How many years will the United States be willing to engage in war in Iraq? As the Secretary of Defence speculated we may be in Iraq (fighting I presume) for 12 more years. More? And as Cindy Sheehan stands at the gates of the War Criminal Bush in the cause of denouncing the war, she can say that this war was a personal sacrifice and consequence. For most of the rest of us we can feel nothing in the same way. Oh yes there are those of us who oppose the war, but our sacrifice is limited in the same way as those that stand and cheer for this bloody quagmire.
The sacrifice is limtied to "we feel your pain". We will never be called upon to give our lives unless by our own individual choice we choose to - and frankly lets face it - we do not make that choice. We reject this alternative for many reasons, some of which include that I am opposed to the war or in paraphrasing the words used in a rare moment of honesty of Vice President Cheney, we have other priorities.
University of Oregon Professor Philosophy Cheney Ryan has identified the concept of the Princple of Personal Integrity. Professor Ryan correctly raises the ethical question of burden sharing in the question of war. If the cause of my nation makes it worthy for war and I support this war am I willing to die in that cause. As the Founding Fathers pledged their lives and sacred honor.
My thinking was that if I did not deem that war worthy enough for me
to die in it--tomorrow, say--then how in good conscience could I
endorse policies that ask someone else to make this sacrifice? To do so
would be a bit like saying: "I am all in favor of social policy X, a policy
that will impose an enormous cost on a certain number of people--
but I am not willing to bear that cost myself. I support it, rather, in the
full knowledge that I will not be asked to bear that cost." As an
academic philosopher, I'm inclined to restate the thinking here in
terms of a more general principle for thinking about personal responsibility
and military action:You should only endorse those military actions of
your country in which you yourself would be willing
to give your life (tomorrow).
How many Americans are able to accept the consequences of this moral imperative? Not many. So many of us have been so detached from war that we cannot even muster up a coordinated and strong opposition to this war from our elected Congresional rRepresentatives until those that have sacrificed such as Cindy Sheehan decided to speak truth to power. Was leadership all that was needed? No more was needed. The example of personal complete sacrifice that we are sorry for but perhaps more importantly ashamed of in all its attendent ugliness.
I call it a principle of "integrity" because the reasoning behind it
would seem to be this: when I endorse particular military actions of
my country, then I, as a citizen of a democracy, am asking some of my
fellow citizens to participate in that war and die in it. The issue of
integrity is that if I ask a fellow citizen to do something, then I ought
to be willing to do it myself. Standing behind the issue of integrity is
the value of reciprocity, which political philosophers have recently
identified as the heart of liberal thinking. To violate the PPI is to
impose an unfair burden on others.
As we can see the liberal way of thinking is not to impose the burden upon others that we ourselves would not carry. But there is no societal sacrifice in this war. There are examples of individual sacrifice but our society and particularly our President are distantly removed from the sacrifice. How else can we explain his actions in Crawford these weeks. Or the fact that he has not attended a single funderal. Or that we censor the pictures of the retruning coffins filled with the individual sacrifice of the few.
We like the President can live our lives detached from the harsh reality of war. We extend this wonderland of detachment in that we have no immediate economic consequense to change our blissful reality either. Instead our leaders let us as a nation rack up billions in debt, removing the economic reality to some other burden bearers of the distant future. Nevermind, that this consequense will land squarely upon our children and grandchildren.
That average persons should count on bearing the costs of wars
was regarded as a requirement of personal morality (what I have
called integrity). In fact, Kant maintains that paying men to kill or be
killed violates their "rights of humanity." General citizen involvement
in wars was also seen as contributing to a kind of democratic
prudence. The Founding Fathers reasoned that if average citizens
know that the costs of a war will be extracted from their purses or
bodily persons, they will exercise much greater caution in endorsing
that war. This point lies at the heart of what has come to be called the
"democratic peace thesis"--the notion that democracies will be less
inclined to go to war because they impose the costs of wars on the
average citizens who, through their representatives, decide whether
or not to go to war. Kant speaks of how they will weigh the "calamities"
of war seriously because they can count on "doing the fighting
themselves" and "paying the costs of war from their own resources."
So I ask you kossacks, is it not time to solve the burden sharing problem of this war and other wars by calling upon the personal integrity of the citizens or in the alternative ending the burden of the war? For me the answer is that I call upon ending the burden of the war for I am not willing to die for this war tomorrow.
If you like this diary please read Professor Ryan's essay. Please recommend this diary if you agree with its ethical premise.