The Theory of Just War, Warsaw 13-14 october 2015 (original) (raw)

In Defence of Just War: Christian Tradition, Controversies, and Cases

De Ethica. A Journal of Philosophical, Theological and Applied Ethics, 2015

This article presents four controversial issues that are raised by the articulation of just war thinking in my book, In Defence of War (2013, 2014): the conception of just war as punitive, the penultimate nature of the authority of international law, the morality of national interest, and the elasticity of the requirement of proportionality. It then proceeds to illustrate the interpretation of some of the criteria of just war in terms of three topical cases: Britain’s belligerency against Germany in 1914, the Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime in 2011, and Israe’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza in 2013. It is often claimed that just war thinking has been rendered obsolete by novel phenomena such as nuclear weapons, wars ‘among the people’, war-by-remote-control, and cyber-aggression. The presentation of issues and cases in this article, notwithstanding its brevity, is sufficient to show that just war thinking continues to develop by wrestling with controversi...

Jus Post Bellum: Just War Theory and the Principles of Just Peace

International Studies Perspectives, 2006

What happens following a war is important to the moral judgments we make concerning warfare, just as the intentions going in and the means used are. There has, however, been inadequate attention paid to considerations of jus post bellum in the just war tradition. This essay seeks to contribute to recent efforts to develop jus post bellum principles by first noting some of the ways that jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations serve to constrain what can legitimately be done after war. We argue, however, that the constraints grounded in traditional just war theory do not offer sufficient guidance for judging postwar behavior and that principles grounded in the concept of human rights are needed to complete our understanding of what constitutes a just war. A just peace exists when the human rights of those involved in the war, on both sides, are more secure than they were before the war.

Ethics and War: An Introduction

Journal of Military Ethics, 2012

The law of nations may be deduced, fi rst, from the general principles of right and justice applied to the concerns of individuals, and thence to the relations and duties of nations. Justice Story 2 In the last chapter, we discussed jus ad bellum under the national defense paradigm, according to which only defensive war is justifi ed. Given the priority principle, which is part of this idea of just cause, the fi rst use of force is never justifi ed. 3 This understanding of just cause is different from that during much of the history of the just war tradition. In particular, the just war paradigm, which characterized the tradition through the seventeenth century, did not accept the priority principle, and aggression was not the only wrong that could justify war. In this chapter, we continue our discussion of jus ad bellum by examining whether there is a need to revise our account of just cause in ways more consonant with the just war paradigm. In recent decades, a number of wars have been justifi ed on humanitarian grounds. A humanitarian intervention is a war launched to rescue persons in another state suffering under a grave humanitarian crisis, such as genocide, mass enslavement, starvation, or ethnic cleansing, usually at the hands of their own government. Among the recent interventions 4 Sovereignty and human rights