When is war justified?

[Kraznaya]

Some wars can be economically justifiable, as the Mexican-American War was.

um wat

 

[madviking]

wat

vcl

I'll "wuuuuut" with Dachs, too.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

But you don't make morality to be external just the same way. You think it's more internal to humanity; you agree with me that it arises from a human group. I think that you then say it comes from a common consensus of a group on how to act, serving the group's warmth, stability, happiness and safety. The whole point of morality is to serve these things.

Yes, one could say that.

And let's hold it there. Because the establishment of social convention and consensus is a natural social drive that ensure the pleasantry and safety of a human group.

Yes, that is why you have people arguing that morality is sort of coded into our genes. Which I find a stretch, but never mind.

It comes from the group for the sake of the group. Then thinkers of the group write down this establishment of common ground as morality to ensure that the safe consensus remains. Now, it becomes a moral code, a rational concept, something external that very rationally describes how to act according to the group. Morality becomes an idea, making it possible to be ideal. And the idea becomes applied back onto the real world and collides horribly and violently with many things, currently leading to "We must bomb Ongostan because they are not free."

I like where this is going, seems interesting. What you describe seems to be in core one of the most natural phenomenas of any intellectual concept. That over time, this concept may start to have a "will of its own" to speak figuratively.
So at stage one you got the original intention and understanding. In case of morality, an intuitive understanding, "internal" as you call it.
Now, as time progress, as every other intellectual concept the concept of morality is threatened by A) abuse of people with ill intentions and B) by people who either don't understand the concept to begin with or the original intention of it / or simply have a different understanding. The sum of this makes up this "will of its own". And I imagine that is particular so with morality, because it is so crucial to well, anything. The ultimate justification after all. So morality is probably bound to have a very significant will of its own as it is processed by human societies over time.

You describe this phase as "external" and I think I see where you are coming from. It in so far is external as it is removed from intuition and direct experiences, carried away into the abstract. That makes sense. Now I justified this development with the refinement of morality and accordingly with the refinement of its uses. However, you have a good point when you say that this power for refinement can just as well be used as a power for obscuring the original good use of morality, for virtually every madness imaginable.
And if this is what you primarily associate this external phase with, I can very much understand your resentment towards it. In deed, I am hoping here were have finally reached some real mutual understanding, which feels great

As to if the internal phase really is morality or not. Well as you suggest yourself, it is getting merely semantic here, but I am sure it is the established consensus for it to be called morality. Just not the kind that upholds those academic standards such as logical coherence. Which means, that this internal morality may be described as a kind of morality where you don't need to necessarily know why you think something is wrong, while with the theoretical, the academic kind of morality you at least always need to know where you are coming from. You know, the general requirements of academic work so to rule out gut-reasoning as a viable foundation.

Where I have still to strongly disagree with you is with how you characterize the internal and external phases in comparison and seemingly attribute all the possible bad effects of moral concepts to the latter.

First you assume the internal phase is inherently passive. How is that? I am under the impression that every kind of moral opinion can result in action, no matter if derived from abstract axioms or your gut. In fact, the very purpose of abstraction is to prevent people from abusing moral concepts for their selfish gain, while your gut may very well not hold such objections.
You go on to blame the external phase for all the violence and judgments. Again, how is that? 6000 years ago abstractions weren't really thought about (at least not in an academic sense, you still will have stories and symbols and such I assume), but people still made use of internal morality and people slaughtered each other like no tomorrow. I also don't see why you would think they weren't judgmental based on their institutional morals.

And in the end, it is my understanding and conviction that whatever the woes moral theory can produce, this mostly happens because people make faulty use of theoretic morality. Meaning - inconsistent use. So what we most of all need is a majority that realizes such by having a substantial understanding of moral theory. But what is true is that this does not have to be the case. One can simply choose very questionable fundamentals of a moral concept, those assumed dogmas we talked about. But I am afraid that is something we have no choice but to face, it won't go away by ignoring. Because, let us remember what morality is, establishing common judgmental ground. Which means, in the end, morality is literally all we have to make decision collectively, to differentiate between right and wrong. So morality will continue to play a major role, be it internally or externally. And if we want the "right" kind of moral concept to win, we need to be engaged in the debate what actually is moral and in deed would need to actively judge and defame people not following the resulting moral code (unless they had good reasons that is of course, we exactly don't want to go down the road of religions after all). That sounds mean, but it is the only way to enforce morality other than by law (which is helplessly over-challenged by such a task). Of course, there needs to be a balance between the suffering caused by enforcing morality and the suffering removed by succeeding in it. But it is not like this is anything new. We do so since forever and have to. I just wish ordinary people were more engaged in it. Well, I stop rambling

I'm happy you found I was so wrong that you had to answer.

And I am happy that you didn't feel threatened by it, but that it got you engaged. Alright, so much harmony makes me feel girly. [insert masculine sentence]

@Akkon888
Your post to me seems like a loose conglomerate of obvious facts (and more questionable stuff) which have been squeezed into a not so coherent order.
In short, what are you even trying to say?

 

[Angst]

Thanks for the answer SiLL, I don't have much more in retort (Yet again haha) but I want to answer your question because I need to explain when you ask:

First you assume the internal phase is inherently passive. How is that?

Well, the consensus is not passive in that people don't act, it's passive in that it actually doesn't actively change people's actions before it's written down.

This consensus is what can be read from people's actions. It can be described as a description (hehe); how they act, so to say, a description of their acts. It's more like a status quo; it doesn't violate or change before it becomes external. The moment it becomes external and becomes an actual moral system, it begins correcting people's actions forcefully, actively. Do you understand the difference from what I see?

A passive internal consensus is the general consensus of how people act; it's observable and neutral, and doesn't "act" on people as an idea independent of the internal, if you understand my incorrect yaddatalk.

An active external morality is an assumed direction of how people should act; it's designating and biased, and actively "acts" to change how people act; it's active.

 

[Akkon888]

wat
vcl

um wat

I'll "wuuuuut" with Dachs, too.

Polk had wanted to acquire Mexican territory through means of purchase, long before the Mexican-American War actually began. He favored manifest destiny for the purpose of economic individualism. "In 1845, [Polk] sent diplomat John Slidell to Mexico to purchase California and New Mexico for $24–30 million" before the war ever began. Having just completed a U.S. History course, I can say Polk's reasons for declaring war were less political and perhaps social, but definitely economic as he saw the acquisition of this territory as yielding prosperity to America.

Your post to me seems like a loose conglomerate of obvious facts (and more questionable stuff) which have been squeezed into a not so coherent order.
In short, what are you even trying to say?

Propaganda twists the public's perception of war so that it appears justifiable, in any sense. You can't have two belligerents participate in a war if either side has any doubt they are fighting for the right cause.

 

[innonimatu]

The conversation was getting a bit abstract to me, I'll admit, but I'm glad I tool a look at the most recent posts, I too like where this is heading!

And let's hold it there. Because the establishment of social convention and consensus is a natural social drive that ensure the pleasantry and safety of a human group. It comes from the group for the sake of the group. Then thinkers of the group write down this establishment of common ground as morality to ensure that the safe consensus remains. Now, it becomes a moral code, a rational concept, something external that very rationally describes how to act according to the group. Morality becomes an idea, making it possible to be ideal. And the idea becomes applied back onto the real world and collides horribly and violently with many things, currently leading to "We must bomb Ongostan because they are not free."

I to can see what you mean here. And I agree: morality as an ideal can become a very bad thing. But it can also be a good thing. And in the end I have to agree with SiLL:

So morality will continue to play a major role, be it internally or externally. And if we want the "right" kind of moral concept to win, we need to be engaged in the debate what actually is moral and in deed would need to actively judge and defame people not following the resulting moral code (unless they had good reasons that is of course, we exactly don't want to go down the road of religions after all). That sounds mean, but it is the only way to enforce morality other than by law (which is helplessly over-challenged by such a task). Of course, there needs to be a balance between the suffering caused by enforcing morality and the suffering removed by succeeding in it. But it is not like this is anything new. We do so since forever and have to. I just wish ordinary people were more engaged in it.

The problem with morality, in my view, is following it blindly. If people at least paid more attention to the contradictions between all the kinds of morality they follow a lot of harm would be avoided! In the example of war, which is what this thread is about, do people weight the idea of freeing others against the idea of killing others? Most people would, when asked separately, reflexively say that freedom was good and that killing was bad. But when it comes to applying these moral ideas in the context of a war, they too often go with just one or the other, depending on how the problem is posed to them. Using morality as a clutch to react instinctively without knowing the details of the issue, seems to me the real problem.

This is why "internal" (using lord_joakim's description) morals seem better: because those are applied to things we know in more detail, things going on inside our groups. Our judgement is more careful there. When dealing with distant issues we use not our "gut emotions"; instead we use abstract rationalizations, ideal, "external" morals, but we're judging on what we have little or no experience about, and the results can be disastrous. It's two different ways to apply morals, but I think we're still speaking about the same thing.

And you two really are out to prove here that Germany (and Denmark) still is the land of philosophers!

 

[Flying Pig]

Propaganda twists the public's perception of war so that it appears justifiable, in any sense. You can't have two belligerents participate in a war if either side has any doubt they are fighting for the right cause.

I think 1918 rather proved otherwise, at least for the men at the front.

 

[Dachs]

Polk had wanted to acquire Mexican territory through means of purchase, long before the Mexican-American War actually began. He favored manifest destiny for the purpose of economic individualism. "In 1845, [Polk] sent diplomat John Slidell to Mexico to purchase California and New Mexico for $24–30 million" before the war ever began. Having just completed a U.S. History course, I can say Polk's reasons for declaring war were less political and perhaps social, but definitely economic as he saw the acquisition of this territory as yielding prosperity to America.

Item: "justifiable" usually implies that one side wronged another and therefore a military response was warranted. An "economic justification" would be something like a ridiculously restrictive tariff imposed by one state on the other, or perhaps an embargo - you know, an actual grievance. "We want their stuff so we can be richer" does not count as "economically justifiable".

Item: Polk was not a representative member of Congress, much less a representative American. While he may have conceived of Manifest Destiny as a policy of economic expansion, the general idea was much bigger than that; it was ideological, even mystical. Even "expansion for expansion's sake" and "colors on a map" can be said to have played a role in Manifest Destiny equivalent to economic motivations. Reducing it to economics is comically reductionist, especially when nascent public opinion - and therefore, the public's understanding of what Manifest Destiny meant - actually played a role in the war crisis (see below).

Item: Economic justifications were certainly not at the heart of the Texas annexation crisis, which is what actually precipitated the war, regardless of any concurrent projects to transfer California to the United States. Annexation had been more or less inevitable (or at least, an enduring state of non-annexation was so highly improbable as to have been hardly worth mention) since the Battle of San Jacinto, but it took until the waning days of the Tyler administration for the government to hash out a joint annexation resolution acceptable to the Whigs and for the Whigs to realize that insofar as a public opinion existed on the East Coast, it was more or less in favor of annexation anyway. While Mexican policy was disastrously adrift during 1845-6, due to the state's standard political instability, very few people actually opposed war with the United States after annexation, so the intermediate moves - the treaty proposal, the first Fremont expedition, and finally the push south of the Nueces - were done pretty much faute de mieux.

---

When you argue with me - or anybody else - about history, please don't use "I just took a history class on it!" to try to make yourself look knowledgeable. You either are or you aren't, and the stuff you actually say means a lot more than whether you've taken an undergraduate course on the subject. I don't pretend to know much about American history (the Eastern Hemisphere is much more interesting), apart from the history of the United States Army and the events surrounding the War Between the States, but referring to the Mexican War as "economically justifiable" reaches so far beyond the pale of even high-school textbook history as to be just laughably wrong.

 

[Angst]

To be fair, I merely think he has another idea of what justification is than you. (And most probably the majority of people, I don't know!)

 

[cav scout]

"We want their stuff so we can be richer" does not count as "economically justifiable".

Sorry, but it kinda does count. The strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.

 

[Traitorfish]

If you're going to push so nihilistic a line as that, then why would you care whether it can be considered "justified" or not?

 

[cav scout]

If you're going to push so nihilistic a line as that, then why would you care whether it can be considered "justified" or not?

Why cognitive dissonance of course

 

[Flying Pig]

War Between the States

I'm taking you up on that one - while 'civil war' is an awful term, it's much closer to accurate than that!

Edited to clarify: a 'civil war' is a war between two parts of one country for control of the government, which does not accurately describe the American Civil War (it was the struggle by one part of a country for independance and the other part of that country for re-union), but 'the war between the states' is analagous to calling the English Civil War 'the war between the Counties' - it was a war between two countries, composed of states, not 34 seperate states.

 

[cav scout]

...but 'the war between the states' is analagous to calling the English Civil War 'the war between the Counties' - it was a war between two countries, composed of states, not 34 seperate states.

Hmmm, I don't think that is a great analogy. English counties and states in a Federal system are two different animals. Don't underestimate the power of the states in the U.S. federal system in the 1860s.

 

[Traitorfish]

The states weren't entering into the war as independent entities, though, they entered it as constituents of their respective federations. Vermont never declared war on Alabama, if you follow.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

@lord_joakim
You lost me...again ^^

A morality that does not change does as I understood this distinction of yours exist externally only, that is in some form of some sort of moral theory which is not actually practiced.
On the other hand, if it exists internally only, that is exists on an intuitional level only, it clearly shapes opinions and behavior one way or another and hence changes people. Otherwise it wouldn't exist at all.
No?
Sorry I don't get it otherwise.

@innonimatu
I am flattered by your attention I would not have expected to have anyone read our walls of text except us and I like what you have added. I think moral dilemmas as the one you named - bringing freedom and killing people - ideally would be discussed in school, supervised by teachers who know what they are doing.

Propaganda twists the public's perception of war so that it appears justifiable, in any sense. You can't have two belligerents participate in a war if either side has any doubt they are fighting for the right cause.

Probably. But I think that in many such cases "right" is a reflection of archaic, maybe even barbaric notions. Sure, that still is a kind of justification in its own right. But if we say "justified", I don't think we mean "somehow justified" - because everything is - but justified in a manner that is not archaic or barbaric. But one that is, well, at least sort of moral.

 

[Dachs]

I'm taking you up on that one - while 'civil war' is an awful term, it's much closer to accurate than that!

Edited to clarify: a 'civil war' is a war between two parts of one country for control of the government, which does not accurately describe the American Civil War (it was the struggle by one part of a country for independance and the other part of that country for re-union), but 'the war between the states' is analagous to calling the English Civil War 'the war between the Counties' - it was a war between two countries, composed of states, not 34 seperate states.

It is a name I used chiefly to make the post seem less dull, because it's not a commonly used name for the conflict anymore and it has slightly more interesting and romantic connotations.

It does have some modern validity because one of the key rallying cries of the conflict was the issue of states' rights. It's roughly as appropriate to use "War Between the States" for the American Civil War as it is to use "English Civil War" for a certain unrepresentative slice of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

There is no standard definition of "civil war" apart from a vague sense that it is a large-scale conflict with the bias of action being internal to one state, so your claim that the American Civil War was not really a civil war is idiosyncratic. In that sense, most conflicts which are usually described as civil wars were nothing of the sort, and many others only featured a very small part of the action compared to the larger whole that meets your definition.

 

[Angst]

SiLL, it's not a morality before it becomes an external idea.

Internal consensus: What is before the consensus becomes a moral idea; how people act.

External morality: What is after the consensus becomes a moral idea; how people should act.

Think of how you phrased it yourself: Sometimes, ideas may shape the world, and that's practically how morals work, as they are ideas that intervene in how you act. The whole deal is that when the internal consensus is only by itself, it's definitely observable and can be measured in words or thoughts; but it's not a designation or a direction.

My choice of the word "passive" was merely to distinguish from an "active" idea which actively changes how people should act. The "passive internal consensus" is merely how people act by mutual gut feeling.

To make a metaphor; let's assume there's a car driving towards a cross road section. It wants to drive through the cross, but it's hindered by other traffic in the other lane of the cross. Then the other cars hold for the car to cross the lane, and it does. That's the internal consensus.

Then people realize this was actually a practical thing and hire a traffic guard to point and whistle and control who should hold for who. That's the external morality.

Bad metaphor when the actual living guy became the deattached element, but you catch my drift on how he actively controls contrary to something that just happens... Don't take the word "passive" too literally, because, as what most probably made you confused, of course people still act. It's just that the consensus per definition doesn't control. It just is in itself by being a consensus.

 

[madviking]

The states weren't entering into the war as independent entities, though, they entered it as constituents of their respective federations. Vermont never declared war on Alabama, if you follow.

Missouri and Iowa 'fought' a bloodless war.

So did Michigan and Ohio.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

@lord_joakim
Alright, so I thought that by internal you basically just meant a kind of "natural" use of morality, of basic ideas of right and wrong as every group of humans will inevitable possess, if this group intends to be functional that is.
But how you now frame it (or how I just now understand you), it seems with internal you mean a consensus which is void of any kind of judgment, of any kind of sense of right or wrong - which in deed would not be something we could call morality.
But without a sense of right and wrong, such a consensus could depend on self-interest alone. And that makes me wonder about two things:

- First I thought your original position was that it is enough to just be nice. That however necessitates a sense of right and wrong, but now you say this can only be created by the external. However, you at least initially rejected the external.
Hugh?
- Secondly, why would the drivers allow the one crossing the road to pass. They seemingly have nothing to gain but just loose time. To find this worthwhile, I would claim those drivers would already need a sense of right and wrong and hence some kind of moral orientation.

Either I still don't get it or you are missing some serious coherence.