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This article examines the role of time in Just War theory. It maintains that contemporary Just War theory’s legalist focus on rules and principles, rather than judgment and interpretation, makes a serious engagement with timing appear quite irrelevant. To deal with this shortcoming, the article clarifies the dual nature of political time as both chronos and kairos, and argues that a cogent account of the justice of warfare needs to incorporate the two faces of political time. In addition, the article contends that a casuistic re-orientation of Just War theory would have the beneficial effect of putting critique back on the agenda. The moral core of the argument is that judgment and interpretation ought to be guided by the spirit of “pragmatic fallibilism,” which combines the willingness to assertively uphold one’s values with a disposition to revise one’s commitments through reflection and deliberation.

673 Thanks to Lior Barshack, Tatiana Flessas, Linda Mills, David Saunders, and Anton Schutz for the incomparable incidents of criticism. 1. Jeremy Taylor,Ductor dubitantium, or, The Rule of Confcience in All Her GenerallMeafures Serving as a Great Instrument for the Determination of Cafes of Confcience (London, 1660); hereafter abbreviatedDD. 2. Dwight Garner, “Inside the List,” 5 June 2005,New York Times Sunday Book Review, www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/05TBR.html?ei The New Casuistry

The debate over prostitution is probably as old as prostitution itself. And the discussion of the oldest profession is as alive today as it ever was. New books and articles are constantly being published, new scientific reports and theories presented, and new committees and commissions formed.1 Yet while the scientific and literary discussion is very much alive, the philosophical discussion of it seems never even to have come to life. How is this to be explained? And is there any justification for it? Could it be that harlotry is a topic unsuitable for philosophical treatment? Or could it be that, although suitable, it does not give rise to any interesting philosophical questions? Obviously, I would not be writing this article if I thought that the answer to any of these questions was yes. But I wish to emphasize that it seems absurd to maintain that the subject is unsuitable for philosophical treatment, since it clearly involves many normative and evaluative issues. Could it be instead that prostitution as a moral question belongs to casuistry or to applied ethics rather than to moral philosophy proper? Could it be that it does not give rise to any "high-level" questions of principle? This will not do as an explanation, for the same thing could be said just as appropriately about such topics as abortion, suicide, war, or mercy killing-topics that have been intensively discussed by philosophers. Nor can the explanation be that prostitution is regarded by philosophers as too unworthy or too base a subject to deal with, for that would put them in a prudish ivory tower, and this (I hope) they do not deserve.

ion and one that I am urging be reinstated in our discourse from which it has been for too long conspicuously absent. I am objecting to a sort of abstraction that I call "internationally accredited." Perhaps after all I should give an example-chosen, I assure you, virtually at random: We see in this rehearsal of "Foucault" that contemporary criticism cherishes the displacement both of dialectics by diacritics and of totalized organic representations of history by comprehensive graphs of affiliated disciplines in the episteme.1 Reading such jaw-breaking propositions-and we all know how commonly they present themselves to us and our students (we have been hearing some of them at this conference)-we find ourselves echoing Ben Jonson when he objected to one of his contemporaries that he "writ no language." For such formulations cannot be said to be written in British English or in American English or in French but only in an ungainly jargon compounded out of all three. I may as well take the risk of giving offence and confess that I think such linguistic enormities became inevitable as soon as "the scholarly paper" and the scholarly "article" became established among us as literary genres distinct from the essay on the one hand and the lecture on the other. At any rate, you already see one way in which I would claim that patriotism, that admittedly assailable sentiment, can be an incentive for those of us who promulgate our findings in discursive English. It incites 1. William V. Spanos, Paul A. Bove, and Daniel O'Hara, intro. to Boundary 2 8 (Fall 1979): 3. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.12 on Thu, 12 May 2016 06:54:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry September 1982 us to recognize, through our way of handling our language, that the intellectual endeavour we are engaged in is continuous with that of Edmund Burke maybe or Jonathan Swift, or of Jonathan Edwards and John Adams. In that way it cuts us down to size, it cures us of cocky presumption. Interpretation pursued in this spirit is, no doubt, politically conservative; and I would not dispute the inference that literary studies, of the sort that I respect and try to practise, are of their own nature rather profoundly conservative-they have an inbuilt bias toward preserving, conserving, keeping in memory. This does not mean, of course, that they therefore recommend themselves to the political powers behind the status quo at any given time; on the contrary, since such powers often are, or like to think that they are, "progressive" or "innovative," the literary scholar's inbuilt proclivity toward dragging his feet is likely to irritate grant-awarding government agencies more than a little. More generally, "conservative" in the sense of "keeping in mind" has little or nothing to do with what the word means in the mouths of political journalists. The keeping in mind, or bringing back to mind, of principles and liberties long overlooked is just as likely to figure in their vocabulary as "liberal" or "radical." Patriotic feeling in a scholar, however, can fuel in him incentives of an altogether more momentous sort. I think of the philosopher George Berkeley when, still a student at Trinity College, Dublin, he confided to his Commonplace Book certain statements of Lockean epistemology and then declared: "We Irishmen cannot attain to these truths": There are men who say there are insensible extensions. There are others who say the fire is not hot. We Irishmen are apt to think something and nothing are near neighbours. The mathematicians think there are insensible lines. About them they harangue. We Irishmen can conceive no such lines. I publish this to see if others have the same ideas as we Irishmen.2 This declaration is remarkable, in fact astonishing, in several different ways: to begin with, that Irishness which Berkeley so confidently claimed would be disputed, if not explicitly denied him, by most of the marchers in Saint Patrick's Day parades in Boston or New York or (I suppose) Chicago; and, though Berkeley indeed was born on Irish soil and his family had resided in Ireland for two generations, his English cousins, 2. George Berkeley, quoted in Joseph Maunsell Hone and Mario M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (London, 1931), p. 28. 31 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.12 on Thu, 12 May 2016 06:54:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Poet: Patriot: Interpreter the senior branch of the family, as the philosopher well knew, still occupied their seat in Berkeley, Gloucestershire-from which English place the family indeed appears to have derived its name. This shows that for certain people at certain times in certain places the patria is not anything they are simply stuck with by an accident of birth. It may be negotiable and a matter of conscious or unconscious choice on the part of the individual. By the same token, we may declare our allegiance to two patrias at the same time. No one apparently asks the marchers in Saint Patrick's Day parades to decide between a patria that is an as yet unconsummated Republic of All Ireland and another patria that is the United States of America. Thus we allow people to declare in one sentence "We Welsh" or "We Irish" or "We Scots" or "We English" and in the next sentence without fear of contradiction (or without much fear of it) "We British"; and in the same way "We Virginians" is not held to be at odds with "We Americans." All the same, as to an American audience the case of the Virginians may bring home very poignantly, there can arise historical situations in which the dual allegiance cannot be maintained, in which one is forced to choose one patria over the other. That choice cannot be other than a political choice; and if one is an artist or a scholar, it is mere casuistry to say that the decision is made in one's capacity as a citizen and not in one's professional capacity. The case of Berkeley is very instructive in this respect: it was only when modern scholars of Berkeley like A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop pondered this entry in his Commonplace Book (along with other evidence to be sure) that they envisaged the possibility that Berkeley, so far from extending and driving deeper the furrow that John Locke had ploughed (which was the view held of Berkeley's epistemology through two centuries), was in fact promoting a radical alternative to Locke-as it were, Irish common sense as against English common sense. And the modern revolution in the understanding of Berkeley derives from that perception: in other words, it was as a philosopher rather than as a citizen that Berkeley proudly declared himself an Irishman. And while no one would want to maintain that Berkeley's perception of himself as Irish (distinctively non-English) originated his critique of Locke, still all the evidence is that this perception strengthened his critique and heartened him in formulating it and pushing it through-there was, he felt, a consensus that he could appeal to, in support of it. If patriotism can thus be seen as an incentive or as an instigation even in such a recondite science as epistemology, how much more readily can it be seen to perform such functions in other studies more immediately or inextricably bound up with communal human life? I pass over instances that occur to me-for instance, the Victorian Jesuit, Father Hopkins, declaring (too shrilly for modern susceptibilities) that every good poem written by an Englishman was a blow struck for 32 Donald A. Davie This content downloaded from 207.46.13.12 on Thu, 12 May 2016 06:54:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

DOES moral philosophy moralize? I believe it does, and that it should not. It is also possible, I think, that ethical issues have been clouded, first, by the tendency to regard ethics as the basis of all valid systems of casuistry, in which, however, it is supposed to have a proprietary rather than an administrative interest; and, second, by what seems to me an underlying assumption, for whose origin and nature I shall attempt to account, that praiseworthiness is a not irrelevant attribute or constituent of what is morally good. It is difficult to avoid feeling, when reading works of moral philosophy, that they are what Dr. Jacks, speaking of philosophy in general, calls "disguised imperatives,"' that they urge us to think or to act in this or that way. The ethical chapter in Mr. Ayer's earlier book, Language Truth and Logic, may be absolved from this charge; but then that seems due to the fact that he appears to wish to abolish, rather than to contribute to, moral philosophy-a wish which it may be that I shall seem to support, but that appearance would be due to my inability to see lines of future approach rather than to any skepticism as to whether there should be any. The "command'12 in moral philosophy is to be found in idealist, utilitarian, and subjectivist. If in the Republic, indeed, we do not see very clear indications of this tendency, then I am inclined to think that this is so because Plato was not concerned to work out a full-fledged system of ethics, as something quite distinct, and because, accordingly, in the Republic, much ethical

Much as the Spanish crown once asked its theologians and jurisconsults to provide a casuistry for its conquest of the New World, so United States policy makers sometimes call upon social scientists to legitimize, as it were, our involvements with and aspirations for modern Latin America. If the two cases differ importantly, one reason is that the range of policy choice in the sixteenth century was wider, more varied, and more explicitly philosophical in origin. Modern discrepancies of focus are but pale semblances of the old polemics over the rationality of the India, the means of conversion to be employed, or the legitimacy of the Spanish title to the Indies. Contemporary pronouncements on the capacity of Latin Americans for democratic government and efficient economic production, or on the propriety of U.S. policy pressures upon our neighbors, flow from premises which do not permit of extreme and speculative alternatives. If, then, we call this new book "casuistical, " we take the word not in its pejorative sense, but as pertaining to the science of handling cases of conscience.

IN A lecture delivered in Heidelberg in I922, Hermann Oncken interpreted certain passages in Sir Thomas More's Utopia., From these passages he tried to derive the principles and aims which justified More's imaginary nation, the Utopians, in going to war. Briefly, Oncken argued that, in her relations with other states, Utopia appeared to employ the methods of a modern imperialistic power; that these methods were more "Machiavellian" than Machiavelli's own; that they were made to appear moral and idealistic by "Utopian casuistry." It seemed to Oncken as if More had thus prophetically drawn a picture of the future expansion of his own country-of England-and as if he had forecast the idealistic justification of this expansion by anticipating the missionary ideology that was to serve it. Oncken treated More's ideas on this subject as something separate and new. He did not deal with the intellectual tradition into which More had been born, but he did project his. words into the future. These are weak points in his argument. What More advocated was actually not very original or very different from the theories that were advanced from antiquity through the Middle Ages to and beyond his own day in justification of war. A brief examination of some such theories may not entirely exonerate him from Oncken's charges, but it may at least serve to put his ideas into their proper perspective

The purpose of ethical theory is to assist us to make concrete and specific moral decisions. This is the sense of G. E. Moore's sentence, "Casuistry is the goal of ethical investigation." 1 The final test of every theory of ethics, whether theological or philosophical, is the pragmatic one of how well it prepares us for casuistry, for deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad. Critical reason-analyzing the data and conceptualizations and background of religious experience, moral experience and moral judgments-can formulate ethical theories that approximately fulfill this fundamental purpose. And precisely because reason has this capacity, some of the central (though in our century most neglected) questions in theological ethics are about the place of reason in the moral decisions made by religious people. For instance: (I) How can a knowledge of theological ethics assist one in making rational moral decisions ? (2) What constitutes rational deliberation in Christian ethics? (3) What theological assumptions must one make for a rational Christian ethics to be possible ? (4) How is the place of reason in theological ethics like and unlike the place of reason in philosophical ethics?