Just Peace On My Plate, Please

Loving theories, whether they are true or not, broadly characterizes mathematicians like myself. That’s the theory, anyway. I don’t know; I just know I like theories and theoretical talk and theory-related stuff.

Take ethical and moral theorizing. What glorious fun it is to sit around all day out of the sun, in Seattle or in the shade, reading about “the aretaic turn.” It’s a wonderful thing. It’s not a theory but a whole turn of theories, like a flock of geese wheeling about in the sky preparing to migrate.

Any recent (last half century or so) theory to the effect that a moral philosophy should be based on seeking individual Virtue may be said to be part of “the aretaic turn.” There’s no end to the theories that’ll get you, and they’re all a hoot to a guy like me, even if all their proponents are deliberately full of themselves!

Another passel of theories I like (I wanted to say “passel”) is just war theories. In case you missed the Middle Ages, a just war theory is a theory used by theologians to fudge the Thou Shalt Not Murder commandment when advising kings on how to conduct wars and the odd pogrom. Some famous theologians came up with a particular (“the”) Just War Theory, and it’s still all the rage in theocircles. So much so that there are now multiple versions of it, all called Just War Theory. All as much fun as tort law. (Really: tort law is endlessly amusing.)

Let’s say you’re a Medieval King, “post-Fall of Rome,” and say you’re laying siege upon an enemy King’s city for Good Cause. Maybe he blasphemed the Holy Ghost or something. When is it OK to hurl rocks the size of outhouses OVER the walls, not into them, thus risking the lives and well-being of innocent women and children as well as killing defenders who deserve to die and burn in eternal hellfire, anyway?

The answer, says some proponents of certain Just War Theory, is it’s OK, PROVIDED that it induces the defenders to surrender, AND leads to only so much harm to innocents as might be expected to be commensurate with the wrong done, by the enemy King.

If, on the other hand, hurling the rocks toward innocents makes the defenders defend all the more furiously, so that your siege either fails altogether or the amount of death or agony you visit upon innocents outweighs the wrong done by your enemy, then you SHOULDN’T hurl the rocks. OR, if you calculate that the outcome would be acceptable in the sense just described, you SHOULD hurl more, or fewer, or bigger, or smaller, rocks, as your calculation may determine.

So applications of the Just War Theory require real-world calculations of effects of real-world actions. You have to anticipate consequences, and you are only as moral as you are accurate. The theory depends on knowing stuff that’s beyond the theory to know! It makes me feel so axiomatically unencumbered!

Example 1. How many Branch Davidians do you have to shoot or burn to get David Koresh to give up his weapons stash? If you don’t know, what do you do? In that case the theory (as applied here to pogroms) would say, figure out what number of dead and wounded Davidians would amount to a wrong still less than the wrong of hoarding illegal weapons to that degree. Then kill and wound that many, AND NO MORE.

Example 2. King W and his advisors want to know whether to nuke Iran or simply carpet-bomb parts of it, for possibly having a nuclear weapons program. To hurl, or not to hurl, and how much, is the question.

How wrong can it be for Iran to possibly have nuclear weapons, later, if you would use your own now to deprive her of them? However wrong that is, that’s how much wrongful killing of Iranians you’re allowed, goes the theory. Adjust your bombing accordingly.