What moral limits should bind warfare—on terrorism, civilian risk, and humanitarian intervention—if ‘just war’ is meant to be a real constraint rather than a slogan?
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1. Guest
Michael Walzer is a political theorist and public intellectual, and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and editor emeritus for the magazine Dissent.
2. Interview Summary
Michael Walzer sketches ‘just war theory’ as a long tradition (classically shaped by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) that separates judgments about going to war (‘jus ad bellum’) from judgments about how war is fought (‘jus in bello’), and he defends treating those two assessments as independent. From that standpoint, he defines terrorism as the deliberate killing of innocents for political/military (and sometimes expressive) purposes, and argues it is always morally wrong—whether carried out by non-state groups or by states (he cites Hiroshima as an example). He then turns to the moral pressures of asymmetric conflict—when insurgents such as the Taliban fight from civilian cover against a high-tech force like the United States Army—and focuses on the hard question of what risks soldiers should be required to take to reduce civilian casualties, illustrating the dilemma with concrete battlefield scenarios and historical bombing tradeoffs.
A recurring theme is that moral thinking about war has to stay “close to the ground”: Walzer emphasizes learning from military history, literature, and veterans, and he criticizes approaches that treat the subject as a purely intra-philosophical debate detached from the lived realities of combat. On postwar justice, he argues that the Nuremberg trials worked as well as they did because (temporarily) they combined something like legislative, executive, and judicial authority—whereas standing institutions like the International Criminal Court lack enforcement power and can create perverse incentives or retaliation without offering protection. Relatedly, he defends the view that ordinary soldiers shouldn’t be blamed simply for fighting in an unjust war: the key is holding people responsible for violations in conduct (war crimes), while recognizing that young conscripts are typically acting under strong social and political pressure and cannot reasonably be expected to adjudicate the justice of the war for themselves.
On intervention, Walzer positions himself as generally noninterventionist but argues for humanitarian intervention to stop massacres (with “mixed motives” acknowledged) and stresses that interveners should leave as soon as local decision-making can be reestablished; he rejects using military force solely to install democracy, while noting that after total wars victors sometimes inherit duties of reconstruction (he points to Japan after WWII). He also distinguishes a state’s foreign policy from what he calls a “foreign policy for the left”: unions, NGOs, and civic organizations can support democratic struggles abroad through solidarity, resources, and participation without turning that into state-led military adventurism. Finally, he previews a more personal forthcoming book on “liberal” as an adjective—arguing it usefully constrains and pluralizes deeper commitments (e.g., majority rule bounded by rights, a contrast he illustrates via Viktor Orbán)—and he closes by defending political theory’s value as clarifying and organizing arguments for citizens and leaders, citing his satisfaction that Just and Unjust Wars has been used at United States Military Academy at West Point even by readers who disagree with him.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:59 - Just war
05:13 - Non-combative immunity and terrorism
07:49 - Combating terrorism and asymmetric warfare
16:02 - Rules of engagement and WW2
19:08 - Theorizing about war
21:35 - Metaethics
26:15 - Lessons from Nuremberg
32:40 - Problems with a world state
34:41 - ICC
37:04 - Responsibility of soldiers in war
40:58 - Pragmatic concern?
43:55 - Excuse vs. innocence
45:12 - Less risky option?
47:50 - Possible improvements
49:30 - Handling Russia/Ukraine
52:00 - Promoting democracy
58:35 - Non-interventionism
1:01:51 - Foreign policy for the left
1:06:55 - ‘Liberal’ as an adjective
1:12:31 - Examples
1:16:29 - Political relevance of political philosophy
1:20:32 - Conclusion
