War already is illegal. Quoting from that wikipedia article on the Kellog-Briand pact:
"The interdiction of aggressive war was confirmed and broadened by the United Nations Charter, which states in article 2 paragraph 4 that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations." The consequence of this is that after World War II, nations have been forced to invoke the right of self-defense or the right of collective defense when using military action and have also been prohibited from annexing territory by force."
And if you take a look at the Nuremburg principles:
You'll see that under article VI(a), planning to start, and participating in, a war of aggression, is a war crime.
In spite of the fact that these laws are not universally and properly enforced, I still think it's a very good thing they're on the books and that they are sometimes enforced. When Great Britain passed its laws against slavery, they weren't enforced fully or properly either, but with time, they came to be.
These laws will probably be around for a long, long time before they actually are enforced as reliably and justly as (say) domestic laws against murder. But having them on the books, and having countries agreeing to them in principle, is an indispensible first step.
As so many have said, war is already illegal, unless it's either:
A. In self defense, or
B. With the approval of the U.N. Security Council, made up of the world's most powerful nations, with a rotating spot for the rest.
Did that stop us from spinning the Iraq war as a war of "Self-Defense" to pro-actively kill Saddam and then all the terrorists and thus make everything happy for Americans?
No.
Did the Security Council say "holy shit this is insane, no you can't go to war against Iraq guys"?
Yes.
Did we fucking care?
Not one whit.
Who the fuck is going to enforce something like this?
War is retarded but it's kind of hard to outlaw it when so many retards believe in it. It would be the same way with murder if people believed it was required to get along with other people. Humanity as a whole has to evolve culturally to the point where the majority believes war to be wrong. Although by that time I imagine we'll have troubles with Klingons that we'll have to solve with war.
Outlawing war would let brutal dictators and crazed murderers stay in power. What if hitler decided not to attack other countries but just stay in germany and genocide the jews? if war was outlawed back then, Hitler would be able to continue on killing them.
Outlawing war would let brutal dictators and crazed murderers stay in power. What if hitler decided not to attack other countries but just stay in germany and genocide the jews? if war was outlawed back then, Hitler would be able to continue on killing them.
I'm pretty sure WWII didn't stop the holocaust, it happened anyway. It actually was much bigger with the war because it expanded to the Jews in the countries Germany invaded.
Hoz on
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
edited November 2006
In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked.
I have seen that movie way too many times.
On topic: this sounds like a good idea on paper. But just how could we implement it? How would a trial system work when the defendent is the leader (or leaders) of a country who are accused of making war on another nation? Would they still be presumed innocent until proven guilty? Or would it be easier to just presume them guilty until proven innocent? How much would self defense enter into it? Would economics and terrorist actions be considered weapons of war? If so, does that absolve someone for attacking another nation when these weapons are used against them?
Someone in the UN calling for a motion to outlaw war would be pretty interesting though. I keep imagining the United States being one of the three countries saying nay.
I'd imagine it would be quite a bit easier to sort out a war than murder. It's not like there would be war who-dun-its, like a "Who invaded Chile?" war mystery.
I'd imagine it would be quite a bit easier to sort out a war than murder. It's not like there would be war who-dun-its, like a "Who invaded Chile?" war mystery.
Man, haven't you been following the fallout from this election among the neoconservatives? The little circle of think tankers who more than anyone not actually on the presidential cabinet probably drove us into war are currently all pointing at each other and yelling "I didn't want to go in Iraq!! HE wanted us to go in Iraq!!"
It would have played out differently if war was outlawed and there was some strong network of nations enforcing it. They would have asked themselves "Do I risk jail and severely fucking over my country for political reasons?" and however they voted for the war would have been final, nobody would give a fuck about their excuses if the war was deemed unlawful. Of course, the enforcement would be the problem. Because punishment simply isn't enough, this network would have to be able to replace an entire government.
Yeah, the problem is this. You have two possibilities:
1) War is always illegal. There's no such thing as a justified war, even in self-defense. This has the problem of being terrifically stupid, as you can't tell a nation that is being attacked not to defend itself.
2) War is legal only when there's a really good reason, with "really good reason" defined however you please. This sounds good on paper, but if any random nation wants to go to war for any reason, it won't be hard to spin it in such a way as to ostensibly appear to be for a "really good reason". This is more or less what we kinda-sorta have now.
And both of these scenarios ignore the fact that "war" is not a binary state. You can wage hostilities against someone without it technically being a war. You can assist one side in a conflict without officially being at war with the side you're trying to get ass-fucked. The US wasn't at war at any time during the 80's, but that didn't stop us from supporting skirmishes all over the damned place.
In short, the world is too complicated a place to make outlawing war a meaningfull proposition. You may as well try to outlaw poverty.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
It's a very noble ideal to make wars illegal, but it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work not because it's practically and technically impossible to outlaw war, but because conflict is a fundamental part of human nature and it is inevitable.
What we need is not inhuman ideals for peace and love. What we need is a set of strict, enforcible (sp?) rules and standards so that when wars do happen, they happen with the least amount of casualties and damage possible.
It's very important that these rules and standards are practical to enforce, because otherwise we run into the Pacifist Fallacy.
If John hits Jack and Jack hits back, Jack lowers himself to John's level and becomes just as bad as John.
This is a fallacy because John is hitting an innocent while Jack is hitting a guilty, and therefore not equally bad.
At first I thought he was talking about inappropriate reactions to self-defense, but no--he's talking about punishment after the fact, which seems to tie in to your point after all. The guy I quoted is actually pretty obnoxious, too--he posits, essentially, that a guilty person loses his human rights, and that people who think otherwise simply have poor reasoning skills. Our (Western--Netherlands, apparently) society is too soft on crime, he says, because people with good verbal skills and poor reasoning skills keep rising into power.
My confusion: 'the Pacifist Fallacy' seems to relate to the degree of punishment, not its practicality, as you suggest, so I'm not sure this is the one you mean. If it is, then I just don't understand at all--please explain?
Anyhow, I agree with an earlier poster. When you say that war is necessary because conflict is inevitable, you're setting up a false dichotomy. War is conflict improperly resolved.
Who exactly doesn't benefit here, the powerful countries get a more stable world as various dictators are less willing to attack their neighbours and the less powerful ones get protection from those stronger than them.
Who gave you the idea that powerful countries necessarily want a stable world?
If John hits Jack and Jack hits back, Jack lowers himself to John's level and becomes just as bad as John.
This is a fallacy because John is hitting an innocent while Jack is hitting a guilty, and therefore not equally bad.
At first I thought he was talking about inappropriate reactions to self-defense, but no--he's talking about punishment after the fact, which seems to tie in to your point after all. The guy I quoted is actually pretty obnoxious, too--he posits, essentially, that a guilty person loses his human rights, and that people who think otherwise simply have poor reasoning skills. Our (Western--Netherlands, apparently) society is too soft on crime, he says, because people with good verbal skills and poor reasoning skills keep rising into power.
My confusion: 'the Pacifist Fallacy' seems to relate to the degree of punishment, not its practicality, as you suggest, so I'm not sure this is the one you mean. If it is, then I just don't understand at all--please explain?
Pacifist Fallacy basically states that it's retarded to pass pacifist judgments because there will always be someone who will take the aggressive route.
Down below, Donald Selsing in his comment explained it perfectly. He goes into tangents about religion, but the following bit is sufficient to explain the fallacy.
...it seems to me that pacifists today have generally set up false dichotomies - that the choices we can make are between violence and non-violence, or between peace and war, and that in so choosing we are really choosing between sin and sinlessness. That is, Christian pacifists seem to propose that using military force is sinful, while refraining therefrom is sinless.
But none of us collectively or individually have such stark choices. In the context of the war, violence exists already. It is impossible to choose non-violence; our only choice is what type and amount of violence we shall use. And even if we had refrained from using violence against those who attacked us, we would not have gained peace. The violence against us would have only intensified.
Also what's all this "Justice leads to Peace" or "Peace is presence of Justice" stuff meant to be?
I need some actual arguments for those cos they sound like stupidly simplified catchphrases. Perhaps someone knows a book or something?
It's from the same people who say "...but World War II was a good war" whenever you question their insistence that war is the only solution to whatever conflict their political party has their attention on. To be fair, historically they're right 50% of the time!
We should totally start making reference to the Libertarian Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that government interference in the free market is bad
And, like, the Pro-life Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that abortion is immoral
Oh! And the Liberal Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that government programs can have a positive net effect on the world if properly administered
We should totally start making reference to the Libertarian Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that government interference in the free market is bad
And, like, the Pro-life Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that abortion is immoral
Oh! And the Liberal Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that government programs can have a positive net effect on the world if properly administered
Pacifist Fallacy is a fallacy. Pacifism is about opposition to war by refusal to take up arms or aggressive measures against threats. Yet the fallaciousness of it shows itself when you realize that:
1- There will always be agressors, and there will always be wars.
2- When war actually comes, pacifists are just as likely to get hurt or die as non-pacifists. Their pacifism does not contribute or lead to peace. On the contrary, the enemy is more likely to take advantage of their lack of resistance, and thus escalate war.
You can be sarcastic all you want. The fact of the matter is that the fallacy is existent and valid (in its logical form), but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
Maybe that's because it doesn't exist as a fallacy, but is in fact just a straw-man caricature of an opinion you don't like, which some bloggers reclassified as a fallacy to make it look bad?
but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
Maybe that's because it doesn't exist as a fallacy, but is in fact just a straw-man caricature of an opinion you don't like, which some bloggers reclassified as a fallacy to make it look bad?
but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
Maybe that's because it doesn't exist as a fallacy, but is in fact just a straw-man caricature of an opinion you don't like, which some bloggers reclassified as a fallacy to make it look bad?
but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
Maybe that's because it doesn't exist as a fallacy, but is in fact just a straw-man caricature of an opinion you don't like, which some bloggers reclassified as a fallacy to make it look bad?
Well, in immediate terms, it's probably true that pacifism won't always lead to the best result when applied to an ongoing conflict with people who're mostly immune to dialogue. For example, I would like to see some military intervention in the Darfur region, and though it's ridiculous to say that World War II was a good war, I'm glad the United States got involved.
Doesn't mean that war is inevitable, or that it's a legitimate and necessary tool of the state, or that even that war is often a good idea--only that in some situations, it might be. But...
My issue is that we seem to have taken the Pacifist Fallacy and twisted it into a fallacy of our own, namely that peace and love are inhuman and that world peace is not going to be possible ever. The Pacifist Fallacy is only a fallacy from a national perspective in a situation where some other people are The Bad Guys. For an end to war, we'd need a global perspective and an end to extremism on all sides, and a general consideration of net benefit.
The Pacifist Fallacy is, I think, an argument against absolute pacifism in the short term, but not a proof of the inevitability of war.
edit: and it's fair to call it a strawman. It describes a specific and extreme situation, where the assumption is that military intervention is going to bring about the greatest good.
Wow it took awhile to catch up in this but anyhow...
I think the root problem to all of this is the human. If we want peace we have to first achieve a stable environment to grow peace from. We at least need one institution creating the rules and comprised of religions and philosophies that don’t conflict. We would also need a type of "forced" education system where the younger generations will be imbued with the lessons and problems that faced the earlier. Education is key to maintaining peace and keeping a civilization in working order and hopefully preventing an "entropy" effect. Religion would also play a key role in the government. Now you may disagree with a certain belief system but it generally creates a well rounded individual with a defined moral structure (obviously if it’s taught and practiced right). A tight restriction would need to be in place on entertainment (mostly concerning television) and "dangerous" ideologies and cancers to the state would have to be dealt with at their primitive stages. The main goal would be educating the human into understanding what it takes to have peace rather than always just trying to make it from an environment that can’t sustain it.
And by one institution I'm refering to the world being under the rule of one government.
Basically a good 1984...which would most likely fail
Also just on the war idea in general, you can’t have peace if you have so many nations comprised of opposing viewpoints and objectives. As long as humans are separated by "lines", we will never fully understand or appreciate each other.
Yeah, the problem is this. You have two possibilities:
1) War is always illegal. There's no such thing as a justified war, even in self-defense. This has the problem of being terrifically stupid, as you can't tell a nation that is being attacked not to defend itself.
2) War is legal only when there's a really good reason, with "really good reason" defined however you please. This sounds good on paper, but if any random nation wants to go to war for any reason, it won't be hard to spin it in such a way as to ostensibly appear to be for a "really good reason". This is more or less what we kinda-sorta have now.
And both of these scenarios ignore the fact that "war" is not a binary state. You can wage hostilities against someone without it technically being a war. You can assist one side in a conflict without officially being at war with the side you're trying to get ass-fucked. The US wasn't at war at any time during the 80's, but that didn't stop us from supporting skirmishes all over the damned place.
In short, the world is too complicated a place to make outlawing war a meaningfull proposition. You may as well try to outlaw poverty.
Why are those the only two options? At present war is illegal except for in self-defence, or for collective defence. (ie, the first Iraq war, when the US was attacking Iraq not to defend itself, but to defend Kuwait.)
The US may have chosen not to call what they did in Panama or Grenada "wars" (rather like G.W. Bush deciding to call his POW's "Enemy Combatants" in order to pretend he wasn't breaking international law) but I don't think one has to be a flaming-mad left-wing-extremist like me to see that they pretty clearly fit the definition.
The fact that neither G.H.W Bush or Reagan had to face the ICC or were punished as war criminals doesn't change the fact that they are/were war criminals. In the long run, if they are judged as such, that will represent progress toward a world without war.
Why are those the only two options? At present war is illegal except for in self-defence, or for collective defence. (ie, the first Iraq war, when the US was attacking Iraq not to defend itself, but to defend Kuwait.)
This is an example of ElJeffe's "War is legal only when there's a really good reason, with "really good reason" defined however you please." option.
The guy with the bigger guns can always say ANYTHING HE WANTS was self-defense, even after it's been conclusively demonstrated it wasn't.
Hell, didn't Hitler claim at the time that the invasion of Poland was self-defense?
Frankly I think the way forward isn't to have less war. It's to develop defensive technology so good that war itself is pretty pointless and/or casualty-less.
Unfortunately this pretty much requires us to have forcefields we can erect anywhere, around anything, and I'm pretty sure we'd eventually figure out how to get through them anyway. And as a side-point, the corollary of it would be that while the status quo is maintained, the status quo is maintained and generally the status quo sucks ass for 70%+ of the world's population.
Posts
Clearly you have forgotten the term "Police Action."
"The interdiction of aggressive war was confirmed and broadened by the United Nations Charter, which states in article 2 paragraph 4 that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations." The consequence of this is that after World War II, nations have been forced to invoke the right of self-defense or the right of collective defense when using military action and have also been prohibited from annexing territory by force."
And if you take a look at the Nuremburg principles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles
You'll see that under article VI(a), planning to start, and participating in, a war of aggression, is a war crime.
In spite of the fact that these laws are not universally and properly enforced, I still think it's a very good thing they're on the books and that they are sometimes enforced. When Great Britain passed its laws against slavery, they weren't enforced fully or properly either, but with time, they came to be.
These laws will probably be around for a long, long time before they actually are enforced as reliably and justly as (say) domestic laws against murder. But having them on the books, and having countries agreeing to them in principle, is an indispensible first step.
A. In self defense, or
B. With the approval of the U.N. Security Council, made up of the world's most powerful nations, with a rotating spot for the rest.
Did that stop us from spinning the Iraq war as a war of "Self-Defense" to pro-actively kill Saddam and then all the terrorists and thus make everything happy for Americans?
No.
Did the Security Council say "holy shit this is insane, no you can't go to war against Iraq guys"?
Yes.
Did we fucking care?
Not one whit.
Who the fuck is going to enforce something like this?
The second sentence is correct.
War will not end when it's illegal--it already is.
War will end when people stop believing the first sentence.
Yeah, world war II
Warsaw Pact?
yeah, Cold War
In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked.
I have seen that movie way too many times.
On topic: this sounds like a good idea on paper. But just how could we implement it? How would a trial system work when the defendent is the leader (or leaders) of a country who are accused of making war on another nation? Would they still be presumed innocent until proven guilty? Or would it be easier to just presume them guilty until proven innocent? How much would self defense enter into it? Would economics and terrorist actions be considered weapons of war? If so, does that absolve someone for attacking another nation when these weapons are used against them?
Someone in the UN calling for a motion to outlaw war would be pretty interesting though. I keep imagining the United States being one of the three countries saying nay.
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
The issue is that you simply cannot enforce law agaisnt the hegemon without its consent.
No, rationalizing war is very easy.
If you try to determine what causes war in genral, not rationalize it, you'll go crazy :-P
I remember reading something about that, and man, that worked great.
1) War is always illegal. There's no such thing as a justified war, even in self-defense. This has the problem of being terrifically stupid, as you can't tell a nation that is being attacked not to defend itself.
2) War is legal only when there's a really good reason, with "really good reason" defined however you please. This sounds good on paper, but if any random nation wants to go to war for any reason, it won't be hard to spin it in such a way as to ostensibly appear to be for a "really good reason". This is more or less what we kinda-sorta have now.
And both of these scenarios ignore the fact that "war" is not a binary state. You can wage hostilities against someone without it technically being a war. You can assist one side in a conflict without officially being at war with the side you're trying to get ass-fucked. The US wasn't at war at any time during the 80's, but that didn't stop us from supporting skirmishes all over the damned place.
In short, the world is too complicated a place to make outlawing war a meaningfull proposition. You may as well try to outlaw poverty.
What we need is not inhuman ideals for peace and love. What we need is a set of strict, enforcible (sp?) rules and standards so that when wars do happen, they happen with the least amount of casualties and damage possible.
It's very important that these rules and standards are practical to enforce, because otherwise we run into the Pacifist Fallacy.
At first I thought he was talking about inappropriate reactions to self-defense, but no--he's talking about punishment after the fact, which seems to tie in to your point after all. The guy I quoted is actually pretty obnoxious, too--he posits, essentially, that a guilty person loses his human rights, and that people who think otherwise simply have poor reasoning skills. Our (Western--Netherlands, apparently) society is too soft on crime, he says, because people with good verbal skills and poor reasoning skills keep rising into power.
My confusion: 'the Pacifist Fallacy' seems to relate to the degree of punishment, not its practicality, as you suggest, so I'm not sure this is the one you mean. If it is, then I just don't understand at all--please explain?
Anyhow, I agree with an earlier poster. When you say that war is necessary because conflict is inevitable, you're setting up a false dichotomy. War is conflict improperly resolved.
Pacifist Fallacy basically states that it's retarded to pass pacifist judgments because there will always be someone who will take the aggressive route.
http://onehandclapping.blogspot.com/2002_11_24_onehandclapping_archive.html
Down below, Donald Selsing in his comment explained it perfectly. He goes into tangents about religion, but the following bit is sufficient to explain the fallacy.
Interesting.
I need some actual arguments for those cos they sound like stupidly simplified catchphrases. Perhaps someone knows a book or something?
No, we learned about it as a fallacy in my philosophy class last year. I didn't make it up.
And, like, the Pro-life Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that abortion is immoral
Oh! And the Liberal Fallacy, which is an argument of the form that government programs can have a positive net effect on the world if properly administered
Pacifist Fallacy is a fallacy. Pacifism is about opposition to war by refusal to take up arms or aggressive measures against threats. Yet the fallaciousness of it shows itself when you realize that:
1- There will always be agressors, and there will always be wars.
2- When war actually comes, pacifists are just as likely to get hurt or die as non-pacifists. Their pacifism does not contribute or lead to peace. On the contrary, the enemy is more likely to take advantage of their lack of resistance, and thus escalate war.
You can be sarcastic all you want. The fact of the matter is that the fallacy is existent and valid (in its logical form), but perhaps not very commonly referred to as a fallacy.
I'm pretty sure philosophy professors don't have a habit of making up fallacies out of thin air.
They're philosophy professors. Making things up out of thin air is their job.
Touche.
Seriously though.
Doesn't mean that war is inevitable, or that it's a legitimate and necessary tool of the state, or that even that war is often a good idea--only that in some situations, it might be. But...
My issue is that we seem to have taken the Pacifist Fallacy and twisted it into a fallacy of our own, namely that peace and love are inhuman and that world peace is not going to be possible ever. The Pacifist Fallacy is only a fallacy from a national perspective in a situation where some other people are The Bad Guys. For an end to war, we'd need a global perspective and an end to extremism on all sides, and a general consideration of net benefit.
The Pacifist Fallacy is, I think, an argument against absolute pacifism in the short term, but not a proof of the inevitability of war.
edit: and it's fair to call it a strawman. It describes a specific and extreme situation, where the assumption is that military intervention is going to bring about the greatest good.
I think the root problem to all of this is the human. If we want peace we have to first achieve a stable environment to grow peace from. We at least need one institution creating the rules and comprised of religions and philosophies that don’t conflict. We would also need a type of "forced" education system where the younger generations will be imbued with the lessons and problems that faced the earlier. Education is key to maintaining peace and keeping a civilization in working order and hopefully preventing an "entropy" effect. Religion would also play a key role in the government. Now you may disagree with a certain belief system but it generally creates a well rounded individual with a defined moral structure (obviously if it’s taught and practiced right). A tight restriction would need to be in place on entertainment (mostly concerning television) and "dangerous" ideologies and cancers to the state would have to be dealt with at their primitive stages. The main goal would be educating the human into understanding what it takes to have peace rather than always just trying to make it from an environment that can’t sustain it.
And by one institution I'm refering to the world being under the rule of one government.
Basically a good 1984...which would most likely fail
Also just on the war idea in general, you can’t have peace if you have so many nations comprised of opposing viewpoints and objectives. As long as humans are separated by "lines", we will never fully understand or appreciate each other.
Why are those the only two options? At present war is illegal except for in self-defence, or for collective defence. (ie, the first Iraq war, when the US was attacking Iraq not to defend itself, but to defend Kuwait.)
The US may have chosen not to call what they did in Panama or Grenada "wars" (rather like G.W. Bush deciding to call his POW's "Enemy Combatants" in order to pretend he wasn't breaking international law) but I don't think one has to be a flaming-mad left-wing-extremist like me to see that they pretty clearly fit the definition.
The fact that neither G.H.W Bush or Reagan had to face the ICC or were punished as war criminals doesn't change the fact that they are/were war criminals. In the long run, if they are judged as such, that will represent progress toward a world without war.
The guy with the bigger guns can always say ANYTHING HE WANTS was self-defense, even after it's been conclusively demonstrated it wasn't.
Hell, didn't Hitler claim at the time that the invasion of Poland was self-defense?
Unfortunately this pretty much requires us to have forcefields we can erect anywhere, around anything, and I'm pretty sure we'd eventually figure out how to get through them anyway. And as a side-point, the corollary of it would be that while the status quo is maintained, the status quo is maintained and generally the status quo sucks ass for 70%+ of the world's population.