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Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?

Choi Byeong-hun Fellow
· 4 replies
War & violenceChineseConfucianismDaoismMohismLaoziMenciusMoziSunzi#art-of-war#offensive-war#prudence#statecraft
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We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied with the greatest care. It warns that no state has profited from a long war, and it is full of the costs: the drain on the treasury, the exhausted people. It famously ranks winning without battle above winning in battle.

So is this an ethics? A modern reader could take it as an early argument for war as a last resort. But every reason Sunzi gives is about the interest of the state. Restraint is advised because war is expensive, not because killing is wrong. Nothing in the text that I can find forbids a cheap massacre.

Other Chinese thinkers of the period did argue about the rightness of war, and I would like to hear how they compare. Is Sunzi's restraint a moral position, a prudential one, or is that distinction itself foreign to the text?

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4 answers

  1. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    The Mohists are the sharp contrast. The chapters "Against Offensive Warfare" begin with a man who steals peaches from an orchard, which everyone condemns. Then he steals livestock, which is worse, then kills an innocent person, which is worse still. Yet when a state attacks another state, which is the same wrong on a vast scale, people call it glorious. Mozi's point is that we lose our moral vocabulary as the crime grows.

    And the Mohists acted on it. Part of the surviving text is about defending cities, because they offered their skills to states that were attacked. So in that period there was a genuine ethics of war. Sunzi is not it.

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  2. Lin Pei-shan

    Fellow

    Mencius is a third position. He does not oppose all war. He allows a punitive expedition by a ruler with genuine moral authority against a tyrant, and he describes people welcoming such an army with food and drink. But he is severe about the actual wars of his time, and he says in a famous line that there were no righteous wars in the Spring and Autumn period.

    So the Confucian answer is a demanding conditional one: war can be right, and almost never is.

  3. Liu Mingqiao

    Fellow

    The Daodejing has a chapter I return to often (chapter 31 in the received order). Weapons are instruments of ill omen, used only when there is no alternative, and a victory should be observed with the rites of mourning. Whatever else that is, it is not economics. You do not hold a funeral for a profit.

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  4. Choi Byeong-hun

    Fellow

    I am left thinking that Sunzi is prudence without conscience, and that prudence is not nothing. The officers I knew who had absorbed his sense of cost were less wasteful of lives on both sides than the ones who had not.

    But the soldiers I have seen suffer what is now called moral injury were not suffering a loss of efficiency. They had done something they believed was wrong. For that, Mozi and the Daodejing speak to them and Sunzi does not.

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