Much of the theory of just war assumes that the warmaker is a single individual, the prince. It is doubtful whether this has ever been true: even in so-called ‘absolute monarchies,’ the prince relies on councilors, advisors, and even some relatively independent collaborators (including bishops and parliaments). In modern times, it is undeniable that it is political organizations, administrations, parties, and governments, that decide whether or not to go to war, and how to conduct the war.
Despite this fact, even contemporary commentators on the justice of war, like Edward Feser, still apply the criteria to individuals, as if, for example, the intentions of the United States Government in the war against Iran could be discerned by exploring the psychology of Donald Trump. In fact, I will argue, the private intentions are irrelevant to the question. The issue is not the intention of the President but of the Administration which he leads.
The traditional criteria of jus ad bellum certainly imply that the warmaker know or at least justifiably believe that the criteria have been met: that the cause is just, that there is a reasonable chance of success, that no further resort is available. Here I want to focus on another criterion: that the warmaker enters the war with right intention. What does it mean for an organization (and not an individual) to have a right intention? Can an organization have an intention at all?
Similar questions have been asked about knowledge and beliefs in the sub-field of social epistemology, and the consensus there is that groups and organizations can have knowledge and beliefs— and can do so in a way that the content of the group’s beliefs need not match the contents of any of the members’ beliefs. I will argue that the same thing is true of social intentions.
I am going to build on my son’s work on social epistemology. Benjamin Koons has developed an account of group knowledge that builds on Alvin Plantinga’s proper-function theory of warrant. According to Plantinga, an individual S knows that p just in case S believes that p, and S’s belief that p has been formed and sustained by the proper functioning of S’s cognitive faculties F in an environment E, where the F faculties have been well-designed to produce true beliefs in environment E. Plantinga speaks of the ‘design plan’ of our cognitive faculties, explicitly relying on teleology. For theists, our ‘design plan’ is literally the content of God’s intention in creating those faculties.
Ben Koons’s definition of Group Warrant:[1]
Warranted Group Belief: A belief B has warrant for group agent S if and only if the relevant members and other parts (i.e. those involved in the production of B) are functioning properly in a social environment sufficiently similar to that for which S’s faculties are designed and the modules of the design plan governing the production of B are 1) aimed at truth and 2) such that there is a high objective probability that a belief formed in accordance with those modules (in that sort of social environment) is true; and the more firmly S believes B the more warrant B has for S.
As Benjamin Koons points out, Plantinga’s model can be applied to group knowledge so long as (i) we can make sense of the group’s having beliefs, and (ii) we can identify the group’s cognitive faculties in such a way as to imply that they have a design plan oriented toward the truth. On the first point, groups can certainly issue group assertions, that express group beliefs. If, as I will argue, groups can have intentions, we can also discern a group’s beliefs by how its intentions lead to overt actions and behavior.
On the point of the design plan, we may have to suppose that a government or political organization can be (as Thomas Hobbes supposed) an artificial person. Organizations have internal structures and rules, which assign roles and functions to individual members and sub-groups. In some cases, this group structure has been well designed to enable the group to commit itself to true propositions in normal circumstances, and in those cases we can rightly talk of group knowledge.
In this series of posts, I would like to focus on group intention, using a Thomistic and Anscombian scheme. On this picture, there are tight connections between intention and belief. Just as beliefs are added by a process of reasoned inference, so intentions can be generated by practical syllogisms. And just as there are basic beliefs that don’t need to be justified by further beliefs or inferences, so there are basic acts of willing (willing of the good). Can groups reason or have such basic acts of willing?
As Ben pointed out to me, Aristotle actually built his model of individual deliberation on the example of the public deliberations of a council or boulē. So, it is ironic that we now find group deliberation to be problematic.
It’s clear that groups can reason. For a group to reason as a group, more is required than the fact that each of its members can and do reason. Suppose a legislature passes a law implementing a policy and suppose that each member has good reasons for passing the law. It need not be the case that the group as a whole has a coherent set of reasons. For example, suppose that there are two contrary suppositions, each of which is sufficient for the policy in question. For example, suppose that the legislature considers two scenarios relating to global warming: (A) carbon reduction will be very costly, but the gains will be great, and (B) carbon reduction will be inexpensive, and the gains modest. One-third of the body believes A, and one-third believes B, and let’s suppose that all the evidence for A controverts B, and vice versa, so the A believers assign low probability to B, and vice versa. In this case, although the bill passes, there are no coherent reasons for the legislature’s group action.
But suppose that the body’s action is structured in such a way that it must first consider the truth of A and B, then consider the truth of their disjunction, and then finally decide the policy. In this case, both A and B will be rejected, each by a 2/3 majority. Then, the disjunction will also be rejected. On the basis of these commitments, the legislature rejects the proposed policy. The group is now acting on a coherent set of reasons, reasons that are not shared by a majority of the members. The group now has a cognitive design plan, which is plausibly oriented toward generating true group beliefs.
[1] “Warranted Group Belief,” Erkenntnis (forthcoming), and “Warranted Catholic Belief,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1):1-28.
The Analytic Thomist 