I’m trying to think of a less useful, more intrinsically irrelevant concept than utilizing science fiction as a lens with which to consider the ethics of war….
Generally, three families of theories about the ethics of war have some credibility or prestige within modern liberal democracies. We can question whether the third is technically an ethical theory, but it plays the same role, and I think it does contain at least a residual ethical element:
- Pacifist theories, which, with limited exceptions and variations, rule out acts of violence.
- Just war theories.
- International relations realist (or simply “realist”) theories of war. These are basically theories of enlightened self-interest.
Before going further, it’s important to note that there are other approaches that now lack credibility among thoughtful people in liberal democracies. These approaches emphasize such things as empire, personal and national glory, spreading religion or ideology, the idea of war as a kind of adventure or grand game, or as character building, and so on. A whole range of such approaches were once popular, but are now commonly viewed with disdain.
Historically, that is a recent development. These approaches to war lost credibility as a result of the horror of trench warfare in World War I, the immense destructiveness of the atomic bombs used in World War II, and the hydrogen bombs developed soon after, and doubtless other historical developments. But at least until World War I, these older ideas had great currency.
Prior to that time, few narratives of future wars included warnings against the horrors of war as such, or against the horrors of a future form of war. Where they expressed warnings, as they often did, it was usually against geopolitical and military vulnerability, as with “The Battle of Dorking”, a novella by G.T. Chesney (1871), and, in the Australian context, The Yellow Wave by Kenneth Mackay (1895). The great exception here is The War in the Air by H.G. Wells (1908), which I’ll return to in more detail.
The article is not entirely uninteresting for anyone who is interested in military history or strategy. But the idea that science fiction offers anything – anything at all – to say on the subject is objectively risible. And this intrinsic irrelevance is underlined by the way that the opinions of “thoughtful people in liberal democracies” are meaningful, let alone definitive.