1 McMahan’s Argument for Engaging in a Cover-Up

The suggestion that the received just war tradition is incorrect about the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello is an intriguing one, and has been taken up by a number of theorists. Such theorists, known as revisionists, argue for a massive shift in how war is understood at the moral level; they argue, roughly, that there is no moral difference between everyday life and war, and so we should approach war in the same way that we approach ordinary interpersonal morality.⁵ I do not wish to adjudicate this debate here. For the purposes of this chapter, I remain neutral on the question of whether the revisionists or the traditionalists are correct. Rather, I want to focus on the argument that comes on the heels of McMahan’s revisionist understanding of just war theory, namely, his claim that we ought not seek to publicize, nor change military policy and law in response to, the revisionist conclusion that combatants on the unjust side of a war act wrongly, and so are no different than criminals firing on police (or on other criminals, in cases where both sides are in the wrong).⁶

McMahan’s argument for this claim is that publicizing this fact, and changing military policy and law in response to it, would have widespread negative consequences. He argues that combatants have a tendency to believe that their side is the just one—a belief that military commanders and political leaders, among others, foster—and that this belief, in conjunction with the belief that combatants on the unjust side of a war act wrongly by engaging in fighting at all, would lead combatants to treat enemy combatants more like rogue criminals or terrorists than like fellow combatants to whom certain rules and restrictions apply. In particular, McMahan worries that, if the laws of war were to come to reflect his conclusions regarding the morality of war, then the torture of enemy combatants would become more acceptable, the protections traditionally offered to pows would be eroded, and the use of cruel and unusual weapons of war, such as biological and chemical weaponry, and perhaps nuclear weapons themselves, would gradually become allowed, if not commonplace.⁷ In short, McMahan worries that codifying his moral view in military policy and domestic and international law would lead to the in-practice relaxation of current restrictions that keep wartime fighting from being even worse, and more vicious, than it currently is.

In addition, McMahan’s moral view entails that non-combatants, or civilians, on the unjust side of the war are also, in some cases, liable to defensive attack by just combatants, because they are sometimes at least partially morally responsible for the objectively unjustified harms that are suffered by both the just combatants and the just civilians in the war.⁸ Thus, on McMahan’s view, the principle of non-combatant immunity, familiar from the jus in bello aspect of the just war tradition, is false. However, McMahan argues that to publicize and legalize this aspect of his view would be a disaster as well, given his earlier point about the usual belief of combatants that their side is the just one.⁹ Much like combatants would treat enemy combatants more like rogue criminals or terrorists, McMahan argues that implementing his view at a policy and legal level would lead combatants on all sides to attack and harm enemy civilians, many of whom are not liable to attack, because combatants would believe that enemy civilians are on the unjust side, and thus are liable to defensive attack. Given the fog of war, McMahan suggests that combatants will not be able—either because they do not have the time, or the willpower, or the intellectual freedom, or the inclination—to make the sort of fine-grained moral distinctions required by his moral view, and so will simply assume, given their prior beliefs about the justice of their side, that all enemy civilians are liable to defensive attack. And having made such an assumption, McMahan concludes that combatants will act in accordance with that assumption, and, rather than work to protect both friendly and enemy civilians, will attack, or at the very least will not deliberately avoid attacking and harming, enemy civilians.

Put broadly, McMahan worries that publicizing and legalizing the truth about the moral asymmetry of warfare will lead combatants on both sides to cast off the constraints of the jus in bello tradition, which currently operate both policy-wise and legally to limit the harming and killing of enemy combatants and enemy civilians. From a straightforwardly consequentialist point of view, this would be extremely bad, because it would make it more likely that a much higher number of people, including many who are not liable to be harmed or killed, would be harmed and killed in war. As McMahan puts it, it “would be worse [to have] an in bello law that would be as asymmetric as in bello morality. … [such a law] would be exploited by the unjust and inevitably abused by the just, leading to greater violence, and in particular to more and worse violations of the rights of the innocent, than a [symmetric] law that prohibits these forms of actions to all.”¹⁰ So, given the present epistemic circumstances of combatants (that is, that their knowledge of the relevant facts is limited, that they are likely to be biased towards believing their commanders, and that they are usually disinclined to seek out the truth of the matter), when considering what the laws should be that regulate military actions in war, the dictates of morality must be ignored, lest truly horrific consequences come to be.¹¹

In addition to the direct effect that it would have on combatants and their wartime actions, McMahan also worries about the effect that publicizing and legalizing his revisionist conclusions would have on the already-difficult transition from war to peace. Traditionally, enemy combatants—except in cases where they have broken standard, traditional rules of jus in bello—are not put on trial after wars, because they are not regarded either by international law or by enemy militaries or political leaders as having acted unjustly merely by fighting. This legal policy, in addition to being morally correct according to the traditionalist view of war, has a number of good consequences according to McMahan: combatants are more willing to fight, and more importantly, are more willing to surrender, because they believe that they will not be penalized or punished merely for the act of fighting, and that they will be allowed to return to civilian life without censure after the war is over. Revising the laws of war to reflect the moral asymmetry of combatants would almost demand that those combatants who are determined (perhaps by an independent tribunal, such as the International Criminal Court (icc)) to have been unjust combatants be censured, penalized, or punished for the act of fighting.¹² McMahan worries that this will lead combatants to be both less willing to fight in all cases—for fear of fighting on the wrong side and so being punished afterwards—and less willing to surrender—for fear that surrender will simply lead to a humiliating punishment, censure, or penalization, regardless of the actual morality of their actions. Again, the worry is that the negative consequences of changing the laws of war to match the morality of war will vastly outweigh the positive consequences of doing so. As McMahan concludes, “In current conditions, the law of war cannot aspire to congruence with the morality of war. It must be formulated with a pragmatic concern for the consequences of its implementation.”¹³

2 Dire Predictions: a Feminist History and Explanation

Of course, consequences do matter; so, McMahan is right to consider the consequences of codifying his moral conclusions in military policy and law. However, I question whether he is correct that changing the laws of war to match the “deep morality” of war will have the extremely negative consequences that he claims. First, and perhaps most straightforwardly, it is important to note that McMahan is neither a social psychologist, nor a sociologist, nor a legal scholar. Thus, he does not have the relevant expertise necessary to make such large claims about the social and legal consequences of codifying in law and military policy the main moral conclusions of his book. In addition, he does not rely on any empirical scholarship from these fields to help bolster his claims; rather, he relies on intuitive considerations and hypothetical examples to support his sweeping consequentialist arguments.¹⁴ This is not to denigrate McMahan; he is clearly one of the giants of contemporary western just war theory and applied ethics more generally. It is simply to note that philosophers love to speculate about fields not their own, but in general they, like other lay persons, should be wary of doing so. Often, intuitions about such matters are incorrect, as we will see by first considering a brief episode from history. And more importantly, they are often incorrect not randomly, but for predictable epistemic reasons, as we will see by considering an influential argument from feminist epistemology.

Consider first the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 19th amendment states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”¹⁵ The initial proposal, and the lead-up to the passage, of the 19th amendment is a good test case for our purposes, because it shares three relevant similarities with the case from the just war tradition described above: first, it is about bringing the law into line with morality,¹⁶ and second, it is about giving formal power and discretion to a large group of people who previously lacked such power and discretion. And third, although most, if not all, people would agree now, if asked, that the good consequences of the 19th amendment far outweigh the negative ones, when the amendment was first proposed, it was widely denigrated and opposed for fear of its bad consequences.

Critics worried that the amendment, if passed, would destroy society in a number of ways. In particular, they argued that it would be bad for women, men, and children, would destroy the institution of the family, and would destroy the overall American social order. The National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage (naows), founded in 1911, argued against women’s suffrage “because it is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur.”¹⁷ Such potential evils included women competing with men rather than cooperating with them, the harm to women’s reputations that could come from being involved in bitter political campaigns, women wasting time and energy learning about political candidates when that time and energy could be better used caring for their homes and families, men feeling offended and bitter that their wives did not trust them to vote well, the expense of doubling the electorate, and the possibility that some states would come under “petticoat rule” (that is, rule by women).¹⁸ In addition, many anti-suffrage groups argued that giving women the vote would increase the number of socialist voters.¹⁹

Much like McMahan’s argument above, the formal arguments against legalizing and implementing women’s suffrage from anti-suffrage groups claimed that it would harm women and men (the combatants, in our analogy), children, the institution of the family, and the economy (all innocent civilians, or bystanders, in our analogy), and that the resultant political structure would lead to worse outcomes for all citizens (in much the same way that legalizing asymmetric jus in bello laws would lead combatants to make worse choices overall). Less systematically but still importantly, prominent individuals spoke out against women’s suffrage, as well. William Taft argued that the “enfranchisement of women would increase the proportion of the hysterical element of the electorate to such a degree as to be injurious to the public welfare.”²⁰ Other anti-suffragists, also drawing on biological views of women and womanhood, argued that “female enfranchisement would sexualize politics and unsex women, confusing the proper boundaries of masculine and feminine, public and private, domestic and political, by which the natural complementarity of a harmonious social order was maintained.”²¹ In other words, because of what women are like, letting them get a chance at the polls would harm, or even destroy, society. Again, this mirrors McMahan’s argument above that, because of what combatants are like, the laws of war should not be changed, lest horrific consequences occur.

Of course, these dire predictions did not come to pass; women have had the vote for nearly a hundred years in the United States, and nuclear families, the economy, and society as a whole are still present and operating. While there have been a number of cultural and political changes in the intervening years, women and men still manage to cooperate socially, politically, and professionally, and have loving relationships (of all kinds) interpersonally. The anti-suffragists’ fears of societal and political collapse, to put it simply, were unfounded. Still, this is not to say that those fears are inexplicable; people often fear and thus vilify change, especially large-scale political and legal change. However, I contend that there is more behind the anti-suffragists’ arguments than a simple fear of change. Following Alison Jaggar, Lorraine Code, and others, I argue that anti-suffragists, or at least their arguments, were epistemically biased in particular ways, and so it is not surprising that they had negative intuitions, and thus made particular knowledge claims, about the likely consequences of the passage of the nineteenth amendment.

Feminist epistemology seeks to acknowledge and understand “the ways knowledge is embodied, emotional, socially situated, and informed by specific experiences and goals. …[F]eminist epistemologies focus on the social and historical circumstances that determine knowledge in particular contexts, and on the relationships between knowledge production and forms of power.”²² The overall point is that often what passes for objective knowledge and reasoning is in fact subjective and biased in various ways, in that it is at the very least influenced, and at the very most determined, by the personal, social, and political position and circumstances of the knower/reasoner. It is possible to read feminist epistemology in a more or less radical tone: there are important debates about whether objective knowledge is impossible because no one can completely overcome their own standpoint,²³ or whether such knowledge is possible, albeit very difficult,²⁴ or whether such knowledge is plausible, if a bit of care is taken to screen out obvious biases and the like.²⁵ However, regardless of which of these general positions within feminist epistemology is correct, all agree that knowledge claims about women in general, and subsequent reasoning and conclusions drawn on the basis of those knowledge claims, are strongly influenced by the oppressive social and political relations that have long held between men and women. It is this point that I want to focus on going forward.

As Alison Jaggar persuasively argues, western philosophy, and western society more generally, understands reason in opposition to emotion. Reason is associated with men and male competence, while emotion is linked to women and feminine appetites. As Jaggar puts it,

Although there is no reason to suppose that the thoughts and actions of women are any more influenced by emotion than the thoughts and actions of men, the stereotypes of cool men and emotional women continue to flourish…[this myth] functions to bolster the epistemic authority of the currently dominant groups, composed largely of white men, and to discredit the observations and claims of the currently subordinate groups including, of course, the observations and claims of many people of color and women. The more forcefully and vehemently the latter groups express their observations and claims, the more emotional they appear and so the more easily they are discredited.²⁶

Women have been historically, and in many ways still are, viewed as irrational and hysterical, and as constitutionally unable to make reasonable, rational, informed decisions. (This is true to the extent that, when women are seen to be making reasonable, rational, informed decisions, they are often either praised as an “honorary man,” as “a member of the boy’s club,” or are denigrated as “cold,” “unfeeling,” or as “not a real woman.”) Given this epistemic bias against women—women-as-irrational-and-hysterical—it is unsurprising that anti-suffragists²⁷ concluded that women should not be allowed to vote, for fear that they would vote irrationally or unreasonably.

Following in this vein, Lorraine Code argues that women, as a group, are often viewed as objects of study rather than knowers in their own right. As she puts it, “women—and other ‘others’—are produced as objects of knowledge by S-knows-that-p epistemologies and the philosophies of science/social science that they inform.”²⁸ Rather than being regarded as subjects who acquire knowledge, women have been viewed, both in western philosophy and in western science and social science, as objects to be known about. And as objects, women’s subjectivity is erased and they are assumed to have “interchangeable, observable features.”²⁹ In light of this epistemological view of women—women-as-interchangeable-non-knowers—the anti-suffragist claims that women would simply double their husband’s vote, and that women having the vote would be both offensive to men’s sensibilities and straightforwardly harmful to men and children, make sense. It is important to note again that these claims about women are both false and pernicious; but given prominent sexist epistemic biases, they are perfectly understandable. As Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo point out, “oppressive power relations are often reinforced by epistemological theories and methods.”³⁰ Taking it for granted that early 20th century America was a culture of male dominance and female subordination (among many other relations of dominance and subordination),³¹ it is not surprising, and in fact is to be expected, that there were strong epistemic biases against women, and that these biases influenced social and political thought and action.

Ultimately, the dire political and social predictions of anti-suffragists, (to the extent that they believed what they were saying and writing), were the direct result of their epistemic biases against women. Because women were viewed as emotional, hysterical, non-knowers, the conclusion drawn was that they ought not have a formal political role in the state. Jaggar sums up this view nicely: she writes that “the alleged epistemic authority of the dominant groups [was and still is used to] justify their political authority.”³² The flip side of this view, of course, is that any threat to the dominant group’s political authority—by suffragists or other disenfranchised groups—was (and still is) responded to on epistemological grounds as well as political grounds. Anti-suffragists did not simply fear change; they feared that people whom they viewed as fundamentally intellectually incapable—women—would take over and/or destroy the electoral process, and in doing so, would destroy the country.

3 McMahan and Epistemic Bias

As we have seen, the anti-suffragists’ fears and predictions were not founded on sociological or psychological or historical data, but on a strong set of sexist epistemic biases. Analogously, McMahan’s dire predictions about the consequences of legalizing his moral conclusions regarding jus in bello can be traced to classist epistemic biases. Combatants are, after all, by-and-large members of the lower classes.³³ This is not to say that McMahan consciously has such biases; but it is to suggest that, absent any other firm data-driven foundation for his consequentialist conclusions, epistemic bias may well be playing a (conscious or unconscious) role in his argument. I thus follow the general feminist strategy of being suspicious whenever theorists make large claims about what groups of people, in general, are likely to do.³⁴

Recall that McMahan argues that combatants, absent existing symmetric laws of war that keep them in check, will turn into murderers; they will “exploit” or “inevitably abuse” asymmetric laws of war (that is, laws that match what McMahan considers to be the correct moral view of war), leading to greater, and unjustified, violence against both enemy combatants and enemy civilians. Importantly, McMahan reaches this conclusion based on his view of combatants’ epistemic position. Combatants, he writes, have a strong tendency to believe their side’s propaganda about the justice of their cause and the injustice of their enemies, because they lack the sort of intellectual curiosity and acumen necessary to interrogate that propaganda.³⁵ As McMahan puts it, “combatants are quite generally negligent about their epistemic responsibilities,” and “very seldom even try” to consider the moral character of the war they are fighting.³⁶ This belief in the justice of their side, combined with the fog of war, would lead combatants to not be able to make the important moral distinctions that would be demanded by asymmetric laws of war. And absent the ability to make such moral judgments, war under asymmetric laws would be even more hellish than it currently is under symmetric laws. At least, so McMahan contends.

But we should be wary of these claims about the epistemic position of combatants. At first glance, it reads as a strongly paternalistic argument: combatants don’t have the intellectual capacities to question what they are told (they cannot, or are highly unlikely to be able to, distinguish between propaganda and the truth), and so we must lie to them via the law and public policies (we must maintain the currently-existing symmetric laws of war), for their own good (so that combatants on both sides do not cast off the practical restraints that the “moral equality of combatants” legal doctrine places on them). This matches closely with well-known epistemic biases against members of the lower classes, that they are “too stupid” to grasp the truth, and so elites ought to lie to them, for their own good. Such a bias can be seen as far back as Plato’s infamous myth of the metals.³⁷ Plato claims that this myth protects the lower classes from having to grapple with philosophical matters that would only confuse them. Because the lower classes are not ruled by reason, they ought not be told the truth, because they are likely to misunderstand and mis-apply it.³⁸ More recently, Joanna Kadi persuasively argues that our entire society reinforces the social myth that poor people are stupid, because it is a handy explanation for why the poor are poor and the rich are rich. As she puts it, “so much energy goes into the social lie that poor people are stupid; capitalism needs a basic rationalization to explain why things happen the way they do. So we hear, over and over, that our lousy jobs and living situations result from our lack of smarts.”³⁹ But of course, this is not true; it is simply a lie told by the rich to justify their treatment of the poor.⁴⁰ To assume that all, or even most, members of the lower classes are stupid is to accept capitalist ideology, and its associated epistemic bias, uncritically. Combatants, although they are—for the most part—from the lower classes, are not stupid; to theorize about them as though they are is to make Plato’s, and capitalism’s, epistemic mistake.⁴¹

McMahan is undoubtedly correct that the fog of war makes it difficult for combatants to determine the right course of action. However, as we saw above, he moves from this claim to the conclusion that, given asymmetric laws of war, combatants will simply assume that all enemy combatants and civilians are liable to defensive attack, and will act accordingly. But it is not clear that combatants are never able to make fine-grained moral distinctions in war: there is both historical and contemporary evidence that combatants can, and often do, make complex moral judgments during military campaigns.⁴² To suggest otherwise sounds similar to another epistemic bias commonly employed against the lower classes, that they lack the moral sensibilities necessary to appreciate art and culture, to act well, and to be anything other than “brutes.” (Not surprisingly, this epistemic bias is also leveled against black and brown Americans.) Lacking such moral reasoning skills, the poor must first be controlled and then instructed (if possible—often the poor are regarded as unteachable) regarding how to act appropriately, lest they proceed to ignore all moral dictates and act very badly indeed. As Kadi writes, describing this bias, “I grew up learning that workers…are dumb, brutish, boring, close to animals. …I internalized the lie and lived with it for years.”⁴³ But again, this epistemic bias is not borne out by the world; complex moral reasoning and judgment is not, it turns out, the provenance of wealthy or academic elites. It is a skill, and like any other skill, it is both fairly evenly distributed among the human population, and can be taught. So there is no reason to accept McMahan’s conclusion that combatants will, even given the fog of war, abandon all moral judgment and attack enemy combatants and civilians indiscriminately. That is what unteachable brutes would do; but combatants are neither unteachable, nor are they brutes.⁴⁴

McMahan also contends that asymmetric jus in bello laws would have negative consequences on the transition from war to peace. Combatants will either refuse to fight or, more importantly, refuse to surrender, for fear of being punished after the war for fighting in it. Interestingly, this worry of McMahan’s is in tension with his overall view; he should, we might think, want combatants to be more unwilling to fight, given both the likelihood that their side is unjust, and the general trend of just war theorists to want to eliminate most, if not all, wars.⁴⁵ So why does he worry about the unwillingness of combatants here? Presumably, because he worries that they will refuse to fight and surrender in all wars because of their fear of punishment, not simply the unjust ones, and thus will fail to do what they morally ought to do. But why think combatants’ fears will stop them from surrendering? This strand of argumentation closely matches an often-invoked classist epistemic bias, that the poor are “bullheaded,” that they are stubborn and unable to give up particular ideas, propositions, projects, or battles. (To see this bias, consider the many op-eds claiming that there is no point in trying to convince poor white voters to change their minds, because they have picked their position, and will stick to it forever, come what may.⁴⁶) But again, this bias is belied by military history: there are numerous cases of combatants either surrendering or attempting to surrender long before their high command or political leadership were willing to do so, on the basis of claims that the war was no longer worth fighting, even when they knew they would be punished for their surrender.⁴⁷ Given such history, McMahan’s conclusion that, if the laws of war are changed to be asymmetric, then combatants will refuse to surrender, seems to demonstrate that he has something of a blind spot where the epistemic position of combatants is concerned. And furthermore, this blind spot is not surprising—it matches general classist epistemic biases in a predictable manner.

As we have seen, epistemic biases tend to discourage giving groups of people formal power and discretion who previously lacked such power and discretion, even when morality supports doing so. Such epistemic biases do this by operating as hidden premises in arguments that conclude that the consequences of providing such power and discretion would be disastrous for all concerned. And this is precisely what we see in McMahan’s argument; he concludes that we ought not legally provide combatants with formal power and discretion by passing and implementing asymmetric laws of war, even though he argues that the morality of war is asymmetric, for fear of the dire consequences of such a legal change. Whether McMahan himself is consciously epistemically biased or not, there are predictable classist epistemic biases embedded as hidden premises in his argument, ones that lead it partially, if not fully, astray.

4 Morality and the Law

But perhaps this line of reasoning is mistaken, and McMahan’s argument for de-coupling the morality of war from the law of war is not infected with (conscious or unconscious) epistemic biases. However, even if he is correct that changing the laws of war will have the negative effects that he claims, I contend that we still should be wary of accepting his conclusion that we ought not incorporate the morality of war into our military and international public policies and laws. One of the stated goals of the western just war tradition is to prevent morally unnecessary wars. While just war theorists differ from pacifists in that they argue that it is possible for wars to be morally justified, they align with pacifists in that they argue that morality does apply to war, and that morally unjustified wars should be prevented and avoided. Because of this, the moral theory of war always has been, and in general has sought to be, closely linked to actual policies and laws surrounding war. Consider the Geneva Conventions; they are strongly based on the western just war tradition that was elucidated partially as a legal theory and partially as a moral theory by Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, and Vitoria (among others), and have been ably defended by many theorists as both a legally correct and a morally correct doctrine in the modern era.⁴⁸ Speaking generally, traditionalist arguments about the morality of war standardly reference the actual laws and policies surrounding war for support, and arguments about the actual laws and policies surrounding war standardly reference traditionalist just war theory for support. To put it another way, the common presumption is that the laws of war do—or, if they don’t, they should seek to—match the morality of war.^49,50

This puts just war theorists in the important position of being relevant to real-world political, legal, and military debates about what the laws and policies surrounding war should be. Military practitioners, advisors, and lawyers read and reference just war theorists’ research, as do international jurists and political scientists. But if McMahan is correct that we ought not publicize or legalize the “deep morality” of war, then this means that just war theorists—insofar as they accept McMahan’s revisionist moral conclusions—are no longer in a position to advocate honestly for particular international laws and military policies as morally apt. Just war theorists could advocate in bad faith, of course, but this would necessitate going against where the moral theory has led, and any reasonably adept public policy maker would be able to quickly ferret out the difference between their public and private stances. This could (and we have some evidence that it does⁵¹) lead to a widespread loss of trust in just war theorists, which might make it even less likely that public policy makers, international legal theorists, and military decision-makers will listen to just war theorists. And this is bad for the stated goal of just war theory. If those involved in the creation and implementation of military policy and international law no longer listen to just war theorists, then those theorists will be unable to advocate successfully for the prevention of morally unnecessary wars. At the risk of being myopic, war is one real-world arena where philosophers have a say, and are listened to; it is not clear that we should engage in practices that are likely to reduce that influence, especially given the amount of good that we could do.⁵² Ultimately, to be a moral revisionist without being a legal revisionist is to give up the (admittedly limited, but real) practical influence that just war theorists have. This, in turn, is to give up on one of the just war tradition’s key goals, that of preventing morally unnecessary wars.

5 Coda: on Lying (Even by Omission)

Thus far, I have presented two arguments, one theoretical, one pragmatic, against McMahan’s view that we ought neither publicize nor (more importantly) legalize what he terms the “deep morality” of war. In this section, I would like to discuss, much more tentatively, a third consideration. McMahan’s conclusion that we should lie, or at the very least remain publicly and legally silent—i.e., lie by omission—about the revisionist morality of war (i.e., about his conclusions that combatants are morally unequal, that some civilians are liable to defensive attack, that some unjust combatants are liable to punishment after war, etc.) should give us some reason to question the success of his argument. Much like the infamous theory of government house utilitarianism, if you have to lie about it, that is some reason—although not decisive—to think that perhaps the theory is not correct. In much the way that Plato’s “noble lie” casts suspicion on his entire theory of justice, McMahan’s contention that we ought not change international law and military policy casts suspicion on his entire revisionist theory of war.

Of course, suspicion is not an argument. And sometimes, lying is necessary, as we learn from the many responses to Kant’s “murderer at the door” case. But there does seem to be a difference between lying in particular cases, and lying about an entire domain of human endeavor. Specific, one-off lies can be easily and straightforwardly justified; but it is not clear that the same is true of lies about an entire sub-domain of morality. Ultimately, it reads as somewhat hypocritical to argue for a moral position and then contend that the world should not strive to be moral. But perhaps, in the end, such large-scale mismatches between the law and morality are justified; I have certainly not put forward a positive argument against this view here. I have merely suggested that such mismatches ought to draw increased attention and interrogation, if not general suspicion. McMahan advocates for a combination of moral revisionism and legal traditionalism on purely pragmatic grounds; but, as I have shown, there are at least two, and possibly three, reasons to reject his pragmatic argument for covering up the so-called “deep morality” of war.