Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber writes:
Those who have made the 'humanitarian' case for war have never addressed the dirty little issue of who runs the risks and who does the dying. Rather, they've sought refuge in pointing out the plain truth that Saddam's Iraq was an evil tyranny and that the world is a better place without it. So it was and so it is. But would or could this war have been fought if the children of the wealthy were at as much risk of dying as the children of the poor? One rather suspects not. It may be unpalatable to think that there's a moral link between being willing to wage wars for democracy and human rights, and being willing to introduce conscription, but maybe those who have taken a leftist/liberal-hawk line on Iraq should be calling for a citizen army too. I've never read them doing so.Chris has introduced a very interesting discussion of the morality of supporting war (including a humanitarian war) when the people doing the actual fighting are mainly the children of the poor, rather than the rich. Crooked Timber's comments section raises all kinds of important issues connected with this point. Myself, I'm inclined to agree with Chris in thinking that it's likely that the middle classes would be less willing to support a humanitarian war if their own children had to fight in it. And, like him, I suspect that conscription would be one way of remedying the moral deficit in such a situation.
However, what primarily interests me is the question of what follows from this thought. Is it supposed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the intervention? Not in Chris's eyes, it seems, since he specifically says in a contribution to the Comments thread that his concern holds even for a war which it was right to engage in. So maybe it's supposed to impugn the moral standing of those who support such a war without being prepared to fight in it themselves, or send their own children to fight in it. And perhaps this is correct – maybe there is something morally dubious about calling for a war without being ready to take the risks of war oneself. Unfortunately this doesn't actually tell us a thing about who or what is in good moral standing in the debates about Iraq. And the reason for this is that the argument is too strong: it applies to both sides. Are those who are against the war prepared to spend time, along with their families, living under the dictates of a murderous psychopath? Would a million Stoppers have marched against intervention if their own children would thereby have been immured in the Iraqi torture chambers? Or is it OK for people to be tortured and die, without help from outside, so long as our country, and our comfortable lives, aren't under threat? If the hawks are too ready to let soldiers die in pursuit of a humanitarian cause, then the doves are too ready to let civilians, including innocent children, be tortured and killed rather than risk Western lives. There are dirty little unaddressed and unacknowledged issues on both sides of this debate, and the main thing we can learn from it is that people who have enough time to sit around writing are generally protected from most of the horrors about which they try to form reasonable moral opinions. This fact shouldn't deter us from trying to form the most reasonable opinions that we can, but it does suggest that a bit of humility would be appropriate before charging others with, in effect, holding life cheap. The truth is that most people participating in the debate about Iraq, hawks and doves alike, will not themselves be put at physical risk if their own views prevail, although others certainly will be. The criterion - unreadiness to participate in the risk - by which those who support the war in Iraq may be found to be morally imperfect is one which, if applied even-handedly, will reveal that those hostile to the war are also morally imperfect, and for the same reason. What we should infer from this, in the technical jargon we philosophers like to use, is that even in matters of war and peace the pot shouldn't call the kettle black. (Eve Garrard.)