The humanitarian war fallacy

It's impossible to accurately evaluate a utilitarian humanitarian war because it's impossible to measure atrocities caused and prevented by such a war in a concrete way. 

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    A soldier carries his gun along with flowers in this file photo. The costs and benefits of a humanitarian war are nearly impossible to calculate.
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Ronald Coase, probably one of the most misunderstood utilitarian economists, has often been criticized for what he did not say (i.e., the so-called Coase Theorem) but rarely criticized for what he did say — that individual rights depend on the potential of those rights to create aggregate wealth. The following article is a critique of the Coasean approach to the theory of rights.

Coase, in his essay "The Problem of Social Cost," argued that, in cases where markets fail to do so, the government should allocate property rights in a way that maximizes national income. His main argument was that the existence of transaction costs would preclude efficient allocation of property rights through market transactions. Thus, this would be a job for the government.

In essence, Coase is proposing a theory of justice in which individual rights depend on the circumstances. If a government bureaucrat finds that taking away Jim's rights and giving them to Janice would bring about an increase in the national income, then this reallocation of rights is just, regardless of whether Jim and Janice agree with it.

Some economists took a more abstract approach and talked about maximizing social welfare or utility. In this framework, utility — total satisfaction by material objects, experiences, and other states of affairs within a society — is treated as a quantity that can be increased or reduced by a public policy. A policy that leads to an improvement in total social welfare is, within this framework, justified.


Utilitarianism and the Politics of "Humanitarian" War

The idea of "benevolent" or "disinterested" militarism is not new. However, I will start with one of the more recent "benevolent" military endeavors. On March 24, 1999, the members of the governments of 19 NATO countries decided that in order to prevent a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Kosovo, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia should be bombed.

This war, named "Merciful Angel," has been used as an example of a successful "humanitarian" war by its proponents. Even though the initiators of wars have often justified them by appealing to the well-being of some collection of individuals (usually a nation or an ethnic group), this was the first explicit reference to humanitarianism as a sole justification for a war.

More recently, similar arguments have been used by the proponents of keeping Western troops in Iraq and Afghanistan under the banner of "nation building."

Again, in these cases, the decision on whether to withdraw or stay depends on a long-term cost-benefit analysis not only for the countries that have troops there but also, allegedly, for the inhabitants of the "host" country and the whole "international community." Many of those who support or oppose these wars differ only in their accounting methods of aggregate costs and benefits.





Calculating Atrocities


Something is not an atrocity just because there is a lot of the red liquid called blood around, but because a human being experiences certain emotions faced with this scene and the events preceding it. The extent to which something is an atrocity is determined by an individual's internal experience, not just the physical properties of the event.

Thus, when it comes to the measurement of atrocities, every case of human suffering is different and any objective comparison is meaningless. For example, what is a greater atrocity: a child losing its parents to a bomb on an airplane, or a man losing his eyesight to a cluster bomb's shrapnel, or a father losing his 3-year-old daughter under the rubble of their family home? Who is to evaluate the "amount" of atrocities committed?



However, even if we adopted the silly idea that the justness of a war could be derived from a count of dead bodies and lost arms, legs, eyes, etc., there is another problem — we will never know what a war prevented. We can only speculate as to what would have happened if the humanitarian war never occurred.


Even if one accepts ethical judgments based on speculation and "objective" measures of suffering, University of Chicago Law School professor Eric A. Posner doubts that any of the recent humanitarian interventions, including the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, would be justified. He argues that the costs of the recent humanitarian interventions far outweigh his estimate of the potential benefits.


Those who want to wage "humanitarian" wars need to first persuade us that they know the future. Then they need to persuade us that they know the objective value of individual humans' sufferings and deaths. Finally, they need to persuade us that some people's lives are less valuable than others.

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