I’m going to deal here with some arguments I’ve seen recently in a number of forums with regard to the war in Ukraine. While the war continues past a thousand days, and the heroic resistance during the battle of Kyiv and spectacular breakthroughs in Kherson and Kharkiv are displaced in public memory by other geopolitical events, some commentators in safe countries are giving voice to arguments about “the futility of war”, “risk of nuclear annihilation” and calling reasoned, careful analysts like Lawrence Freedman “warmongers”.
Most directly: these arguments take the view of “we must abandon the Ukrainians: I don’t care how many civilians the Russians torture if Putin adds chunks of their country to his empire, because on a wider scale the way war affects me/humanity/me as part of humanity is worse”.
We are crucial juncture in the war. Russia is performing as badly as it ever has: thousands of soldiers consumed for kilometers of worthless ground, sending [ineffectual] North Korean troops into the meat-grinder, inability to retake sovereign Russian territory in Kursk, a collapsing ruble and soaring inflation/interest rates, strategic disaster in Syria, losses of military infrastructure and senior generals even in Moscow, etc. But the risks for Ukraine are severe: further offenses in 2023 could not be sustained, 2024 has been playing defence, unreliable support from Western leaders/Trump is now a major risk1, and retaking deeply embedded positions in e.g. the Donbas is serious stretch. Putin does not want to make peace: in fact, he has locked himself into trying to wring more than the burnt-out parts of the Donbas he holds as some kind of payoff for his catastrophically ill-conceived war that has wrecked the Russian economy, decimated the working-age population and turned Russia into an international pariah.
So it’s interesting to see these sorts of arguments – which I’m going to call I’m All Right Jack Pacifism – are re-emerging. They were very visible in the first days of the war on places like Twitter – but the basic evolution of the war (the resilience of Ukraine, the embarrassing performance of Russia as a “Great Power”, the basic irrelevance of nuclear weapons even as “red lines” were crossed again and again) has made even those with an actual ideological preference for Putin switch to something more sophisticated.
So based on the facts on the ground and the history of the war, these views are rather crude. But rhetoric and sophism aside, I think there are actually deep philosophical contradictions in these IarJ pacifisms that are at least somewhat interesting to examine.
I should make clear here my target here is not principled or religious pacifism: which universally applied would acknowledge the horror of war occurring anywhere, for whatever reason (and so would be campaigning pretty hard against Putin, I would imagine).
Rather, the features of I’m All Right Jack Pacifism (IarJP) are:
- Concern primarily with the physical well-being of those who are in a relatively safe position. These include fears of imminent nuclear war that will affect “all of us” (unspoken: “me”). These seem to take a consequentialist position in avoiding an infinite disaster.
- Concern primarily with the moral well-being of those who have barely been morally tested. Here the desire is to keep clean hands, to retain what Hegel disparagingly calls “the beautiful soul”. This seems to have a Kantian basis.
Most directly: these arguments take the view of “we must abandon the Ukrainians: I don’t care how many civilians the Russians torture if Putin adds chunks of their country to his empire, because on a wider scale the way war affects me/humanity/me as part of humanity is worse”2.
1. “peace at any cost because of the risk of nuclear war: people who disagree are warmongers”
This looks like a consequentialist argument: but appearances are deceptive, as it’s actually an argument to forego moral thinking entirely – something a true consequentialist has to constantly attend to (due to the ever-shifting potential outcomes).
This rather pious language assumes the moral high ground, but the argument actually has the same problem as Pascal’s Wager: it abuses the idea of infinitely bad outcomes to abrogate any rigourous moral thinking completely. If the stakes are as high as claimed, then extremely careful consideration of (i) what our moral model and values are (e.g. consequentialism) and (ii) how the choices we make are likely to feed into those – are crucial. Instead of doing this “peace” is invoked like it is a magic word.
But what if the idea of “peace” leads to morally worse outcomes? It could actually raise the likelihood of those dire moral stakes. This is at least thinkable, and cannot be ruled out a priori: in the same way blindly believing in Pascal’s God might damn one to hell anyway. With effort, one could make a principled argument for (e.g.) pacifism based on, say, deontology – but it isn’t easy, and those making these sorts of arguments seem to prefer self-righteousness to actually doing that serious moral work, which will of course involve terrible trade-offs.
So the argument is actually a-moral, while dressed in moral language. That position is not intellectually tenable to many serious observers who feel the need to do real ethical work the gravity of the situation demands. I’m certain Zelensky and those in Ukraine feel this moral burden powerfully – to keep one’s soul pure from these difficult questions is a great, and perhaps unattractive, luxury.
It’s not robust consequentialism.
2. “Putin believed that NATO/Ukraine was a threat and acted in self-defence. It doesn’t matter if we believe this: what’s important is the regime does”
On the first level, most obviously this a bit of sophistry (from a professor of history, no less!). Our interlocutor here knows that the factual basis for this claim is extremely dubious (unsupportable, actually: Ukraine was not a member of NATO in 2022, had no real prospect of becoming so, and had been invaded and occupied by Russia for 8 years with precious little international support, despite the Budapest memorandum). So instead they make a claim about internal belief states of a rather opaque “regime”. This sounds superficially sophisticated – we’re not arguing about facts, we’re arguing about beliefs! – and allows them to circle back to the idea that there must be some sort of no-smoke-without-fire basis for this belief, and so (quelle surprise!) it’s the West that bears responsibility in some mysterious deeper sense.
As an aside: This pattern of argument seems to recur in certain circles of radical thinking. It’s related to the “root cause” family of arguments, where a chain is consequences is built up and always found to terminate at at a well-known villain. That this villain is usually the USA is testament to the essential parochial nature of these worldviews.3
So on the one hand, most obviously this deprives the Ukrainians, the Russians (the Poles, Turks..) and even Putin of agency (that this argument is usually touted as an “anti-imperialist” one is particularly ironic: it’s a worldview that struggles to imagine any actor outside America as having agency). In this view, a fudged Kremlin/Regime/Putin is some kind of mechanised, deterministic system, which has no real ability to morally reason and has come to acquire certain beliefs about being “threatened” and now must be automatically “expected” to lash out. The fudge is important, as this view becomes increasingly hard to sustain if we expect it to apply to real identifiable individuals – especially Putin, who knows the value of propaganda and is nothing if not duplicitous.
Geopolitically, this is all rather silly: of course there are complex agencies going on here, and many of them are not overridingly concerned with the US or even “the West”. One only has to look at the support Turkey gave for the astonishing success of HTS in the Syrian revolution – an event of monumental importance in the eastern Mediterranean where the US was a bit-part player, at most.
But I think there’s a more interesting philosophical problem too. These sorts of anarchistic arguments for pacifism seem to rest on an essentially deontological framework: following Kant’s “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch“. Ultimately Kant wants to abolish standing armies entirely; but it’s worth noting that Kant would actually be a very ambivalent support here: one of his “articles” for peace states
No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state
Kant
which would clearly, I think, cast Putin as the aggressor and make a war of self-defence perfectly just, even if it did not ultimately lead to good outcomes.
The impulse behind this second sort I’m-alright-Jack pacifism is essentially Kantian I think4: that the Right is prior to the Good, and we must act according to rules established by rational faculties rather than on outcomes. The IarJ pacificist wants the benefits of this Kantian virtue: knowing that they can act to keep their hands clean, remain piously superior, and that this will hold whatever the consequences of their actions; but doesn’t want to acknowledge the stipulations Kant bakes into his moral philosophy.
Kant does lay something like a principled pacifist position out, whereby his theory of international relations becomes a broader case of his moral philosophy: that the categorical imperative (that your every judgement can be rationally defended as a universal maxim) is generalized to relations between states. Kant is therefore very much against any form of Realpolitik or means-to-an-end thinking: states should deal with each other rationally and in good faith, as ends-in-themselves.
But the view above: of effectively agentless behaviour, where Putin or the regime is not supposed to be able to make moral judgements at all, and is merely acted upon by stimulae (like “being threatened”) that might not be rationally defendable, militates directly against this. If actors in the geopolitical world have no rational agency, then we cannot expect our foreign policy maxims to ever become universalised. Kant would have no trouble identifying such a Russia as a despotic state, and while he would object to pre-emptive invasion or interference, would presumably have no problem whatsoever with vigorous self-defence.
So this isn’t robust deontology.
- Presently this is looking like a possibly defrayed risk – perhaps as a result of some brilliant diplomacy by Rutte or Zelensky? Or perhaps just a reflection of Trump’s general ineptitude as a negotiator? ↩︎
- The argument is not: “it’s bad because Ukrainian soldiers are dying” – the IarJ pacifist knows the Ukrainians are courageously fighting on their own initiative. The even cruder version is the Ukrainians don’t really “want to fight”, are “puppets” or “proxies” – this view is too inane for me to spend any time on here. ↩︎
- It isn’t the, perfectly evidenced, view that there are enormously heinous geopolitical policies (and fuck-ups) that are the USA’s responsibility: the Vietnam and Iraq wars spring to mind. It’s that everything going on in the world must be testament to the essentially depraved nature of the USA. That the US has been a laggard and had to be coaxed into every bit of support for Ukraine by the UK, Poland, Balts, and of course the Ukrainians themselves doesn’t seem to figure. Heck, the German Greens have been stancher supporters of Ukraine than the Biden administration. ↩︎
- One could also make a virtue ethical case, but given how many virtues: loyalty, promise-keeping, justice, bravery, compassion, protection of the weak against bullies are tied up with the defence of Ukraine, I think this is a non-starter. What virtue praises doormat-like behaviour towards aggressors? ↩︎