Final thoughts on Shue

I guess I was almost disappointed in the way Shue rationalizes his ideas. On one hand, he almost comes off as a pacifist, but on another, he basically justifies any cause of war, and any means of war so long as it adds to the war's end. It just makes me think of every other rules of war discussion: Well, war is bad, and people shouldn't just kill for no reason; but there are reasons for killing, and there are means of killing which may be frowned upon but are essential to the war also. In this respect, Shue is the same as everyone else, however, I think he hits a note with me saying that you cannot have one level of war unjust and the other just. That is, you cannot conduct a war in an unjust manner even though the resort to war is just; they just don't intermix.

Shue argues that proportionality is a factor when dealing with war and gives two reasons why it fails. I think the general opinion of the class had agreed with these two opinions: that the ability to weigh our own troops' lives and others' is not really viable, and that arbitrary factors and justifications, such as liberty or freedom, simply cannot have a price put on them. However, why then do we have war, and in terms of weighing the harm done to others versus the harm prevented from being done, are any wars just?

To my knowledge, there does not seem to be a war that hasn't escalated from, "defending our nation" to "freeing peoples of X nation" or "fighting for the freedom of the world", but what is freedom? Is it freedom when you can live your lives day by day without intervention from the government saying that what you are doing is wrong and not allowed? If so, then no country is free. Upon entering a country, you abide by the laws of the country, and if you don't like them, you do not have to go to said country. In a wartime context, if what you are fighting for is freedom, then you might as well be fighting for world peace (which in itself is a majorly unattainable end from fighting, but regardless of that fact...), or some other unattainable end, because there has never been a circumstance in recorded history when a state has had freedom. If this state exists, and you can say this is true freedom, then prove me wrong.

My point of this argument I guess is to add an addition to Shue's objections to proportionality. That in weighing your options, not only is it difficult because you cannot come to consensus about the value of lives, or that certain aspects cannot have a value attributed to them, but that certain aspects that people fight for do not exist, and thus cannot have any weight whatsoever in determining whether or not a war is just.

If you have freedom, you do not have a government. If you do not have a government, you cannot use proportionality as a criterion for just war, as you must always weigh your own life over the life of another, otherwise you are simply being foolish or being governed by divinity.