Thinking of drafting a post on war crimes, trying to answer the following puzzles:
Why do we have a notion of war crimes at all, given how bad war itself is?
Why are some things war crimes and not others?
Why do precursor notions to war crimes appear, independently, in essentially every culture that has fought wars at scale?
Given that essentially every culture has also broken these norms, sometimes spectacularly, why does the norm always come back, and often come back stronger?
Common answers to these questions seem profoundly misguided. The naive answer, that war crimes are simply the most horrible things that we all agree is collectively wrong, does not survive even five minutes of scrutiny. More sophisticated versions of that argument also do not survive scrutiny: Just War theory is similarly flawed and question-begging on the descriptivist front, and the Schelling—shaped argument that war crimes can’t limit all of war’s badness, but are aimed at curbing the worst excesses, does not explain why mass bombings and medieval sieges are/were considered acceptable, but false surrender is not.
The “cynical” answers are (differently) flawed. eg some people think war crimes are completely fake and anything other than total war is just modern virtue signaling, ignoring the thousands of years of documented history we have on precursors to war crime (Xerxes in 400s BC: “The Spartans, when they do such things overthrow all law and justice among men.“). If anything, the modern version of “total war” is much newer than the idea of war crimes. Similarly, a naive “power analysis” that war crimes are simply defined by the powerful to limit the options of the powerless ignores that powerful people are often themselves constrained by these norms, sometimes hugely.
Instead, my core answer here is surprisingly simple: A “war crime” is, in its oldest and clearest form, the category of acts that destroy the means by which wars can be ended. The prohibitions track not the moral worst things people do in war, but the acts that, if generalized, would turn every future war into a total war.
I don’t think my theory here is very novel. Indeed, as I’ll discuss, this theory is literally thousands of years old and likely arose independently in many places. I will try, however, to make my post the best modern articulation of these ancient ideas.
No offense Linch, but aren’t these questions for jurists, historians and philosophers? Why should you develop the answers from first principles, so to speak? I’d get writing a blog post about a journey through such sources and what their theories are, but I think trying to answer such questions ourselves is not very robust.
This is not a criticism of you personally—developing ideas that require domain expertise from first principles is an approach I often see in EA and I think it’s a wrong one.
My experience with trying to investigate various questions is that it’s pretty hard to ex ante predict which things already have substantial attention from the “experts”, and many questions that seem important fall through the cracks (for some EA-relevant examples that comes to mind, optimal charity, AI risk, pandemic preparedness, the impact of incarceration on crime).[1]
In this case, I don’t think the specific question I’m interested in has attracted a lot of academic attention/I don’t believe any single field has a good unifying theory. Just war theory is overwhelmingly normative with limited descriptivist content. IHL scholarship is interpretive and doctrinal. IR/game theory scholarship has partial answers, but afaik no one has synthesized them into a structural theory of war crime, etc, etc[2].
Second, I’m definitely reading a bunch of sources here! I’m sure I’ll miss a bunch but I’m certainly reading through a bunch of sources, including historical ones.
Third, if you believe the most useful thing to do here is a literature review, be the change you want to see in the world! Like if you think what’s missing in the world is a pure literature review summarizing various theories, go for it! I’d be happy to read your review.
Watts (2013) talking about perfidy specifically is the closest. But tbc there have been many shadows of this theory/hypothesis over the centuries, since at least 2400 years ago and probably long before.
Your experience reminded me of how Holden Karnofsky described his career so far:
The general theme of my career is just taking questions, especially questions about how to give effectively, where it’s just like no one’s really gotten started on this question. Even doing a pretty crappy analysis can be better than what already exists. So often what I have done in my career, what I consider myself to have kind of specialized in, in a sense, is I do the first cut crappy analysis of some question that has not been analyzed much and is very important. Then I build a team to do better analysis of that question. That’s been my general pattern. I think that’s the most generalizable skill I’ve had
I guess a “but can’t we, like, just outlaw all war?” approach is not the standard one so I’m at least interested in what answers you may find. Especially with me coming from a very, umm, war-prone country...
You might like this post I wrote earlier about the bargaining theory puzzle of war. I engaged with the academic literature on the subject pretty significantly, particularly James Fearon, so you might like it. On the other hand Fearon himself mostly reasoned from first-principles rather than conduct a careful historical assessment, so in that regard it might fit your interests less.
The post never got very popular but a few people who read it carefully really enjoyed it. One of the better compliments I’ve gotten on my writing is when somebody said they were surprised to learn after reading my post and several books on the subject that the post gave them >50% of the value of an academic book on the subject.
I like the puzzle. But I wonder if you can make your answer even simpler:
Actions taken in war have some benefit to the perpetrator, and some costs to the larger system of permitting them
When the ratio between these things gets too extreme, it’s regarded as a war crime
I think this explains the category that you outline (undermining trust in the kind of institutions that could stop the war is super destructive!), but also explains some other cases, e.g. abuse of prisoners, not impersonating medical staff, etc.
Yeah this is fair. I outlined something like that here.
I think there’s a few tricky things with this model. One is lack of precision, eg by whose lights are you interpreting “costs to the larger system of permitting them.” Relatedly, an advantage of advocating “war crimes are crimes against the end of war” is that it creates a clear core (even if it doesn’t describe everything) of norms that I think are a good description of commonly shared norms in history, and I think are good to uphold morally[1]. In contrast, many other norms of war tend to be more sporadic, like protecting civilians, chivalry, or diplomatic precedence.
Another tricky thing is Schelling’s point that almost all conflict is non-zero-sum, you can’t treat the zero-sum parts of war and the non-zero-sum parts as cleanly separable.
(I’d also note that torturing POWs makes surrender less appealing, so it’s consistent with my narrower answer. My narrower answer would also predict that protecting civilians is important but not very important, which is consistent with the historical record. On the other hand it does not have a explanation for weapons bans; my defense is that a decent enough simple theory in social science doesn’t need to explain everything).
I agree that the model I proposed is imprecise; I think this counts against its usefulness but not its validity.
I’m not suggesting this as a thing to advocate for; merely as a descriptive pattern of what the category of war crimes is doing. I think the things which make ending war harder are an important class of really destructive thing, but it seems clarity-obscuring to me to claim that this is definitionally what war crimes are? Rather than giving your thing a new label and then getting to discuss what fraction of war crimes are in that category, and whether there are things in that category which aren’t war crimes (e.g. if torturing POWs counts under your categorization, then why doesn’t conscription count—after all, it damages the “one side runs out of soldiers” mechanism for ending war).
merely as a descriptive pattern of what the category of war crimes is doing. I think the things which make ending war harder are an important class of really destructive thing, but it seems clarity-obscuring to me to claim that this is definitionally what war crimes are? Rather than giving your thing a new label
Fair, I guess the thing I’m interested in is something like “widely shared and independently recurring norms of war.” Though I’d want to be narrow enough to exclude stuff like “norms of war include paying your soldiers and have okay logistics planning” or “norms of war descriptively include being total morons sometimes in XYZ ways”
e.g. if torturing POWs counts under your categorization, then why doesn’t conscription count—after all, it damages the “one side runs out of soldiers” mechanism for ending war
right sorry I do think the costs/benefits ratio matter significantly here.
Ok, so one place the predictions of these theories might come apart is that my theory suggests a norm against impersonating medics, whereas I think yours doesn’t (although maybe I’m just not seeing it; I don’t think I would have said that avoiding torture of prisoners was part of protecting the mechanisms of ending war, although I do kind of see what you mean). I haven’t looked into it at all, but if that norm has emerged independently multiple times that would be suggestive in favour of the broader theory; whereas if it has just emerged once it looks perhaps more potentially-idiosyncratic, which would be suggestive in favour of the narrower theory.
It’s an interesting idea but as expressed feels a little tendentious, particularly if one looks at what is actually formally considered a war crime these days (much of which would not have been recognised as war crimes in the past, including by actors who believed themselves to be unusually chivalrous). Hard to believe it will be impossible to avoid total war if a few civilians are murdered or chemical weapons are used, never mind if a pilot gets shot after ejecting or if a spy is not afforded a fair trial, and hostage taking was once considered a good way to avoid total war. We see peace agreements between prolific war criminals quite often too. Avoiding total war might be a motivation, but it can’t be the only one.
On the other hand game theory favours opposing sides agreeing to not shoot ejecting pilots or torture each others’ prisoners even if they don’t agree on anything else, whereas it is impossible to win a war if you are not permitted to fire at the other side’s soldiers, and at least in 1949 artillery and aerial bombardments were also too critical to winning for the Geneva Convention to agree to ban them. It is possible for opposing sides to agree not to shoot at people that don’t wear uniform, but only if both sides treat sneaking up on the other side and shooting them whilst not wearing uniform as also a crime.
Also, many people genuinely believe in the idea that people shooting other people in a uniform which indicates they intend to fire back represents some sort of fair play (even if the targets happen to be sleeping conscripts who haven’t had a chance to surrender yet) and the sort of people that believe in that sort of thing are disproportionately likely to be military officers. They tend to believe in just wars too...
I do agree that opposing sides are considerably more likely to respect conventions on war crimes (and even reach other bargains like prisoner swaps) whilst the infrastructure that may allow the sides to mutually end the war still exists. But there’s plenty of evidence of war crimes committed with impunity in conflicts that never came close to total war, and for that matter of individual military units choosing to abide by conventions despite there being no realistic prospect of a near-term peace agreement and plenty of war crimes being committed by others on their side
I think the language I used above is more deontological/universalizing than ideal. I agree it’s more of a gradient than anything else. I also think some of the biggest classical norms (“don’t shoot messengers/envoys”) while still important today, are less so in the age of wireless communication, mass media, and email. I also think my primary thesis address the benefits of having “war crime” norms, but norms in practice are about both benefits and costs, and some of your comment here address costs (which are of course also important).
Thinking of drafting a post on war crimes, trying to answer the following puzzles:
Why do we have a notion of war crimes at all, given how bad war itself is?
Why are some things war crimes and not others?
Why do precursor notions to war crimes appear, independently, in essentially every culture that has fought wars at scale?
Given that essentially every culture has also broken these norms, sometimes spectacularly, why does the norm always come back, and often come back stronger?
Common answers to these questions seem profoundly misguided. The naive answer, that war crimes are simply the most horrible things that we all agree is collectively wrong, does not survive even five minutes of scrutiny. More sophisticated versions of that argument also do not survive scrutiny: Just War theory is similarly flawed and question-begging on the descriptivist front, and the Schelling—shaped argument that war crimes can’t limit all of war’s badness, but are aimed at curbing the worst excesses, does not explain why mass bombings and medieval sieges are/were considered acceptable, but false surrender is not.
The “cynical” answers are (differently) flawed. eg some people think war crimes are completely fake and anything other than total war is just modern virtue signaling, ignoring the thousands of years of documented history we have on precursors to war crime (Xerxes in 400s BC: “The Spartans, when they do such things overthrow all law and justice among men.“). If anything, the modern version of “total war” is much newer than the idea of war crimes. Similarly, a naive “power analysis” that war crimes are simply defined by the powerful to limit the options of the powerless ignores that powerful people are often themselves constrained by these norms, sometimes hugely.
Instead, my core answer here is surprisingly simple: A “war crime” is, in its oldest and clearest form, the category of acts that destroy the means by which wars can be ended. The prohibitions track not the moral worst things people do in war, but the acts that, if generalized, would turn every future war into a total war.
I don’t think my theory here is very novel. Indeed, as I’ll discuss, this theory is literally thousands of years old and likely arose independently in many places. I will try, however, to make my post the best modern articulation of these ancient ideas.
No offense Linch, but aren’t these questions for jurists, historians and philosophers? Why should you develop the answers from first principles, so to speak? I’d get writing a blog post about a journey through such sources and what their theories are, but I think trying to answer such questions ourselves is not very robust.
This is not a criticism of you personally—developing ideas that require domain expertise from first principles is an approach I often see in EA and I think it’s a wrong one.
No offense taken!
My experience with trying to investigate various questions is that it’s pretty hard to ex ante predict which things already have substantial attention from the “experts”, and many questions that seem important fall through the cracks (for some EA-relevant examples that comes to mind, optimal charity, AI risk, pandemic preparedness, the impact of incarceration on crime).[1]
In this case, I don’t think the specific question I’m interested in has attracted a lot of academic attention/I don’t believe any single field has a good unifying theory. Just war theory is overwhelmingly normative with limited descriptivist content. IHL scholarship is interpretive and doctrinal. IR/game theory scholarship has partial answers, but afaik no one has synthesized them into a structural theory of war crime, etc, etc[2].
Second, I’m definitely reading a bunch of sources here! I’m sure I’ll miss a bunch but I’m certainly reading through a bunch of sources, including historical ones.
Third, if you believe the most useful thing to do here is a literature review, be the change you want to see in the world! Like if you think what’s missing in the world is a pure literature review summarizing various theories, go for it! I’d be happy to read your review.
As an example in the other direction, many US gov’t agencies are just kinda reasonable and make pretty reasonable tradeoffs given their constraints.
Watts (2013) talking about perfidy specifically is the closest. But tbc there have been many shadows of this theory/hypothesis over the centuries, since at least 2400 years ago and probably long before.
Your experience reminded me of how Holden Karnofsky described his career so far:
Thanks, though tbc Holden’s way better at it than I am!
Thanks for the serious reply!
I guess a “but can’t we, like, just outlaw all war?” approach is not the standard one so I’m at least interested in what answers you may find. Especially with me coming from a very, umm, war-prone country...
You might like this post I wrote earlier about the bargaining theory puzzle of war. I engaged with the academic literature on the subject pretty significantly, particularly James Fearon, so you might like it. On the other hand Fearon himself mostly reasoned from first-principles rather than conduct a careful historical assessment, so in that regard it might fit your interests less.
The post never got very popular but a few people who read it carefully really enjoyed it. One of the better compliments I’ve gotten on my writing is when somebody said they were surprised to learn after reading my post and several books on the subject that the post gave them >50% of the value of an academic book on the subject.
I like the puzzle. But I wonder if you can make your answer even simpler:
Actions taken in war have some benefit to the perpetrator, and some costs to the larger system of permitting them
When the ratio between these things gets too extreme, it’s regarded as a war crime
I think this explains the category that you outline (undermining trust in the kind of institutions that could stop the war is super destructive!), but also explains some other cases, e.g. abuse of prisoners, not impersonating medical staff, etc.
Yeah this is fair. I outlined something like that here.
I think there’s a few tricky things with this model. One is lack of precision, eg by whose lights are you interpreting “costs to the larger system of permitting them.” Relatedly, an advantage of advocating “war crimes are crimes against the end of war” is that it creates a clear core (even if it doesn’t describe everything) of norms that I think are a good description of commonly shared norms in history, and I think are good to uphold morally[1]. In contrast, many other norms of war tend to be more sporadic, like protecting civilians, chivalry, or diplomatic precedence.
Another tricky thing is Schelling’s point that almost all conflict is non-zero-sum, you can’t treat the zero-sum parts of war and the non-zero-sum parts as cleanly separable.
(I’d also note that torturing POWs makes surrender less appealing, so it’s consistent with my narrower answer. My narrower answer would also predict that protecting civilians is important but not very important, which is consistent with the historical record. On the other hand it does not have a explanation for weapons bans; my defense is that a decent enough simple theory in social science doesn’t need to explain everything).
With the important caveat of course that it reduces the cost of war, which is probably bad.
I agree that the model I proposed is imprecise; I think this counts against its usefulness but not its validity.
I’m not suggesting this as a thing to advocate for; merely as a descriptive pattern of what the category of war crimes is doing. I think the things which make ending war harder are an important class of really destructive thing, but it seems clarity-obscuring to me to claim that this is definitionally what war crimes are? Rather than giving your thing a new label and then getting to discuss what fraction of war crimes are in that category, and whether there are things in that category which aren’t war crimes (e.g. if torturing POWs counts under your categorization, then why doesn’t conscription count—after all, it damages the “one side runs out of soldiers” mechanism for ending war).
Poor choice of words on my part!
Fair, I guess the thing I’m interested in is something like “widely shared and independently recurring norms of war.” Though I’d want to be narrow enough to exclude stuff like “norms of war include paying your soldiers and have okay logistics planning” or “norms of war descriptively include being total morons sometimes in XYZ ways”
right sorry I do think the costs/benefits ratio matter significantly here.
Ok, so one place the predictions of these theories might come apart is that my theory suggests a norm against impersonating medics, whereas I think yours doesn’t (although maybe I’m just not seeing it; I don’t think I would have said that avoiding torture of prisoners was part of protecting the mechanisms of ending war, although I do kind of see what you mean). I haven’t looked into it at all, but if that norm has emerged independently multiple times that would be suggestive in favour of the broader theory; whereas if it has just emerged once it looks perhaps more potentially-idiosyncratic, which would be suggestive in favour of the narrower theory.
Thanks, I like this crux/operationalization!
It’s an interesting idea but as expressed feels a little tendentious, particularly if one looks at what is actually formally considered a war crime these days (much of which would not have been recognised as war crimes in the past, including by actors who believed themselves to be unusually chivalrous). Hard to believe it will be impossible to avoid total war if a few civilians are murdered or chemical weapons are used, never mind if a pilot gets shot after ejecting or if a spy is not afforded a fair trial, and hostage taking was once considered a good way to avoid total war. We see peace agreements between prolific war criminals quite often too. Avoiding total war might be a motivation, but it can’t be the only one.
On the other hand game theory favours opposing sides agreeing to not shoot ejecting pilots or torture each others’ prisoners even if they don’t agree on anything else, whereas it is impossible to win a war if you are not permitted to fire at the other side’s soldiers, and at least in 1949 artillery and aerial bombardments were also too critical to winning for the Geneva Convention to agree to ban them. It is possible for opposing sides to agree not to shoot at people that don’t wear uniform, but only if both sides treat sneaking up on the other side and shooting them whilst not wearing uniform as also a crime.
Also, many people genuinely believe in the idea that people shooting other people in a uniform which indicates they intend to fire back represents some sort of fair play (even if the targets happen to be sleeping conscripts who haven’t had a chance to surrender yet) and the sort of people that believe in that sort of thing are disproportionately likely to be military officers. They tend to believe in just wars too...
I do agree that opposing sides are considerably more likely to respect conventions on war crimes (and even reach other bargains like prisoner swaps) whilst the infrastructure that may allow the sides to mutually end the war still exists. But there’s plenty of evidence of war crimes committed with impunity in conflicts that never came close to total war, and for that matter of individual military units choosing to abide by conventions despite there being no realistic prospect of a near-term peace agreement and plenty of war crimes being committed by others on their side
I think the language I used above is more deontological/universalizing than ideal. I agree it’s more of a gradient than anything else. I also think some of the biggest classical norms (“don’t shoot messengers/envoys”) while still important today, are less so in the age of wireless communication, mass media, and email. I also think my primary thesis address the benefits of having “war crime” norms, but norms in practice are about both benefits and costs, and some of your comment here address costs (which are of course also important).