Walzer concludes that moral discourse about war is rather more similar to military strategy than we usually think. Each can be abused for nefarious purposes, but they share a common referent that is broadly understood by combatants (13–16). In both cases, the rules are often honored in the breach: just as just-war theorists know that ethical principles are often violated, so too must strategists be aware of the ubiquity of “confusion and disorder in the field” (14). However, given that, on Walzer’s argument, participants have at least some scope for making free choices, they must be perceived as people responsible for their actions, not as either victims or instruments. Moreover, Walzer argues, when we study the history of war, we see that we do in fact hold participants responsible for their actions. We have built up over time a “moral reality of war” (15); that is, a “set of articulated norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements” (44). Walzer grounds his just-war theory in this set of informal conventions created over time by human participants in military conflict, and calls it the “war convention” (127–221).
In appealing to the war convention, Walzer insists that both realism and relativism – the idea that norms are specific to particular times and places – underestimate the degree to which moral discourse about war is shared by different cultures separated by vast swathes of time and space (16–20). This is not to say that combatants and their civilian leaders always or even often abide by the convention, but that they know of and understand it. Moral terms about war – slaughter, brutality, cruelty, aggression, benevolent quarantine – are in fact broadly recognized by combatants, the evidence for which is the hypocrisy of those who act immorally (19–20). There would be no need to dissemble if war criminals did not know that their actions would be taken as criminal if honestly revealed. Walzer argues that, “The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy, we also find moral knowledge” (19). Walzer concludes that the realist claim that morality has no fixed reference in war is wrong: moral judgments are “socially patterned” rather than idiosyncratic (45), which makes it possible for just-war theorists to appeal to the convention and insist that breaches of it are unjustified. Given that living in our societies brings us awareness of the tenets of the convention, its principles have a stable meaning. There might indeed be people in “other worlds” to “whose inhabitants” Walzer’s arguments would be incomprehensible (20), but Walzer insists that nobody in our world can coherently claim ignorance of the general tenor of the war convention. There is a moral reality of war because moral precepts about war are an aspect of everyone’s experiences that are relatively stable across different societies.
Walzer considers the version of realism that attempts to describe the behavior of states in the anarchic international system, but it is important to note that his critique simply does not address all versions of realism. There is also a “prescriptive realism” that stipulates that states ought to act out of concern for national survival, because any attempt to wage just wars will increase military destructiveness by encouraging secularized crusades (for discussion, Orend 2000: 66–8, 2013: 257–68). On the prescriptive realist view, an amoral policy motivated by national security is the best that we can hope for in a world marked by moral disagreement and because just-war theorists “fill people’s head with talk of aggression” (Orend 2013: 258; for a similar argument, Calhoun 2001). Indeed, realism is not by any means always a militaristic doctrine. Hans Morgenthau, one of the major realists of the 1960s, joined Walzer in opposition to Vietnam, largely because of concern that the USA would overstretch itself (for discussion, Rafshoon 2001, Zambernardi 2011). He and Walzer even co-authored an article in Dissent on American responsibility for the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978).
Walzer does not address this position, so his case for just-war theory does not do as much as it might to assuage concern that notions of just war increase the humanitarian costs of war. On the prescriptive-realist view, just-war theory makes war more bellicose than it would otherwise be, rather than showing that it is possible for wars to maintain a modicum of moral decency such that they are not, as realists suggests, simply hellish (for Walzer’s discussion of the view that “war is hell,” see Walzer 2015a: 32–3; for critique of prescriptive realism, Orend 2013: 259–68). However, this omission is less significant than it might appear. Walzer’s intention in criticizing realism is not to refute all objections to just-war theory but to make a case for its meaningfulness and coherence. In this regard, prescriptive realism’s critique is rather different than the descriptive version, for it does not claim that talk of justice in war is a meaningless chimera but, rather, that it is wrongheaded. In other words, prescriptive realism’s challenge operates within the world of morality to which Walzer appeals, for it accepts the role of choice in human action, but rejects the particular set of moral prescriptions for which just-war theorists argue. So, Walzer’s writings on just war taken as a whole should be seen as an extended critique of the view that amoral behavior minimizes the havoc of war.
The most significant feature of Walzer’s critique of realism is what it tells us about the bases and method of his just-war theory. It is because moral judgments are shared across cultures and epochs that moral arguments about war are mutually comprehensible and just-war theorizing possible. So, although Walzer starts Wars by stating that he will not appeal to moral foundations, or “expound morality from the ground up,” but simply assume universal rights to life and liberty (Walzer 2015a: xxvi), the critique of realism reveals that the theory has a foundation. It is an interpretation of the discourse about war developed over centuries of military history. What Walzer means when he says that he will not consider the foundations of morality is that he will not seek to establish his premises in logical or abstract argumentation. Rather, he assumes that the tools needed for military ethics are immanent in the world and that, starting with a set of conventional understandings, it is possible to develop a coherent theory that is, often, critical of practice. This occurs by systematizing principles and juxtaposing them both to each other and to military events. That is, the moral reality of war does not consist of shared conclusions but of shared language and problems (xxviii). Walzer’s just-war theory uses conventional understandings as its starting point but seeks to reform them by exposing their incompatibility with other deeply held commitments. The method is at once interpretive and critical.
As just-war theory suggests that some actions in war are permissible, making the case for it requires Walzer also to address pacifist non-violence. Yet while Walzer starts Wars by addressing realism and builds his answer to it into the structure of his theory by virtue of the notion of the moral reality of war, he delays responding to pacifism until the six-page afterword (329–34). Walzer assimilates pacifism into Gandhian satyagraha or the direct action of the American civil-rights movement (Gandhi 1997, King 2011). The crux of Walzer’s critique is that, while non-violence is an attractive ideal, it is unrealistic, as it is “no defense at all against tyrants and conquerors” such as the Nazis, who are willing to do whatever is necessary to crush opponents (Walzer 2015a: 332). Against such opponents, nonviolence is “a disguised form of surrender” (333). To Walzer, the Nazis were “evil objectified in the world, and in a form so potent and apparent that there could never have been anything to do but fight against it” (Walzer 1971b: 4). So, the dream of a nonviolent world in which disputes are settled politically relies on ensuring the success of just-war attempts to forbid aggressive war (Walzer 2015a: 334).
Orend notes that Walzer does not attempt to address recent philosophical pacifism (Orend 2000: 70–2). While much of this work postdates Wars, Walzer does not devote sustained attention to it in any of his subsequent just-war theorizing.4 The challenge is that, like Walzer, pacifists point to conventional ideals, but suggest that, when properly understood, they point toward outright rejection