What Sartre Got Wrong About the War

Sartre says that a mobilized person deserves the war because suicide or desertion remained possible, and that there are no involuntary victims. Taken literally, the claim is false. It is worth being blunt about that before reconstructing anything, because the passage is usually either quoted as a scandal or explained away as rhetoric, and neither treatment identifies what actually goes wrong.

Chapter Seven treats it as the starkest display of an illicit transition that runs through the doctrine of unlimited responsibility more generally. The failure is not that Sartre says something harsh. It is that a specific inference does not hold.

The inference that fails

The passage confuses the logical availability of another act with a fair opportunity to choose it, and then confuses opportunity with causal and moral responsibility. Two distinct slides, one after the other.

The existence of a lethal alternative does not make compliance voluntary in any morally relevant sense. And the mere possibility of self-destruction does not transfer authorship of a war from those who initiate and command it to those subjected to it. Suicide is available in a great many situations. Its availability tells us almost nothing about the responsibility of the person who did not take it.

Four questions that must be separated

The remedy is not to abandon responsibility talk but to stop asking one question where four are needed.

Did the person cause or materially contribute to the war? What actions or omissions were within the person’s control? What meaning and practical orientation did the person develop within the war? To what extent is moral appraisal appropriate, given threat, ignorance, trauma, role, and alternatives?

Once the four are separated, cases that looked paradoxical become ordinary. A conscript may be answerable for a voluntary atrocity without being answerable for conscription. A civilian may display courage, compromise, or betrayal without becoming the author of the bombing. A prisoner may resist internally while lacking any safe avenue of outward resistance. These are not exceptions to one undifferentiated responsibility. They are different objects of appraisal, and treating them as one is what produces the scandalous result.

The defensible residue

Something in Sartre’s insistence is worth keeping, and Chapter Seven keeps it under the name of situated answerability.

A victim does not author the atrocity and does not deserve it. The victim nonetheless remains a subject whose responses may, in some circumstances, be attributable and assessable. What varies is the degree of answerability, and it varies with the capacities and alternatives the atrocity leaves intact. Radical coercion can reduce responsibility without converting the person into a thing. Trauma can reorganize attention and action without extinguishing every form of agency.

The proper conclusion is neither universal exculpation nor responsibility without limit. Ontological non-coincidence is a necessary condition of answerability. Situation governs its object, its extent, and its fairness.

Without excuse, restricted

The companion doctrine, that we are without excuse, must be restricted along the same lines, and section V does the restricting.

An upbringing, an illness, a passion, or a threat does not automatically function as a sufficient justification merely because it has causal influence. Nor can it be dismissed as though influence were irrelevant. Excuses and mitigations concern whether the agent could understand and regulate conduct under the circumstances. They do not concern whether the agent possessed ontological freedom in the abstract, because every agent does, and a condition satisfied by everyone cannot discriminate between cases.

Poverty does not choose a person’s response. But it can constrict education, time, health, safety, and collective support until revolt or solidarity is not a presently available option. The person is answerable for conduct sufficiently attributable under those conditions, and not for failing to exercise possibilities that existed solely from an external observer’s standpoint.

That last clause is the one to keep. A great deal of harsh moral judgment consists in counting alternatives that were visible only from outside.

Developed in Chapter Seven, sections IV and V.