Opportunity Costs Pacifism
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Ó The Author(s) 2020
JAMES PATTISON*
OPPORTUNITY COSTS PACIFISM
(Accepted 27 April 2020) ABSTRACT. If the resources used to wage wars could be spent elsewhere and save more lives, does this mean that wars are unjustified? This article considers this question, which has been largely overlooked by Just War Theorists and pacifists. It focuses on whether the opportunity costs of war lead to a form of pacifism, which it calls ‘Opportunity Costs Pacifism’. The article argues that Opportunity Costs Pacifism is, at the more ideal level, compelling. It suggests that the only plausible response to Opportunity Costs Pacifism applies in highly nonideal circumstances. This has major implications for Just War Theory and pacifism since it is only at the highly nonideal level that war can be justified. I. INTRODUCTION
In addition to the destruction and devastation caused by the War on Terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been estimated to have cost the U.S. $5.9 trillion.1 This money could conceivably have been used instead to reduce significantly the deaths from preventable diseases globally, potentially saving millions of lives. Does this mean that these wars were wrong, independent of the other reasons for and against them? More generally, if the resources used to wage war could be spent elsewhere and save more lives, does this mean that war is impermissible?
1 Neta Crawford, ‘United States Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2019: $5.9 Trillion Spent and Obligated’, Costs of War Project, November 2018.
JAMES PATTISON
In large part, this issue has been ignored by pacifists and Just War Theorists. Pacifists focus on the critique of war and, in doing so, largely overlook that the resources spent on war could potentially be put to better use.2 Similarly, Just War Theorists, for the most part, do not consider opportunity costs. Of those that do consider them, some have claimed that they are outside the domain of Just War Theory.3 A handful of Just War Theorists have recently repudiated these claims, persuasively arguing that Just War Theory should consider opportunity costs.4 As I discuss below, these accounts, however, tend to underplay the significance of the objection to war that arises from considering opportunity costs. Crucially, they also do not tackle head-on the central issue: do opportunity costs render war impermissible and so lead us to pacifism? In what follows, I consider whether they do. I explore what I call ‘Opportunity Costs Pacifism’, which holds that opportunity costs render all wars impermissible. I first outline the objection to war provided by opportunity costs and how it relates both to the other central criticisms of war presented by pacifism and to Opportunity Costs Pacifism. I then consider the accounts of opportunity costs offered in Just War Theory, before turning to two responses to Opportunity Costs Pacifism, which I argue fail. I go on to argue that there is a more plausible response to Opportunity Costs Pacifism, but that this applies only in highly nonideal cir
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