Should War Be Eliminated? Philosophical and Theological Investigations by Stanley Hauerwas

Abstract

714 BOOK REVIEWS Vendler does .cover offers interesting vistas, even if one may not be quite willing to follow a Kantian guide who is eclectically equipped with fancy gadgets. St. John's University New York, N.Y. AUGUSTIN RISK.A. Should War Be Eliminated'! Philosophical and Theological Investigations. By STANLEY HAUERWAS. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984. Pp. 72. Stanley Hauerwas's Should War Be Eliminated'! Philosophical and Theological Investigations, an essay delivered as the 1984 Pere Marquette Lecture at Marquette University, proposes a "thought experiment" whose purpose is to reconsider common assumptions about war and its place in our lives, to illumine the ambivalence Christians often exhibit about war, and to show that war is a morally positive institution rather than always "the result of sin" (p. 8). Claiming that pacifism too often "ignores the powerful moral presupposition that sustains war's viability in spite of its brutality " (p. 9). Hauerwas, himself a pacifist, seeks to develop as strong a case for war as is possible. Such a development, he contends, will support the essay's main premise that pacifist and just-war thinkers draw on quite different assumptions about eschatology. John XXIII's 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, and the 1983 American Catholic bishops' peace pastoral, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, provide Hauerwas with examples of the ambivalence which he wants to illumine. Pacem in Terris, articulating a view of peace " that is the working assumption of many schooled by the Enlightenment" (p. 15), erroneously presents cooperation as the key to peace. A human being, endorsed with intelligence and free will, has rights and duties which intelligence can grasp and which flow directly from human nature. By preserving within oneself this order commanded by God, the individual knows peace. A well-oriented society results when all cooperate in mutual reverence £or all others' rights and duties. The greater the cooperation, the less violence will exist in that society. Similarly, in international affairs, reciprocal rights and duties and relations between states should be harmonized in truth, justice, active cooperation, and liberty. Ambiguity haunts Challenge of Peace when, on the basis of natural law reasoning, the letter acknowledges that a state has the right and moral duty to defend the people entrusted to its care, with force if necessary, and yet maintains that, in principle, peace should be possible in our world. BOOK REVIEWS 715 To acknowledge the moral possibility of war, for Hauerwas, is to be unable to avoid its actuality. Similarly, while the bishops present some war as being justified, they also claim that the " consequences of sin" are found in any violent situation. It remains unclear to Hauerwas, given the Gospel ethic, how Christinas can then participate in war, since Christians must avoid intentionally cooperating with sin. Hauerwas then develops his thought-experiment by indicating how cooperation results, not in the peace proposed by John XXIII, but rather in war. Drawing on the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hauerwas argues that war provides for as well as sustains the particular goods of particular peoples in a divided world. War is not anarchy existing between states, but rather it is anarchy's enemy insofar as it allows corporate entities, such as nation-states, to perpetuate their own particular shared goods and histories through a cooperative pledge to protect them. The elimination of war, therefore, would mean the extinction of cooperation as well. War also enables a nation-state to cooperate with its own past by enabling its people to realize a continuity with its ancestors, who also fought in wars. In fact, to refute the licitness of war would dishonor those ancestors. In present-day reality, war provides a nation-state with its own "story," and therefore a niche in ongoing history. In addition to these advantages, warfare also teaches the individual to preserve common life, which transcends the individual, since each citizen ought to be willing to sacrifice life itself in order to preserve the common life. Such is the best case which Hauerwas can muster for the moral acceptability of war. The remainder of the essay presents Hauerwas's argument for pacifism and his call for the elimination of...