in full cognizance of the moral valence of the line they are crossing.
If they are sincere and their claims of tragic necessity stand up to scrutiny,
their acts may stand in analogy to those rare cases in civil law where criminals
are exonerated despite the clear recognition that their acts violated the law
(for example, in mercy killings of the terminally by distraught relatives,
urged to the act by the deceased). It is not necessary to rewrite law to
exculpate the very rare criminal act which occurs in circumstances so unusual
that punishment is not carried out.
But let the threat of punishment remain: it serves to force the actor to act
in full recognition of the legal risks he or she runs in acting. Similarly, at
the international level, let the threat of war crimes prosecution hang over
anyone who crosses the jus in bello line even if, in the retrospective
judgment of the international community (or the International Criminal
Court, perhaps), those actions under those extreme circumstances are
sufficiently comprehensible that they may be allowed to pass as acts not
justifiable, but subject to exoneration. But on this analysis, one must guard
against victors justice, in which the side which invokes supreme emer-
gency and wins is immune from disinterested review of their choices, while if
it loses, it is subject to condemnation for exactly the same acts. Rather, there
must be some mechanism for retrospective review regardless of outcome
which might, in time, limn out the shape of customary international law in
this area.
The Nature and Importance of Political Communities

In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer argued effectively that political communities
have value because they preserve the common life a concept far richer
than the lives and prosperity of the individuals whom it comprises. In an essay
written approximately a decade later (included in Arguing about War), he
expands this analysis considerably. On his accounting, the view that the
political community is nothing more than a neutral framework within which
individuals pursued their own versions of the good life a view he associates
with some liberal political philosophers is inadequate to capture the moral
values at stake (Walzer 2004: 44).
There is clearly a good deal of truth in this. If it were not so, we could never
explain the moral valence of legitimate patriotic feeling and would be left with
only a cosmopolitan vision that sees value only in biological individuals.
Neither the vision of a libertarian society as a mere aggregation of atomistic
and self-interested individuals, nor the liberals idea of the equal rights and
entitlements of every human person captures the power and moral meaning
of the feelings citizens bear toward their nation (see Cook 2004: 3953 for a
discussion of this reality).
Walzer derives a strong moral maxim from these observations about the
meaning of community: . . . [N]o government can put the life of the
community itself and of all its members at risk, so long as there are actions
available to it, even immoral actions, that would avoid or reduce the risk
(Walzer 2004: 42). It is this maxim that, more than anything else, grounds the
urge to create a supreme emergency exception within the structure of just war
doctrine itself.
The nature of the threat in question to this community must be clearly
defined, Walzer argues: When our community is threatened, not just in its
present territorial extension or governmental structure or prestige or honor,
but in what we might think of as its ongoingness, then we face a loss that is
greater than any we can imagine, except for the destruction of humanity
itself (Walzer 2004: 43, emphasis original). What is threatened is . . . moral as
well as physical extinction, the end of a way of life as well as of a set of
particular lives, the disappearance of people like us (Walzer 2004: 43,
emphasis added).1
The cursory review of history offered above must give us pause when
we attempt to universalize this maxim. Walzer seems to be arguing that any
time any community faces the loss of its way of life, it is faced with a supreme
emergency, and therefore is entitled to disregard the war convention and,
interestingly, not only when that disregard is clearly likely to be effective,
but even when it merely serves to reduce the risk. Given the historical reality
that most human communities that have ever existed have at some point
disappeared, often as a result of conquest, invasion, or loss of political
autonomy, such a generalized permission would be a recipe for rather
frequent supreme emergencies.
In ones imagination, one need only supply the Navajo with nuclear
weapons, the Mexicans of the Southwest United States with biological
munitions, or the Lakota with indiscriminate chemical warheads to grasp the
permissions being offered in this formulation. The truth is, of course, that
communities lose identity and autonomy continually in the Darwinian
evolution of political communities and, as Walzer himself argued eloquently
in his assessment of the moral claims of communities, . . . since these
processes are continuous, international society has no natural shape (Walzer
1977: 61).
There clearly is a tension, therefore, in Walzers analysis of these
phenomena. On the one hand, he (correctly, in my view) wants to stress the
fluidity of communities through time. He recognizes that the loss of
community is almost always perceived as utter disaster for the community
in question and indeed, often is a great loss even viewed in hindsight. But he
also recognizes that, like tectonic shifts in an earthquake, the new landscape
settles down and, especially if benign government follows the disruption, new
communities of moral meaning form in their wake.
On the other hand, his strong claims about the near-cosmic value of the
loss of a particular community suggests a desire to freeze the status of
communities at a given point in their evolution and to give their leaders wide
permissions to use any means at their disposal, even immoral ones, to
maintain that frozen structure.
Once again, I think we can certainly agree with the psychological point
that leaders of a community threatened with such loss will feel the weight of
their responsibilities, not to be responsible for the permanent loss of their
communitys future on their watch. Furthermore, we can recognize that the
148 M. L. Cook
very processes of evolution of the international order Walzer describes clearly

argue against what we might call a permanent ownership model of territory.
Indeed, those processes argue for an evolutionary model in which there is no
natural shape to the international system. This model is compatible with a
full recognition of the tragedy of the loss of entire ways of life as a result of
ongoing historical processes. The question that remains, however, is whether
any of those facts or all of them cumulatively add up to an absolute moral
permission to leaders to do anything in the name of defending them.
In the end, I think it cant. If humanity is ever effectively to maintain any
constraints on the conduct of war, the existence of a normative permission to
discard those constraints in the face of loss of a way of life is simply too large
an exemption one too threatening to the constraints themselves in light of
the fluid nature of those communities and their boundaries.
This is not to say, of course, that communities are to be expected to go
gentle into that good night. They may and generally should resist their
absorption, dissolution, or destruction as vigorously as possible. They should
do so for a wide number of reasons. First, and most obviously, they may be
successful. Second, Walzer himself gives the example of the heroic but futile
resistance of the Finns to Soviet takeover as an example of actions which,
though ineffective in their time and place, set the stage for a shared sense of
pride and community that serves at a later time as a basis for community
restoration and resumption.
But we expect leaders, especially in the modern world, to be cosmopolitan
enough to recognize that, no matter how deeply felt their love of community
and country, the common project of humanity in building a more peaceful
and just world must trump even loss of beloved community. As a matter of
practical advice to decision-makers, only two options are really possible here.
In the first, they may invoke supreme emergency whenever loss of their way
of life is threatened. But since that is actually a rather frequent event in
history (despite Walzers attempts to suggest it is only a very rare exception),
the net effect of that permission would be continual and (with increasingly
destructive weapons in the hands of more and more leaders) increasingly
massive violations of the war convention.
In the second, we insist on maintaining the war convention, even if (from
the perspective of a given community at a given point in time) the heavens
really are falling. This places a firm restraint on the idolatry of political
community that seems to stand at the heart of Walzers claims. It also places
its hopes on a future where the rule of law is respected ever more broadly and
in which the kinds of violations that might generate fears of supreme
emergency would be rarer and rarer.
There remains, of course, the option mentioned above of exonerating
(rather than normatively permitting) violations under the most extreme and
unusual circumstances. Its too early to tell, of course, how the International
Criminal Court will function and whether it will, in time, gain the respect and
jurisdiction its most ardent defenders hope for it. But it could indeed function
as a body with sufficient prestige to assess facts in the most extreme
circumstances and to offer such exonerations to leaders who make decisions
that would, in normal circumstances, be criminal. Such an approach would

allow for sensitive assessments of the moral and legal case at the extreme
edges without enshrining normative permissions for violation that risk more
than they preserve.
The Martians are Coming?

I beg the readers indulgence in a thought experiment. One cannot complete a
full normative analysis of the supreme emergency issue without pushing it to
its limits. My objections to treating it as a normative doctrine or elevating the
status of communities to the levels Walzer accords them rest fundamentally

on a cosmopolitan rather than communitarian normative commitment
while attempting to grant a good deal of value to Walzers claims about
common life.
But one may well ask, what if what is at issue is not merely the absorp-
tion or conquest of one human community among others, but of the human
species itself ? The scenario, in other words, is not that of one human
community conquering or even enslaving another, but of the human species
itself being threatened with destruction, conquest, or permanent loss of
collective human freedom. In other words, the scenario is the science fiction
one of films such as Independence Day or War of the Worlds. Would the
defense of humanity collectively against non-human but sentient, rational,
and (presumably) technologically advanced adversaries be governed by the
war convention?
The philosophical rationale for raising such an admittedly fanciful scenario
is that it pushes to its limits the fundamental tension between an essentially
communitarian (tribal?) vision of ethical obligation and a fully Kantian
cosmopolitanism of all rational beings. The power of films and novels of this
sort is that they usually include an inspiring vision of all humanity united at
last by common struggle against the non-human foe while usually imaging
it to be a desperate struggle of humans against an initially invincible
adversary bent on human destruction. The emotional power of such scenarios
is borne by the noble human cooperation across previously unbridgeable
chasms of differing culture, religion, and race. While there are exceptions,
such films and novels usually end with the utter destruction of the adversary
as a result of discovering some Achilles heel that initially is not discernable.
Of course, in these scenarios the adversaries unusually have just shown up
and begun utterly unprovoked attacks on Earth and are all combatants in
the normal sense. Some, however, envision the response of humanity reaching
behind the immediate attackers to the complete destruction of the civilization
that sent them so as to permanently eliminate the threat.
Truthfully, I dont know the proper analysis of this kind of limit case. On
the one hand, one hopes that Kant was right in some deep sense about this
that all rational beings would find a core common morality, grounded in
rationality itself and not on the particulars of the biological natures in which
that rationality is instantiated. Certainly that is the basis for inter-human
moral cosmopolitanism the belief that, no matter how misguided the
150 M. L. Cook
adversary may be at the moment, in the end there are common moral values
to which we can appeal.
But what if Kantian convictions are mistaken? What if there is never going
to be any moral meeting-ground between humans and the attackers? What if
it is truly a struggle to the death in which only one species, one civilization,
can survive? What if the conflict is not driven by the fear to be expected by
the encounter with the unknown and the alien, which will pass as
communication and cross-species understanding develops? What if the ethical
gulf between the species is truly unbridgeable, and the gulfs of cross-species
misunderstanding and conflict permanently unbridgeable?
In such a scenario, Im inclined to think the kinds of supreme emergency

permissions Walzer envisages do, in fact, obtain. While human communities
come and go by a wide range of means, often tragic, the fact that humanity
itself persists can counsel a certain tortured equanimity in the face of that
inevitable evolution. But the loss of humanity itself would remove that
somewhat cold comfort, leaving no comfort at all. In that situation, perhaps,
supreme emergency truly obtains, and any means likely to reduce the risk is
justified.
If thats right (and, again, Im by no means sure it is!), it sets the limit case
of normative permission from which we can walk back with historically
informed and realist eyes to ask whether the loss of any human community
among others approximates it sufficiently to gain this permission. The reader
will already have discerned that I doubt it.
In the end, I believe, the wisest counsel remains Augustines. On the one
hand, the loss of Rome would be a tragedy of enormous proportions, and
only a fool could fail to see the need to defend it with all ones might. If Rome
falls, so does the tranquility of order it has provided, and which it will take
centuries to rebuild. On the other hand, even the loss of Rome is not the loss
of the Kingdom of God. For Augustine, this reassurance is grounded in a
religious assurance of providence. But I dont think it has to be. A sober
review of human history shows that tyrants dont rule forever (indeed, usually
not for very long). Even in the darkest of ages, it may be important for the
future that we preserved our humanity through them rather than discarding
principle in the felt exigencies of the moment.
Note
1
An excellent critique of the status afforded political community in Walzers thought is provided in Toner
(2005: 556 557).
References
Beitz, C. R. (1979) Bounded Morality: Justice and the State in World Politics, International Organization ,
33(2), pp. 405 424.
Bull, H. (1979) Recapturing the Just War for Political Theory, World Politics, 31(4), pp. 588 599.
Goodin, R. E. (1988) What is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen, Ethics, 98(4), pp. 663 686.
Johnson, J. T. (2000) Maintaining the Protection of Non-Combatants, Journal of Peace Research , 37(4), pp.
421 448.
Mapel, D. R. (1990) Prudence and the Plurality of Value in International Ethics, The Journal of Politics,
52(2), pp. 433 456.
Orend, B. (2006) The Morality of War (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press).
Toner, C. (2005) Just War and the Supreme Emergency Exemption, The Philosophical Quarterly, 55(221),
pp. 545 561.
Wakin, K. (2004) Controlling the Use of Force: A Role for Human Rights Norms in Contemporary Armed
Conflict, The American Journal of International Law, 98(1), pp. 1 34.
Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic
Books).
Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books).
Walzer, M. (1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (South Bend: University of Notre
Dame Press).
Walzer, M. (2004) Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Yoder, J. H. (1989) Is the Relaxation of the Restraints Upon War Justified When the Stakes are Especially
High? Peace Theology Miscellany #9, available at www.nd.edu/theo/research/jhy_2/writings/
justwar/relaxrestr.htm; Internet.
Biography
Martin L. Cook is Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Department
Head, Department of Philosophy, United States Air Force Academy in
Colorado Springs. He authored the 2003 book, The Moral Warrior, and
serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Military Ethics and
Parameters, the Scholarly Journal of the United States Army War College.

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On: 20 November 2014, At: 22:24

Journal of Military Ethics

Michael Walzer's Concept of 'Supreme

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15027570701381948

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Michael Walzers Concept of

In my experience of many years of teaching Michael Walzers classic Just and

1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/07/020138 14 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

down to these issues are inherently so complex that no coherent analysis is

Naturally, Walzer is careful to attempt to limit these permissions. He labors

suggests there is a kind of momentum to collective moral choices that makes

weapons would be.

if this observation is correct, it immediately points to one area of ethical

communities. At least at first glace, Walzers analysis seems prepared to

We must recognize that by . . . temporary submission of the vanquished . . . a new political

Americans (more complex because the disruption of their societies and

things Walzer wants it to do: first, to reaffirm the almost universal

Is Supreme Emergency a Normative Doctrine?

We come now to one of the central questions in this discussion: is supreme

possible disparity between personal ethics and the ethic of responsibility of

While this is clear advice, it is somewhat paradoxical: you have an

Not everything in war can be morally justified in supreme emergency we

The Nature and Importance of Political Communities

very processes of evolution of the international order Walzer describes clearly

that would, in normal circumstances, be criminal. Such an approach would

The Martians are Coming?

status of communities to the levels Walzer accords them rest fundamentally

In such a scenario, Im inclined to think the kinds of supreme emergency

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Michael Walzer's Concept of 'Supreme Emergency'

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