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I really enjoyed writing the last piece I did on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and philosophy, so I’m doing another one. This one will be focusing on the villain Ronan the Accuser and the conflicts that he’s involved with in primarily in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (though he appears in the movie Captain Marvel as well), and using that as a jumping-off point for exploring the ethics of warfare.
Ronan is of the Kree people, who, when they are first introduced in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, had just signed a peace treaty with the Xandarians of the Nova Empire, against whom the Kree had been fighting for a thousand years. Though the Kree Empire is explained in Captain Marvel as being particularly bellicose and expansionist, no details are given in the films as to the origin of the Kree-Nova War. Ronan, who had lost family members in the war, disagreed strongly with the treaty, and after it was signed, went to fight Xandar and the Nova Empire on his own. Ronan had also fought in a genocidal campaign waged by the Kree against the Skrull people of Skrullos. Again, no details are provided as to the origin of the conflict.
War being among the most catastrophic and damaging behaviors in which humans willingly engage, it’s not at all surprising that the inquiry into the ethics of warfare, often called Just War Theory, is among the most extensive and complex in all philosophy. Just War Theory in general is concerned with the question: when is war justified and how can it be fought justly? And as well, is war ever morally good, or is it, at best, the least of possible evils? Our more particular concerns for this piece are whether Ronan was justified in pursuing war on his own terms after the broader conflict had ended. And generalizing from that, when are we justified in pursuing vengeance, both within and outside of the context of warfare?
Just War Theory is most commonly divided up into two categories: jus ad bellum, which concerns justification for going to war in the first place, and jus in bello, which concerns how a war is to be justly waged once begun. More recently, a third category has been added, jus post bellum, which concerns how things are to be rightly handled once the war in question has ended. Since the origins of the Kree-Nova War are unknown to us, we will concern ourselves here primarily with in bello and post bellum concerns, although the three cannot be completely disentangled from each other: there are certain ad bellum concerns, for example, which may affect the application of in bello and post bellum criteria for just war, just action within war, and reconciliation after the cessation of war. This entanglement will be of particular relevance to what follows.
Seth Lazar’s 2016 article “War” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy1 (which has been my primary source in researching for this piece, though I have also relied on Rory Cox’s 2018 article “The Ethics of War up to Thomas Aquinas,” which appeared that year in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War) presents us with three in bello criteria for actions undertaken in the course of warfare:
- Discrimination: Targeting noncombatants is impermissible.
- Proportionality: Collaterally harming noncombatants (that is, harming them foreseeably, but unintendedly) is permissible only if the harms are proportionate to the goals the attack is intended to achieve.
- Necessity: Collaterally harming noncombatants is permissible only if, in the pursuit of one’s military objectives, the least harmful means feasible are chosen.
There is a distinction made here between “combatants” and “noncombatants”: “Combatants are (most) members of the organized armed forces of a group that is at war, as well as others who directly participate in hostilities or have a continuous combat function… Noncombatants are not combatants” (Lazar 2016). As these criteria are of particular significance to what follows, let’s examine them in closer detail.
The principle of Discrimination states that the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is impermissible. Noncombatants may certainly be participants in warfare; indeed, to such a degree as we all pay taxes and participate in societies that engage in warfare activities, we all participate in warfare. But not all who participate in warfare are combatants, and only combatants may be targeted with lethal intent, according to traditional models of Just War Theory. I don’t mean to affirm this model of Just War Theory, only to describe it.
The second rule concerns the collateral harming of noncombatants. Noncombatants, whether or not they are participants in warfare, may be subject to collateral damage despite their not having been targeted directly, and to a certain degree, this damage is permissible, so long as the harm inflicted is proportional to what is gained in the process. An example might be illustrative here: let’s say that I’m in command of a military force intent on securing a municipality of some sort, perhaps a town or a small city. If I and my forces secure the town, I can ensure that it will not be affected by further hostilities in the conflict. However, securing the town may result in the deaths of innocent civilians. If I weigh the good of the entire municipality against the good of a minority who will be killed in the process of securing said peace, the course of action is clear.
And then to the third criteria of Necessity. Returning to the aforementioned example, my actions as a commander, which result in the deaths of innocent civilians, are only permissible if there is no alternative course of action which would result in lesser harm overall. If I, as commander, might negotiate with the enemy to allow their withdrawal — which would preserve the lives of the civilians — along with our simultaneous securing of the town, and if this option would not result in some greater harm, then that is the option I am morally obligated to take.
Again, I only mean to present this as the traditional model of Just War Theory, not to defend it. But whichever way we turn, we find situations in which the killing of innocents is permissible and moral. These are all mere elaborations of the classic dilemma in moral philosophy, the Trolley Problem. In this thought experiment, you’re the conductor of a trolley, and you find yourself in a situation in which you can either stay on your current track and run over five people, or switch tracks and run over only one. As numerous experiments on this matter have concluded, we are largely in agreement: it is better to deliberately kill one to save five, and the unavoidable consequence is that it is at times permissible, just, moral, and right to kill the innocent.
This is, of course, a horrible outcome. We would certainly prefer that there be no situations under which killing the innocent would be the right thing to do, but at the same time, we cannot avoid that this may be, at times, exactly the case. There remains, to this day, a viable philosophical position under which the dropping of nuclear bombs by the United States on the vulnerable and defenseless innocent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, annihilating over a hundred thousand lives and incurring brutal injury to many more, was a moral good. I don’t aim to defend that position here, but only to elucidate how such a position may be defensible in the first place. The decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to be weighed against the human cost of a land invasion of Japan, which might have dragged on for a decade and cost an order of magnitude more lives than were lost in the nuclear bombings.
Moral philosophy is nothing less than the willingness to confront horror.
A google search with some varied and dubious results has led me to conclude that the Kree may be, at the most, very long-lived, but that their lifespans do not extend to millennia. This means that Ronan was fighting a war that began long before his birth. There seems to me to be a great danger that grows as a conflict ages, that it will become detached from its origins and become less about its causes and more about its continuation, less a matter to be resolved and more the status quo. It seems fitting to me that Guardians of the Galaxy does not mention the origin of the Kree-Nova War; it’s not something that seems at all important to Ronan himself. What’s important to him is that, in the course of the conflict, the Nova Empire killed his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.
The United States initiated the War in Afghanistan as a response to the September 11th attacks on New York City in 2001. Today, eighteen years later, it is possible that some of the Americans now fighting this war were born after that event occurred, and almost certain that many of them were at least very young children at the time and do not remember it. To what degree can we rightly say that such people are fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda because they attacked us, rather than saying that they’re fighting because we’re at war? We’re at war because they attacked us, certainly, but looking at it that way, the attack as the cause of the young troops’ fighting has become secondary and indirect. I’ll refer to this as the sublation of causes. The initial causes of the war are sublated into causes resulting from its perpetuation.
To review, sublation is a philosophical term describing a process by which some concept is negated but also preserved in a new form that synthesizes both the original concept and its negation. In this case, the initial causes of the war are negated as they become irrelevant to those fighting on both sides, but cause for war in general is maintained, though in a new form. The current Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as a model example, however grim, and I’ll emphasize first that I’m presenting this without taking a stand on whether either side has an ad bellum justification in the first place. While I have an opinion on the matter, it’s not relevant to this piece. The causes of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews reaches into antiquity; no one alive has experienced those causes directly. Over the centuries, atrocities have been committed by both sides in furtherance of that conflict, as is the nature of warfare, and those living who still participate in the conflict are responding largely to those wrongs rather than to those that initiated the conflict in the first place, though the initial causes cannot be neglected when considering the conflict in its totality. And an article that arrived in my inbox after I had already written much of this piece indicates that the sublation of causes is indeed in effect in Afghanistan. In “The Logic of Staying in Afghanistan and the Logic of Getting Out,” published jointly by the excellent Lawfare Institute and Brookings on October 20th of this year, Carter Malkasian writes, “…the current threat is not why U.S. forces are still in Afghanistan. The logic of staying in Afghanistan revolves around the future threat, specifically the threat that might materialize if the United States were to leave Afghanistan.”
As we have established, the killing of innocents is sometimes necessary in warfare. But as a purely pragmatic matter, no side is ever going to accept that as a justification for the slaughter of their loved ones. Such would be inimical to our very humanity. And this becomes particularly dangerous when the initial causes for the conflict have been sublated into its perpetuation. By way of making this more concrete, let us say that I am the commander of a force which secured your municipality in the course of a conflict and, in doing so, secured that municipality against further conflict and saved hundreds of lives. Let us also say that, in the course of accomplishing this feat, your entire family was killed: your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your life partner, and your children, all dead in the dirt, effectively by my own hand. What moral argument can I present to you to dissuade you from taking me by the neck and choking the life out of me? More importantly, could you be at all blamed for seeking vengeance against me, no matter how many lives I have saved at the expense of everything you hold dear?
But it seems more likely that Ronan’s relatives who were killed in the war were themselves combatants. What in bello criteria govern violence between combatants? The matter becomes quite convoluted. There is, for example, a principle in Just War Theory called Combatant Equality. This principle states that combatants on all sides of a conflict who obey in bello principles of just warfare have equal moral authority to kill each other, regardless of what any particular side is fighting for. While this initially makes sense, it’s not hard to start poking holes in it, as Lazar does extensively in his article. To begin with, we might take as an example the war against Hitler’s Germany in World War II. Germany’s war against the rest of the world was doubtlessly unjust and illegitimate; that being the case, can we say that the deaths of Allied soldiers at German hands were just and moral within that context? That seems absurd. Clearly, a war can be just on one side but unjust on another, and that ad bellum balance affects the in bello moral framework. And with the sublation of causes, especially as both sides have likely taken actions that have intentionally (and perhaps even justifiably) or unintentionally (and again, perhaps justifiably) killed the innocent, it becomes even more difficult to tell whether either side is truly justified.
So we find ourselves evaluating Ronan in the context of a war whose causes have long been sublated, and in this context his cause becomes much more sympathetic, regardless of whether his relatives were themselves combatants. But let’s take a page out of Immanuel Kant’s book and look at this in terms of the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, what are the moral implications should everyone take this approach? If this kind of post bellum vengeance is acceptable for any one person, can we then say that it’s acceptable for everyone? There is no reason to believe that Ronan’s losses are exceptional with regard to a thousand-year conflict waged by long-lived races. Such a war will doubtlessly have involved numerous atrocities committed by all sides of the conflict, and it wouldn’t be wrong to expect that most members of the societies involved would have experienced wrongs warranting redress, so this universalization of the problem seems to be a real risk. And if most members of all societies involved were to seek vengeance, this would amount to a de facto perpetuation of the war itself. This leaves us with three possibilities: either the members of both sides must agree, collectively and totally, to forgo the individual vengeance to which they may otherwise be morally entitled; or, wars, once initiated, must be fought perpetually until there is no one left to fight; or, certain members of society are ethically exempt from the general rule and may pursue vengeance on their own terms even while the remainder of the parties in conflict agree to peace.
I don’t think I need to make the argument that, all else being equal, peace is preferable to war; and that warfare practiced with legal, moral, and temporal limits is preferable to unlimited, total war that continues until at least one side is completely annihilated. Thus, we are left with either the necessary foregoing of vengeance for everyone, or the allowance only of what we might call exceptional vengeance, vengeance that is morally justified on an individual level for reasons that apply only to that individual.
What circumstances would morally permit someone to pursue exceptional vengeance? Based on what we know from the movies, we’re faced with four scenarios regarding the Kree-Nova war:
- The war was just on both sides
- The war was unjust on both sides
- The war was just on the Nova side and unjust on the Kree side
- The war was just on the Kree side and unjust on the Nova side
…and four scenarios for the deaths of Ronan’s relatives:
- A. Ronan’s relatives were combatants who were killed legitimately
- B. Ronan’s relatives were noncombatants who were killed legitimately
- C. Ronan’s relatives were combatants who were killed illegitimately (e.g. by combatants on the other side not following the in bello principles, or because the Nova side was unjust)
- D. Ronan’s relatives were noncombatants who were killed illegitimately
… for a total of 16 different scenarios which might be referred to by number-letter combinations: 1A, 2B, and so forth. Obviously, as Ronan mentions three relatives having been killed, it’s possible that there’s a mixture of different options going on as well, but let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that all three of Ronan’s relatives were killed under a single scenario, A-D. I think that this simplification can be justified by understanding that the scenarios from A through D proceed in a spectrum of more legitimate to less legitimate, and that the most illegitimate scenario under which any one of Ronan’s relatives died may be considered as a justification for his actions, if any such justification exists at all. What we’ve established so far indicates that a war, as it drags on, becomes increasingly difficult to justify relative to its original causes, and thus that combatant deaths on both sides may become increasingly difficult to justify as well, but that both sides must agree to forego vengeance if war is to be ended, which is obviously the desirable end result. In the case that one side has violated ad bellum or in bello principles, a post bellum tribunal may be established for the redress of such wrongs. But let’s consider scenario 4D — the Kree were fighting a just war against the Nova, whose side is not justified, and Ronan’s relatives were noncombatants who were killed illegitimately — and assume that no such post bellum tribunal is established, or that such a tribunal is established but fails to properly redress the wrongs committed against Ronan’s family. It is possible that other scenarios in which Ronan’s relatives were noncombatants who were killed legitimately would also qualify here, but I think that this is the best case for an example because the case of an unjust war perpetrated against the Kree by the Nova Empire would be the most egregious. Would Ronan then have cause for exceptional vengeance?
I think possibly yes, but there are a few more problems to consider. The first of which is fairly obvious: exceptional vengeance, assuming that it is morally justified in the first place, must necessarily be limited in scope. If some wrong has been committed against me and I am morally entitled to vengeance, I am obviously not entitled to enact my vengeance against anyone at all; my vengeance must be targeted against those who are responsible for the wrong in the first place. We might look at exceptional vengeance as being a kind of microcosm of war in general, and the same principles apply: assuming an ad bellum justification, in bello principles must be followed, and that means that targeting must be limited by Discrimination, Proportionality, and Necessity. Furthermore, those three restrictions are even more restricted in this case, because the maximum good that can be accomplished in vengeance is an individual redress of wrongs, which would seem to never warrant the loss of innocent life. But Ronan targeted not only those directly responsible for the deaths of his relatives, but all of Xandar, an obvious and egregious in bello violation. And as well, as a purely pragmatic concern, what would happen if people were to decide on the morality of vengeance for themselves? The philosopher Brian Rosebury published a paper in 2008 in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research entitled “Respect for Just Revenge” that is particularly relevant here. Rosebury begins with the assertion that acts of private revenge are morally wrong, in part because they do harm to others and in part because the normalization of such acts would be a threat to moral order, which answers our immediate question. Rosebury continues on to suggest that certain acts of private revenge, while remaining morally wrong, may nevertheless be just and worthy of some degree of respect from others (which he defines as “a feeling of sympathy grounded in the belief, on the part of an observer, that she might herself intentionally and after sober deliberation have performed or wished to perform the action in the given circumstances as she understands them,” adding as well, “Respect for an action which the observer morally disapproves of requires an additional thought: ‘I might have performed or wished to perform this action without ceasing to be the morally serious person I take myself to be’”). My own thoughts here are that, if such actions are worthy of respect, we may want to reconsider whether they are truly immoral in the first place2, but I think we’re in agreement that, given certain circumstances and presuppositions about the exact circumstances, Ronan might, at the very least, be worthy of respect for pursuing vengeance for the deaths of his relatives. However, our established judgments about the scope of Ronan’s vengeance remain in place: at the most, Ronan would have just cause to pursue certain individuals who may have been responsible for his relatives’ deaths, and would never be justified in exacting vengeance against all of Xandar.
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- Lazar’s entry is exceptionally opinionated for what is ostensibly an encyclopedia article. Much of it reads as an explicit (and highly effective) refutation of the Just War Theory of Michael Walzer’s 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars. That said, it is well-written, well-researched, well-cited, and at no point does Lazar intimate that his particular opinions on the matter are anything other than his own.
- Rosebury addresses this possibility directly and I’m still weighing his argument on that point, but that disagreement falls outside the scope of this piece.