Last week a woman called Dennis in one of his shows. She wanted to reason against the war in Iraq.
Her argument was (I’m citing it from memory, she certainly articulated it in different words)
“Have you ever fought a war? Did you fight in Vietnam? No? So how can you argue, that a war can be right and just to fight? You’ve never been in a war. You don’t know how it is. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Dennis argued, that you don’t have to have the experience to fight a war in order to reason, that a war can be just and worth fighting.
I agree on that.
But ….
Dennis also said, that this argument is baseless because having experienced something doesn’t entitle you to decide wether it is right or wrong resp. having not experienced something doesn’t disables you from judgement. He said (in words to that affect) that the woman’s argument was baseless and a distortion, caused by leftist thinking.
I don’t agree on that.
I think, the point that the woman made was another one. It was not a stupid one at all.
She basically expressed the moral dilemma of a war. It is the dilemma of the individuum’s rights and value vs. the group’s rights and value(s).
Here is what I mean in other words:
The father of a friend of mine was a young man during the second world war. He was fighting as a young soldier for Nazi-Germnany in Russia. He saw and experienced horrible things and most of his comrades died in combat or froze to death. The horror was so overwhelming that after the war for him there was no greater cause - wright or wrong, whatsoever - that could justify the cruelty human individuums cause to each other in a war ever again.
[Footnote: this is a little bit like some people don’t believe in God because of the badness and the evil in the world. It’s the best argument (theodicy problem) against the existence of a good and almighty God in my opinion. Every believer has to struggle with it at least every once in a while.]
On the other side there is the reasoning, that by fighting a war, a country must defend itself and/or stop evil in the world and therefore may sacrifice innocent young men and women to prevent even greater evil from the group.
A war always means weighing up life against life. Can one say that the life of one innocent is less valuable than the life of ten innocent people?
I don’t think so. It’s a moral dilemma that has no final solution, no final answer to it.
There are two layers. One is the layer of the individual life with its individual rights and value. The other one is the layer of the group, that shapes society and protects the rights and value of the individuals.
Politics is located in the realm of the second layer, the layer of the group, but has to consider the first layer, the layer of the individual, too. In order to protect the rights and value of the individuals of the whole group, it may be justified to potentially sacrifice an individual, e.g. who fights as a soldier. There is a moral obligation to protect one’s fellows from evil: one’s family, one’s neighbours and in the greater perspective one’s country. This is an absolute demand.
The woman that called Dennis argued in the first layer, the layer of the individual. No loss of an individual, e.g. of a son who is fighting as a soldier, can ever be replaced or justified by anything. The loss of one is the loss of the world. The mother’s pain is something, that touches absoluteness.
Nevertheless, the woman who called was reasoning only in the layer of the individual. She, and a lot of people (in my opinion usually people on the left) have a kind of blindness for the layer of the group. Their focus is limited.
One has to consider both layers. One’s mind has to move in both realms when it’s about politics. Considering the layer of the group alone would lead to cruelty against individuals and utilitarism. Considering the layer of the individual alone would lead to extinction of the group, because it could not defend itself as a group from outside evil – or for that matter even defend a fellow group from inside or outside evil (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq or WWII).
Thus “Did you ever fight in a war? Do you know about what you’re talking?” is not a totally wrong question to argue against a war in my eyes: the point behind it is proper. But it is only half of the equation.