Ep. 373: Michael Walzer on Just Wars (Part Two)

You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, episode 373, part two. We've been talking about Michael Walzer's just and unjust wars, and we had pretty thoroughly talked about chapter four. Let's go to chapter five, anticipations. We'll start us off with the idea which is already there in the legalist paradigm, which is that states can defend themselves against imminent violence. And then he's gonna say, well, what do you mean by imminent? Right? So we got into this a little bit already, but is it just about responding at the last minute? In real life, that's not actually very useful because war can seem unavoidable for protracted periods of time. So the word imminent is too restrictive, and then he's gonna say, let's look at this whole spectrum of from imminent responding at the last minute to the farthest point on the spectrum from, you know, in anticipation of war, and let's see where we ought to draw the line. Yeah. He does not believe in this, again, eighteenth, nineteenth century idea. Well, he thinks it's still very important today. The balance of power, which seems to be like, if you wanna give a reason why Russia attacked Ukraine, which I've heard Walzer talking just two years ago on a podcast and saying, it's just so easy to condemn Russia based on this book. Like, Russia is just wrong in many, many ways in both the way it's conducting the war, but even just the excuse for havoc in. And here, I think, is where we would right? It's the balance of power. The Russia was like, you know, if Ukraine joins NATO, if it gets too western, then the balance of power is gonna be screwed up. We need to have dominance in our area of the world, and this is just you know, that's at least one of the reasons that would be the primary motivators. And Walzer thinks that is illegitimate, that you might think that, oh, the balance of power, that's what it keeps the peace because there's this very fragile but the power is always shifting. And if you say, we're gonna go to war, every time there's a shift in the balance of power that, you know, scares you and makes you think, well, eventually, they're gonna come for me. If they're more powerful than me, then they're gonna eventually come for me. There's gonna be war all the time. So on utilitarian grounds, even, you know, though you might be defending the idea of balance and power and utilitarian grounds, like, oh, well, you know, we're we're trying to keep somebody from becoming a giant, you know, world tyrant or something like that. There's a better utilitarian argument to say, let's just not have all these needless wars, you know, in defense of this abstraction balance of power. Does Walter take up the, the legalist paradigm just outright prohibits just conventionally imperial activities, right? Where you just wanted somebody's resources. Right? Yes. …