Second thoughts

Just societies should never deliberately initiate war.

That’s the CatNats topic. I have just been brutally attacked, not on this site, for my dislike of it, if you'll accept that a text calling me an ignorant yabbo because of my opinion is a brutal attack and not just another text calling me an ignorant yabbo in a sea of such texts. On this site, I was admonished that my quick definition of preemptive was fatuous.

So, let’s look at it closely. Maybe I was wrong. It’s been known to happen. Just last week I said it wasn’t going to rain on a day when there was, in fact, light drizzle for a couple of minutes. Fallible is my middle name.

Since I don’t have to coach anyone on the topic, I have to admit I did no initial research other than to look at it and go “Feh,” which is all too common a reaction to the best of topics. The feh response is almost built in when almost anyone looks at a topic or a list of topics. We’ve all been around long enough to know that first blush may not prove out, and that the nature of the debating beast is that the first blush is always negative.

Anyhow, we have to look at a couple of things here. First, we need to know what a just society is. What do just societies do? Well, one can assume that a just society balances the interests of its citizens in a fair way, and does its best to respect their rights. Protecting citizen rights includes literal protection of citizens’ lives from external agents. I always maintain that one of the responsibilities of government is to do things that individuals are unable to do, such as build infrastructure. (I’m liberal to the hilt, of course, and would go way beyond that, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.) Protecting us from foreign attacks is certainly the job of a government (just or not). That’s what government is supposed to do. Individuals on their side must, by the same token, be willing to help defend their country. One way or another this is basic social contract theory.

Society consists of all the individuals therein, and is not a synonym for government. A just society is built in such a way to protect the important interests of its citizens in a fair way. What, exactly, does that just society owe to others?

That was not a rhetorical question.

One must take a cosmopolitanistic stance to construe that the members of one society are responsible for the members of another society. That is, one must look beyond national barriers. By the use of the word war in the resolution, we can confidently infer that the societies in question are, in fact, nations, and not, say, debating societies or knitting groups. Only entities capable of engaging in warfare—national polities—can be reasonably considered as worthy of discussion. So we can say that just societies can be equated with just nations, that a nation that protects the important interests of its citizens in a fair way, loosely put, a “good guy” nation, is what we’re talking about. Since the business of this good guy nation is taking care of its own, how can we construe cosmopolitan goals as being morally warranted (and let’s just buy that “should never” implies a moral warrant, otherwise we’ll never get around to discussing the topic)?

Should a good guy government poke its nose into the business of other governments? If we believe that morality precedes nationality, that we are human before we are Swiss or French, then we certainly will be concerned about the interests of people outside our own borders. A good guy government certainly wouldn’t launch an imperialistic war, but what about a war that protects the citizens of another country from brutal dictators and genocide, or a war to stop a nation from stockpiling weaponry that it will use on other nations?

I have to admit that I’m fairly soft on doing something about genocide and internal harms. The only warrant I was able ever to see for Iraq in 2003 was based on a premise that an evil Hussein could be justifiably be removed by the US as a policing agent with international (i.e. UN) support. I don’t recall the US ever making this argument, however. We went for the stockpiling weaponry approach, which was problematic in that they weren’t stockpiling weaponry and only pretending to do so to keep the Iranians at bay. (There was also some retaliatory issues over 9/11, but since Iraq had nothing to do with it, we won’t go there.) One of the great needs in preventive attacks is absolute certainty that the attacks are warranted, and also that they’ll be successful. There’s no use launching a preemptive attack to prevent war if there wasn’t going to be a war, or worse, the preemptive attack instigates a war rather than preventing it.

The resolution wording does nothing to prevent us from making our agent of action multiple nations, by the way, like the UN or something similar. “A just society” would prevent that interpretation.

I would be very tentative about taking the preemptive track on the neg, because recent history has not been too kind to preemptive attacks/wars. While past performance is no indication of future success/failure, precedents are precedents.

The humanitarian approach would, therefore, seem to be negative’s way to go. Yes, indeed, there is material here. Calling on the essential nature of human worth transcending boundaries, and the requirement for everyone to respect that worth, added to the moral requirement to help those in need when we are able to do so (read Singer to take this to the logical limit), will yield a case.

Affirmative, on the other hand, seems to have way more ammunition, insofar as just societies may have no moral obligations beyond their own borders, that initiation of warfare may always be immoral on face based on the present state of global politics, or maybe a just society has better ways of dealing with injustice within other societies that launching modern day attacks that seem, if one reads the papers, to endanger the very citizens they are trying to protect. It’s like Iranian sanctions: who’s suffering, and are they doing the job?

Look to Africa for situations where bad craziness is happening, and maybe something could be done about it. Should it be done?

I don’t expect the neg to get the sort of inherent benefits it likes on the $ircuit (the implied albeit nonexistent presumption in its favor, or the various theory arguments that might arise over the nature of the rez) given the nature of CatNats judging. Which means that the neg will have to actually advocate just war as the aggressor. And that’s just it. Aff gets to advocate not being the aggressor and neg gets to advocate being the aggressor. Whatever good arguments might underlie the neg position don’t remove that burden, and it just feels to me that it is a way greater burden than aff’s, especially when aff goes first and gets to set the stage, so to speak. Neg does get to take the moral high ground, however, although on the level of Singer and endless charity, and that is tough ground, if you ask me.

So, yeah, I was precipitous in my feh response. Neg has material and places to go. But is my mind changed? Not really. It’s a resolution that favors the aff. I don't think anything will convince me otherwise. What can I say? I'm an ignorant yabbo. Again. What else is new?