“I hate war,” de Fontenelle confessed, “for it spoils conversation.” And does it spoil philosophy too, which is always a kind of conversation? Or can philosophers write about war, as now we surely must, in a way that keeps the conversation going without belligerence? Only so, perhaps, can philosophy shed light on this dark field; but how to do it is itself obscured by the passions that wars evoke. Ted Honderich advocates advocacy, “an advocacy of arguments and judgements. A decent philosopher dealing with moral and political questions … is in a line of life higher than that of a trial lawyer, but not out of sight of that line of life. If there is what can be called moral truth, it is not ordinary truth. Desire sits onto it” (7). Honderich's book may be viewed in this light as a sustained speech for the prosecution in the impeachment of Tony Blair and George W. Bush for waging terrorist war and supporting the terrorist wars of others. It is, then, a polemical work, but, unlike a lawyer's, founded on Honderich's own convictions, which are themselves rooted in philosophical belief.

As in his previous books, it is to his ‘Principle of Humanity’ that Honderich turns to support his judgements. “A fundamental principle is needed”, he declares (26), above what international laws, human rights claims, just war theory and so forth can provide. He disposes of existing democratic institutions as unable reliably to arbitrate here, since there is gross inequality of political power and freedom within them. The Principle of Humanity, by contrast, expresses “a morality to which we are all committed” (58), by the fact that there are certain goods we all desire. The Principle thus states that “we must actually take rational steps to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives” (60). The Principle is consequentialist, but, Honderich insists, the means to its end must not be “self-defeating, not themselves useless makers of bad lives” (80). Does terrorism fall foul of the Principle? Not necessarily, on Honderich's definition of terrorism as violence, short of war (except in the case of terrorist war), political, illegal and prima facie wrong. It is prima facie wrong because it involves killing and spoiling lives, but it is possibly rightful if, for example, the Principle of Humanity would adjudicate in favour of these means to get people out of bad lives even at the cost of some others being plunged into them.

Honderich has been accused, absurdly it must seem, of anti-Semitism, for applying this line of thought to Palestinian terrorism in an earlier volume. This one is, in part, a sustained defence of his position. Zionism he defines as support for the state of Israel within its 1948 borders, neo-Zionism as its enlargement since 1967; and Honderich is pro-Zionist but anti-neo-Zionist because of the latter's consequences for Palestinians, whose only remedy is terrorism. Their campaign, he believes, shows that they are and all along have been a people with a consequent right to statehood and to the means for accomplishing it. Western collusion in the neo-Zionist frustration of this project is, he claims, partly responsible for 9/11, though “the wrong of 9/11 is to be taken as a kind of datum, a moral truth that has general moral principles as its possible consequences” (126).

It is to Iraq and its terrorist backlash on 7/7 that Honderich then turns, condemning the war as wrong and arguing powerfully that the deaths of civilians it involves cannot easily be passed off as unintended “collateral damage.” Their only justification in terms of the Principle of Humanity would be that they were rationally required to keep many more people out of bad lives. But “the idea”, he says, “is morally vicious” (160). The war makes terrorism more probable and terrorism's real enemies, Honderich concludes, are those concerned with its causes—the bad lives of Palestinians and others. Many will sympathise with his political positions here, and non-philosophical readers will have learnt something of philosophy's methods, though not of its usual style, in reading this book. But how philosophically well founded are its judgements?

Honderich concedes that “what is hardest about morality, so to speak, is not morality. What is hardest are questions of fact” (95). The problem is acute for any consequentialist account like his own. The neo conservative architects of the Iraq war seem to have been convinced of its ultimate benefits, perhaps even in terms of something not wildly different from Honderich's own Principle of Humanity. Or we may doubt their, and Bush's and Blair's, sincerity, as Honderich clearly does; but this is not, so far, a philosophical argument against them. Nor does a disagreement about the facts obviously amount to a difference between moral vice and virtue. Honderich is suspicious of deontological morality in general as “lower stuff, dishonourable stuff, an abandoning of humanity, of the decent part of our nature, and an attempt to make that abandoning respectable to oneself and others” (78). But deontological proscriptions of, for example, the deliberate killing of innocents may be viewed as devices for safeguarding humanity against the designs of those who seek to benefit it in controversial ways. So too with much of international law, about which Honderich is equivocal; for it presupposes, so to say, a tragic view in which bright designs fail and hope turns to vengefulness. Then only clear constraints, if that, can stand in the way of mayhem.

Jenny Teichman begins her book with the Wittgensteinian thought that “generality leads the philosopher into complete darkness” (1): instead, we must start with the facts, including the fact that man can be motivated by a straightforward “love of fighting and killing; we might call this the mark of Cain” (5). Constraints are required to prevent this getting out of hand and most of Teichman's book is devoted to discussing these constraints in their historical contexts. Thus while Honderich passes over rather quickly the in bello requirements of just war theory, Teichman itemises those that form part of international law and investigates recent Christian attitudes to them. She turns next, however, to considering their violation through area bombing and the atomic bomb, though atrocities by infantry, through the abuse of scientific advances and through threats of nuclear destruction. These illustrate her view “that international attempts to reduce the savagery of warfare have mostly failed” (47). But how much worse might things have been without them?

Teichman broaches the topical issue of terrorism which, after an interesting discussion of definition itself, she defines as either state terrorism or political assassination or “cruel activities aiming at political or religious change; or a combination of them. It is called terrorism because cruelty causes terror” (98). She moves on to discussing our responses to terrorism, rejecting both Alan Dershowitz's defence of torture and government refusals to negotiate with hostage takers. Although guerrilla war has often been condemned, Teichman finds its ethical standards to vary and in an extensive discussion of cases she detects in some a reason to approve Clauswitz's view of it as a people's war.

Pacificism and anti-war movements occupy Teichman next, in particular anti-nuclear ones. Some of these have had a religious motivation and in the concluding part of the book Teichman looks at religion and philosophical attitudes to war. She reserves especial criticism, however, for kinds of consequentialism and moral quasi-realism, which she regards as corrupting, though she evidently has insufficient scope here to establish this. Delusion is, she believes, in Buddhist vein, a principal cause of war, and such delusions can only be overcome if “ordinary people convince politicians that modern methods of waging war have become a threat to innocents everywhere and perhaps even to the continuing existence of the human race” (247).

Teichman's book is written in a style every bit as irreverent and sardonic as Honderich's, but, perhaps because much more mistrustful of generality, it lacks his argumentative momentum. It is, rather, a miscellany of historical facts and philosophical remarks, collections of views and criticisms of them, without a central philosophical thrust or a clear political stance. But perhaps this is as it should be, and the task of philosophy here ought to be that of a moderate scepticism, especially about theories that run counter to common sense or policies that outrage our moral sentiments. Where do we start from, and at conclusions of what degree of generality and certainty may we hope to arrive?

These are difficult questions of method in this area where philosophy and politics come so close, and I do not think that either volume resolves them quite satisfactorily. Honderich's remark that “the wrong of 9/11 is to be taken as a kind of datum” seems to me right, but to sit ill with his deduction of moral judgements from a general principle that is recommendable to reason, given facts about our nature. Can he have it both ways? And where does his confident identification of peoples and their rights to statehood fit into an egalitarian scheme from which many have drawn much more cosmopolitan conclusions? Intuitions about cases and about principles may here seem even to collide.

Conversely, however, the lack of any urge to generalise from cases which one seems to find in Teichman's book frustrates one's need, surely, for system—for some rational way of treating like cases similarly and different ones differently on which Honderich insists. Thus one might ask why nuclear war would, as she thinks, have been worse than Soviet domination while armed resistance (as in Norway against the Nazis) was right. As an apparent anti-consequentialist Teichman seemingly would not think that this is just because of the disparity in the numbers of innocent lives lost. Is it, more probably, because nuclear war deliberately targets innocents which armed resistance need not? If so, some more systematic account of the moral force of such constraints is needed, and of what precisely they disallow and why; though system need not involve general principles from which results can be deduced—the kind of theory oriented generality from which Wittgenstein shrank.

In philosophy, of course, we are as anxious to detect muddle and confusion in other people's systems as we are to avoid it in our own. And this is, in large measure, the task of its conversation. Yet neither of these books, it may be thought, seriously enters into conversation with the political leaders who wage the wars they disapprove, preferring to think of them as “dim, crass, callous or vicious” (Honderich, 29), or lacking “a certain degree of intelligence” and moved by “greed and delusion” (Teichman, 227, 244). Well, maybe so. But what are the systems of ideas within which politicians and soldiers justify acts of war? Are these systems themselves at fault, or merely factually misapplied? These books may at least start us thinking profitably about such questions.