Chapter 29: International Ethics

1. Cooperation Again

In a world that is not only haunted by the specter of Communism but lives in the shadow of the nuclear bomb, a book on ethics that omitted these topics would be omitting precisely the ethical problems that trouble us most. For problems of personal ethics, after all, custom and tradition have worked out fairly satisfactory answers, and prescribe reasonably adequate guides for day-to-day conduct even if their philosophical basis is uncertain or obscure. But in the international realm the world today confronts some problems (at least of urgency and scale) that it has never confronted before, and to which no accepted or ready-made solutions have been worked out.

And yet there is no basic difference between the requirements of interpersonal ethics and those of international ethics. The key to both is the principle of cooperation.

In a small closed society the worst situation is one of mutual hostility, the war of each against all, "of every man against every man," under which everybody suffers and no one has any security in pursuing his aims. The second-best situation is one of refraint (1) or abstention from mutual aggression, which at least provides an atmosphere of peace. But by far the best situation, as we have repeatedly seen, is social cooperation, which enables each of us to attain his ends and satisfactions most fully.

The case is no different in the international field. The worst situation is one of mutual hostility, mutual aggression, war. The second-best is one of "isolationism," or refraint from mutual aggression. But the ideal situation is one of international cooperation.

This has long been recognized by the philosophy of liberalism (in the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense). It expressed itself in the doctrine of free trade. Free trade rested on the recognition that the international division of labor, made possible by free exchange, tended to maximize the productivity of labor and capital and so to raise standards of living everywhere. The doctrine of free trade included, of course, freedom of cultural exchange.

But liberalism did not merely espouse freedom of import and export. It also espoused freedom of travel, of immigration and emigration, and freedom of capital movements. To make these freedoms possible, there had to be security of life and property, including international respect for copyright, patents, and private property of every kind.

This security and these freedoms not only tended to maximize material welfare in all countries, but also promoted world peace. Protectionism is not only an economic fallacy, but a cause of international hostility and war. All barriers to imports and exports make the efficiency of world production less than it would otherwise be. They increase costs and prices, lower quality, and reduce abundance. Protectionism is an absurdity, because each country practicing it wants to decrease its imports but at the same time to increase its exports. It cannot do so even if it is the sole culprit, because other countries can pay for their imports from it only out of the proceeds of their exports to it. When the practice is attempted all around the circle, the absurdity becomes evident even to the most stupid. Each country that makes the attempt to put it into effect arouses the resentment of its neighbors and causes them to adopt measures of retaliation. Nationalist policies that begin by efforts to beggar one's neighbor must end in the ruin of all.

I have been speaking, in the conventional way, of "countries," of "nations," and of "international" cooperation. But it is important to keep in mind that what we really mean by "international" cooperation is cooperation between individuals in one nation and individuals in another. An individual importer in the United States buys from an individual exporter in Great Britain. An individual investor in the United States invests in an individual company in Canada. Apart from protecting life and property within their own countries, and insuring the integrity of their own currencies, the proper role of governments is simply to keep hands off, to let this "international" cooperation among individuals take place. It was the cry for this in France in the eighteenth century that gave birth to the now much misunderstood slogans: Laissez passer, laissez faire; which should be translated: Let goods pass. Allow goods to be produced. Allow trade to go on.

The great economist David Ricardo was the first to demonstrate (in 1817) in his Law of Comparative Costs that it is advantageous for a country to produce only those goods that it can produce at a relatively lower cost than other countries, and to buy from those countries even goods that it could itself product at a lower absolute cost. In other words, exchange may beneficially take place even when one nation is superior in all lines of production. This is also sometimes called the Law of Association or the Law of Comparative Advantage. To many the law has seemed paradoxical, but it applies between persons as well as between nations. It is profitable for a skilled surgeon to employ a nurse to sterilize his instruments and a cleaning woman to clean up after him, even though he might be able to do both operations quicker and better himself. It is advantageous, for the same reasons, for rich and technologically advanced nations to trade and cooperate with poor and technologically backward nations.

But this is not a work on economics, and I shall not further dilate on this particular point. I shall content myself with quotations from two economists, both of which emphasize the ethical as well as the economic implications of free trade. The first is from a contemporary, Ludwig von Mises: "It is first necessary for the nations of the world to realize that their interests do not stand in mutual opposition and that every nation best serves it own cause when it is intent on promoting the development of all nations and scrupulously abstains from every attempt to use violence against other nations or parts of other nations." (2)

The second quotation is from David Hume, whose three essays, "Of Commerce," "Of the Balance of Trade," and "Of the Jealousy of Trade," which appeared a quarter of a century before Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, stated the economic, cultural, and moral advantages of international trade, and the folly of interfering with it, as powerfully as any subsequent explanation. Here is the final paragraph of "The Jealousy of Trade":

Were our narrow and malignant politics to meet with success we should reduce all our neighboring nations to the same state of sloth and ignorance that prevails in Morocco and the coast of Barbary. But what would be the consequence? They could send us no commodities: they could take none from us: our domestic commerce itself would languish from want of emulation, example, and instruction: and we ourselves should soon fall into the same abject condition to which we had reduced them. I shall therefore venture to acknowledge that not only as a man, but as a British subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy, and even France itself. I am at least certain that Great Britain, and all those nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns and their ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments toward each other. (3)

2. Not Machinery but Attitude

To sum up the argument thus far: International ethics, like interpersonal ethics, must be based on the recognition that the citizens of each nation gain more by cooperation than by mutual hostility, nonintercourse, or non-cooperation. In most cases, when we say that "nations" cooperate, we mean merely that their governments permit their own citizens to cooperate with the citizens of other nations, by allowing freedom of travel, trade, and mutual investment.

But governments must also play a more positive role. They must provide security of life and property not only for their own citizens at home, but for foreigners visiting their countries, or residing in them, and security for the property of those foreigners. Hence they must give foreigners copyright protection, patent protection, and the like.

This has required the growth of international law and of international agreements and institutions to organize cooperation among national governments. It is surprising how recent some of these agreements and institutions are. Even the practice of maintaining standing legations in other countries did not become general until about the sixteenth and seventeenth ceturies. The first Geneva Convention for ameliorating the condition of the sick and wounded, which set up the Red Cross, did not take place until 1864. The International Telegraphic Union was I formed in 1865, the Universal Postal Union in 1874, the Copyright Union in 1886, the International Institute of Agriculture in 1905, the Radio Telegraphic Union in 1906.

In the last century, however, international legislation and organization has developed at an accelerative rate. One writer (4) has estimated that during the half-century 1864-1914, 257 international conventions of a legislative kind were entered into, and that during the years 1919-1929 there were no fewer than 229. Of all the new institutions, perhaps the most significant and promising were the Permanent Court of Arbitration (the Hague Tribunal) established in 1899, and the Permanent Court of International Justice set up in 1921, and now replaced by the International Court of Justice under the United Nations charter.

The questions must be raised, however, whether there is not now an overmultiplication of international institutions, whether they are the right kind of institutions, and whether some of them are not doing immensely more harm than good to the cause of international cooperation, justice, and peace. Tennyson's dream of the day when the war drum throbbed no longer and the battle flags were furled.

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world ... is an inspiring ideal, but some of its too zealous advocates are the victims of confusion of thought. They refuse to see that an organization like the United Nations is at best a means to an end; that it should not be treated as if it were the end itself; that it should be judged by its fruits, and not merely by the good intentions of some of its founders. Does the United Nations, as it stands, actually promote international cooperation, international justice, and world peace? Or does it merely blow up what would otherwise be small controversies into great ones? Is it merely a propaganda forum, which the free capitalist nations have helped to create and finance, from which the Communist nations launch their hate campaigns against the capitalist nations, and through which Asian and African delegates express their envy and resentment of the Western nations and demand increasing "aid"?

These are questions that the overzealous partisans of the United Nations not only never ask themselves, but berate others for asking. But such questions go to the heart of the problem. The American, British, and other governments are denounced within their own countries for not submitting every dispute to arbitration, or to the International Court, or to the United Nations, and for not agreeing in advance to accept any decision or award, whatever it may be. But the real problem is twofold. It is not only that individual nations will not agree in advance to submit every dispute to "judicial" settlement, but that they (in many cases rightly) do not and cannot trust the impartiality of the decision. Their distrust is not irrational. It is the result of bitter experience. One has merely to look at the voting record of the Assembly of the United Nations. When a country like the United States has become the richest and most powerful in the world, it arouses the envy of all other nations, and particularly of the poor and "undeveloped" nations, who can be almost counted upon to outvote it.

This does not mean that the prospects for the growth of international law, of peaceful arbitration, and of judicial settlement, are hopeless. It does mean that what is of primary importance is international sentiment and attitudes rather than the mere international machinery of organization. Where the right international attitudes exist, the appropriate machinery to implement them can easily follow. An outstanding example is the Universal Postal Union. It came into existence because every party to the convention of 1874 recognized that in order to have its own stamps honored in foreign countries it must honor their stamps in its country. This was the only way in which letters mailed from foreign countries could be assured of delivery to their specific address within the country of their destination.

But any attempt to push organization ahead of sentiment must court failure.

3. The Right of Self-Defense

This brings us to the fallacies of extreme pacificism. A growing number of people in the world are not content with denouncing war, but seek to put themselves on a higher moral plane, "above the battle," by denouncing both sides to every dispute or every war. I travestied this attitude in an article in 1950, called "Johnny and the Tiger." (5) What it overlooks or denies is the moral and legal right and necessity of self-defense.

The right of a state, as of an individual, to protect itself against an attack, actual or threatened, is beyond dispute. It is expressly affirmed in the Charter of the United Nations, Article 51 of which provides that "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."

The formulation of the principle of self-defense by Daniel Webster in 1837, when he was the American Secretary of State, has met, a British writer on international law tells us, "with general acceptance." (6) There must be shown, said Webster, "a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation"; and further, the action must involve "nothing unreasonable or excessive, since the act justified by the necessity of self-defense must be limited by that necessity and kept clearly within it." (7)

We come now to a more difficult problem. Is there, in addition to the right of self-defense, in a strictly limited sense, a much wider right, that of self-preservation? Here writers on international law differ, and their differences reflect a moral difference. W. E. Hall declares: "Even with individuals living in well ordered communities the right of self-preservation is absolute in the last resort. A fortiori it is so with states, which have in all cases to protect themselves." (8) "In the last resort almost the whole of the duties of states are subordinated to the right of self preservation." (9)

These pronouncements are vigorously disputed by J. L. Brierly: "Such statements would destroy the imperative character of any system of law of which they were true, for they make all obligation to observe the law merely conditional; and there is hardly any act of international lawlessness which, taken literally, they would not excuse." (10)

Brierly goes on to cite both international examples and personal examples. One paragraph is especially impressive:

Lord Bacon once imagined the case of two men who seized the same plank in a shipwreck, and because the plank could not bear the weight of both, one pushed the other off and he was drowned. There is no doubt that in English law that action would be murder. Indeed, when two men and a boy were cast away at sea in an open boat, and the men, after their food and water had been exhausted for many days, killed and ate the boy, they were actually convicted of murder, although the jury found that in all probability all three would have died unless one had been killed for the others to eat. (11) An American case is to the same effect. (12) The Ship William Brown struck an iceberg, and some of the crew and passengers took to the boats. The boat was leaking and overloaded, and, in order to lighten it, the prisoner helped to throw some of the passengers overboard. He was convicted of murder. In both these cases a right of self-preservation, if any such right were known to the law, would have justified the acts committed, but it is equally clear that in neither were the acts truly defensive, for they were directed against persons from whom danger was not even apprehended. National law, indeed, is so far from recognizing an absolute right in the individual to preserve himself at all costs, that it sometimes even places on him, without any fault of his own, a legal duty to sacrifice his own life; compulsory military service is an obvious case in point. (13)

Both cases cited by Brierly, however, were cases in which self-preservation was secured only at the cost of the murder or destruction of others. In both cases self-preservation was achieved only by an act of aggression. Suppose the second case had been slightly changed: that the life-boat had been filled to capacity, and that, in order to save the people already in it, the man in charge had simply refused to take on any more, in spite of their pleas?

Or suppose the case to be one of what we may call anticipatory self-defense. Two men are snowbound in a one-room cabin and one of them has good reason to suspect that the other means to murder him in his sleep. He cannot keep awake all night in definitely. What is he to do? Decide to kill the other first? If he did so, a jury would presumably decide such a case on the basis of whatever objective facts it could discover concerning how real the threat was that the actual killer would otherwise have been the victim. But suppose a whole nation is in this situation, or thinks itself to be, and there is no impartial jury to which the case can be submitted, and to which submission would be in any case too late? This is the appalling problem -- the problem of the "first strike" -- presented by the existence of the nuclear bomb, and above all by its possession by a Communist government that has openly announced its intention to "bury" capitalist nations and that has shown itself to be utterly without moral scruples. I do not know the answer to this problem; but it is of the first importance that we face it frankly and state it clearly, and not try to evade it by some piece of high-sounding and irrelevant rhetoric; and particularly that we not assume a shammoral attitude "above the battle" by piously declaring that everybody else is "suicidal" and all that is necessary is sanity and trust and brotherly love on both sides. I shall at least spare the reader such a pseudo-solution. (14)

Even before the inventions of the atomic and nuclear bombs, international ethics presented far more difficult problems than interpersonal ethics -- or at least far more confusions of thought. Traditional ethical judgments are judgments made from the standpoint of the interests of "the group." The individual's conduct is judged from its effect on the welfare of "the group." But conduct that is conducive to the welfare of one group may be destructive of the welfare of another. Hence the mixed-up "ethics of war." It is virtuous for our soldiers to kill their soldiers, vicious for their soldiers to kill ours. That is the "naive" idea. But then a "sophisticated" morality arises. Courage is praised as a virtue both in our soldiers and in the enemy's soldiers. "A gallant foe" is admired, even though his gallantry is not in our interest. Treason is thought despicable, even if it is the treason of one of our enemies to his own country, which redounds to our benefit.

This points to what we may call "the paradox of virtues." Most of the old-fashioned books on ethics used to make a list of the "virtues" and deliver a little sermon on each of them. Among these virtues were nearly always included (and are still included) such traits as courage, pertinacity, dedication, industry, sobriety, temperance, prudence. But then we recognize that these characteristics may be used either for good or bad ends. When they are used for bad ends do we still call them virtues? Washington is praised for his courage and dedication in fighting for the freedom of his country. Should Napoleon be praised for his courage and dedication in conquering other countries? Is the kind of courage that enables a man to be a successful gangster or bandit a "virtue"? Yet it is the same trait that enables him to become a good policeman, or fireman, or a good soldier on our side.

Part of this problem comes from the use of the word virtue in a double sense: as describing a trait that serves only "good" ends and as describing a trait that helps its possessor to serve any end, good or bad.

4. Self-Defense vs. Nonresistance

But perhaps some of these are verbal problems rather than moral problems. We can at least answer with reasonable definiteness a few central problems concerning the ethics of war. War is of course an "unethical," indeed a monstrous method of settling disputes. But this does not mean that any of us are entitled in all cases self-righteously to denounce everyone who participates in a war, or to declare "a plague on both your houses." Both sides in a war may be wrong; one side must be; but one side may be right, and defending one's country may not only be justified, but an inevasible moral duty. I should like to quote an excellent passage on this by Herbert Spencer:

Unquestionably war is immoral. But so likewise is the violence used in the execution of justice; so is all coercion.... There is, in principle, no difference whatever between the blow of a policeman's baton and the thrust of a soldier's bayonet.... Policemen are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policemen who act in concert. Government employs the first to attack in detail ten thousand criminals who separately make war on society; and it calls on the last when threatened by a like number of criminals in the shape of drilled troops. Resistance to foreign foes and resistance to native ones having consequently the same object -- the maintenance of men's rights, and being effected by the same means -- force, are in their nature identical; and no greater condemnation can be passed on the one than on the other....

Defensive warfare (and of course it is solely to this that the foregoing argument applies) must therefore be tolerated as the least of two evils. There are indeed some who unconditionally condemn it, and would meet invasion by non-resistance. To such there are several replies.

First, consistency requires them to behave in like fashion to their fellow-citizens. They must not only allow themselves to be cheated, assaulted, robbed, wounded, without offering active opposition, but must refuse help from the civil power; seeing that they who employ force by proxy are as much responsible for it as though they employed it themselves.

Again, such a theory makes pacific relationships between men and nations look needlessly Utopian. If all agree not to aggress, they must as certainly be at peace with each other as though they had all agreed not to resist. So that, while it sets up so difficult a standard of behavior, the rule of non-resistance is not one whit more efficient as a preventive of war, than the rule of nonaggression....

Lastly, it can be shown that non-resistance is also absolutely wrong. We may not carelessly abandon our rights. We may not give away our birthright for the sake of peace. If it be a duty to respect other men's claims, so also is it a duty to maintain our own. (15)

Yes, some readers may say, this is all very well for the mid-nineteenth century. But we are now past the mid-twentieth century. We are in the age of the nuclear bomb, when, without notice, any nation with such bombs may wipe out whole cities and tens of millions of people within an hour. Nuclear war means the end of civilization, if not the end of humanity itself. "Self-defense" is now an obsolete concept, another name for world suicide. It is a luxury we can no longer afford. We now have only a choice of two evils, and we must take the lesser. We must tolerate provocations, insults, indignities, affronts, threats, aggression, domination, conquest, tyranny, oppression, a reign of terror, inquisitions, atrocities, torture, slavery, anything rather than resist; for resistance means atomic war, and atomic war means mutual annihilation -- whereas, if we can keep the nuclear bomb from being used, we can at least nourish the hope that our conquerors will in time soften and relent, and man, and civilization, and even a certain amount of liberty, will survive.

If this were indeed the dreadful alternative, many of us would choose annihilation as the lesser evil. The cry for survival at any price is craven and ignominious. As Santayana once put it: "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way." (16)

But the alternative is false. Appeasement on the part of the West, in the face of Soviet threats, merely increases the danger to the West. If the masters of the Kremlin can throw the bomb without risk to themselves, they may do it just for sport, a possibility that does not seem to have occurred to the later Bertrand Russell, though in some of his earlier books he lists plenty of instances of mass murder and torture for sport from Nero to Hitler.

5. Appeasement as a Threat to Peace

The choice before us is the exact opposite of what the Appeasers assume. It has been stated powerfully and eloquently by Wilhelm Ropke:

The terrible lessons which the two world wars have taught us confirm the very important fact that, as a rule, war will only break out if the aggressor considers that the risk involved is a slight one. Every disagreement among the peace-loving nations, every inclination to weakness, every marked difference in the degree of armament are therefore factors which favor the outbreak of war, whereas the danger is lessened by everything which induces even the most determined aggressor to reflect upon the enormous risk he would be taking in defying the organized defensive forces....

The danger to peace is enhanced the more the will to war on one side grows in inverse proportion to pacificism on the other. Since however in our day the aggressively disposed country will always be a collectivistic-totalitarian one, whose almighty dictatorship always suppresses any expression of opinion which does not suit the government and whose all-encompassing propaganda shapes the opinion of the masses in the way the government desires, the tension between the unrestrained military preparedness, both actual and psychological, of the aggressor, and the defensive power of his victim, weakened by pacificism, will be very great and very dangerous.

This is the real source of the policy of Appeasement, which contributed so fatefully to the outbreak of the second world war, and which since the end of the war has once again created a highly dangerous situation with regard to the totalitarian imperium of Communism with Russia at its head....

Once more the world looks on at the repulsive and lying drama in which the totalitarian center of aggression in the world raises its own war potential to the maximum, and by means of an unscrupulous propaganda of hate, fear and ideology develops a condition of war-preparedness in the minds of its own population, while at the same time abusing as warmongers all those in the West who admonish resistance, and putting the whole machinery of its psychological warfare into operation in order to cripple resistance by a campaign for pacifism and in order to deceive simple souls with the fate morgana of neutralism. It has up to now succeeded to a disastrous degree.

This experience brings us to the distressing conclusion that pacifism, merely as an attitude of mind which rejects war, is not only sterile but indeed dangerous to a tragic degree, since at the very moment when the danger of war is greatest it further increases that danger immeasurably by encouraging the attacker. . . . In the case of a war of aggression . . . that is to say in practically all cases today, [pacifism] not only fails but actually becomes one of the fatal links in the chain of causes which trigger off the war and possibly effect the triumph of the aggressor....

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the chief task of war-prevention is to make it plain to every potential aggressor, beforehand and in a completely indubitable way, that the risk is overwhelming. (17)

Even if the Western powers follow the course that Ropke recommends, they have no absolute assurance that a nuclear war can be prevented. Does this mean that the problem is insoluble? Perhaps. But man can live and act only as long as he can hope. He must act on the assumption that his practical problems are solvable. Perhaps none of them are solvable permanently and absolutely. But he must act on the assumption that every problem is solvable temporarily and relatively. He can at least, in most cases, put off the evil day. If he does not know precisely what is the right thing to do, he can usually know enough to avoid doing most of the wrong things. Man solves his moral problems as he does nearly all his practical problems -- not by finding perfect solutions, but by finding solutions that make his state a little better instead of a little worse.

Notes

1. For the defense of this noun, see footnote 12, Chap. 22.

2. The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962), p. 144.

3. Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political (1740), p. 198.

4. Professor Manley O. Hudson in International Legislation, I, xxxvi.

5. Appendix.

6. J. L. Brierly, The Law of Nations (5th ea.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 316.

7. Loc. cit.

8. International Law (8th ed.), p. 65.

9. Ibid., p. 322.

10. The Law of Nations, p. 317.

11. R. v. Dudley and Stephens (1884), 14 Q.B.D. 273.

12. U.S. v. Holmes, I Wallace Junior, I.

13. Ibid., pp. 317-318.

14. He can find plenty of them in Bertrand Russell -- and some excellent answers by Sydney Hook: cf. Hook's review of Russell's "Has Man A Future?" in the New York Times of Jan. 14, 1962.

15. "The Duty of the State," Social Statics (1850). Many editions.

16. Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana (1920), p. 164.

17. Wilhelm Ropke, International Order and Economic Integration (original German ed., 1954; English translation, Dordrecht, Holland, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 28-30.

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