War Shouldn't be a Government Power
Should war be like slavery?
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There are any number of possible arguments against the existence of war generally, but there is one serious objection which can be made about all of them: although the elimination of war may sound nice, in reality the chance of actually doing so is so low as to be beyond real consideration. Thus, the most we can hope for is to mitigate the negative effects of war while learning to live with war as a human reality.
Moreover, it is claimed, war is something we will always have around because it is a necessary feature of any state which has a right to defend its sovereignty. There is certainly something to this argument - despite the efforts of so many over time to stop war, it sometimes seems as if we have been unable to achieve anything of significance. Perhaps we should learn to live with war and focus our energies on the more productive task of keeping wars from becoming too destructive.
This objection may not be as reasonable as it first appears, however. As the destructiveness of wars has increased over time, so has the interest of people in keeping wars from happening. Today, the use of weapons of mass destruction could readily cause the death of untold millions who have no particular connection to the war in question - are their lives really worth less than the defense of national sovereignty?
Many answer "no" to this question and it has led them to argue that the power to conduct warfare should perhaps be denied to governments completely. This is a deontological position - although it does object to the extreme consequence of modern warfare, it takes a further step and argues that war has become something which is inherently outside the moral sphere of state activity.
Although this seems like a radical, if not impossible, position to take, it isn't all that unusual. There are many actions which were once the common for governments to take but which are now denied them out of concern for human rights. Slavery is an excellent example to consider: although governments once took slaves as a matter of course, today it is condemned far and wide.
War, it is argued, should suffer the same fate as slavery - something which is not longer permitted as a legitimate government function because it is an exceptional violation the basic human right to live. Of course, merely saying that this should happen won't make it happen - even slavery needed technological changes in order to make its elimination easier (and the elimination is not yet total), and the same may also be true of warfare. However, once we have made the mental move to seriously consider warfare as something which should be prohibited to states, then finding the means may become more realistic.
One serious objection to this position is that, while it might be nice, it is ultimately naive because it fails to take seriously the fact that in the absence of the possibility of force, it would be impossible to ensure that war is prevented; but force may mean war, and thus the prevention of war requires the threat of war to maintain, a contradiction in terms.
This can be rebutted by pointing out that force and war are not necessarily synonymous. It is true that a police force needs to be able to use force in order to ensure that laws are followed, but the police do not normally launch wars against the populace. Similar, if not better, police tactics could be employed in the prevention of war (and many nonlethal devices are being developed for the military), but only through strong international bodies and at the cost of national sovereignty - two requirements which many in the world would be loathe to accept.
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