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How justifiable are Just-Wars? A Critical Review
African Social Science and Humanities Journal (ASSHJ), 2021
This paper is a critical review of the theory of just war. The paper attempts to explain what Just-War Theory is. An overview of the history of Just War Tradition is given. There are some cited assumptions and approaches of Just-War Theory. The paper also gives some strengths and weaknesses of Just-War. The paper also gives some strengths and weaknesses of Just-War. The paper concludes with the fact that Just War Theory provides balances that must be taken into consideration when there is any necessitated war that results from inevitable conflicts. Furthermore, the paper concludes that the strengths of the theory should be built on when there is such war.
Just War Theory: A Shift in Perspective
2019
War is an extreme human activity—not only because of the horror of war, but because of the severe emotional, physical, psychological, and moral strain it has on its combatants. Understanding war from the combatant’s point of view is hard enough without personally experiencing war. Without the direct experience of combat, an epistemic gap lies between one who knows what it is like and those lucky enough not to experience it. Consequently, the theoretical propositions of just and unjust conduct in war become difficult to support. I argue that just war theory and its tenets such as jus in bello, or just conduct in war, needs a thorough examination of combat experiences to define the principle with the reality of war in mind. For example, as a precept of moral responsibility in war, jus in bello is an abstract principle which can be supported by concrete historical examples if and only if the epistemic gap between the experience of combat and abstraction is bridged by a consideration of...
Just and Unjust Wars - and Just and Unjust Arguments (2003)
OSSA, 2003
Much of the vocabulary that we use to talk about the cluster of concepts associated with war is commonly applied to arguments. Some parts, of course, do not seem to apply so easily, if at all, and that creates problematic distortion. For all its problems, however, there is still much to be gleaned from the argument-is-war paradigm because there are war-concepts that can be but largely have not been deployed in thinking about arguments. Some of them really should be because of the light they can shed on argumentation. In particular, the concepts, principles, and lessons from Just War theory provide a valuable lens for looking at arguments. We can theorize about Just and Unjust Arguments.
Much work in the ethics of war is structured around the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. This distinction has two key roles. It distinguishes two evaluative objects— the war 'as a whole', and the conduct of combatants during the war—and identifies different moral principles as relevant to each. I argue that we should be sceptical of this framework. I suggest that a single set of principles determines the justness of actions that cause nonconsensual harm. If so, there are no distinctive ad bellum or in bello principles. I also reject the view that whilst the justness of, for example, ad bellum proportionality rests on all the goods and harms produced by the war, the justness of combatants' conduct in war is determined by a comparatively limited set of goods and harms in a way that supports the ad bellum–in bello distinction.
Putting the War Back in Just War Theory: A Critique of Examples
Abstract. Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being sceptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginary hypotheticals, the article turns to some of the special problems that this method raises for appraisals of warfare. It examines some of the hypothetical examples employed in the construction of Jeff McMahan's revisionist just war theory, and finds that they sometimes stipulate incomprehensible conditions, lead to argumentative impasses of diverging yet uncertain intuitions, and distract attention away from the real problems of war as we empirically know it. In contrast, empirical and historical studies of warfare reinforce the deep connections between facts and values, and compel theorists to face uncomfortable moral ambiguities. Perhaps most importantly, the analytic method of focusing on imaginary hypothetical examples can not only be distracting, but it can also be genuinely dangerous. Hence, the article pays special attention to the way in which a seemingly innocuous fiction like the famous Ticking Time Bomb scenario can come to frame a new paradigm of inhumanity in the treatment of prisoners of war.
For many centuries the moral ground of war it has been a quasi-exclusive matter of the well-known Just War Theory, even though, of course, there hasn't been lack of critics. In our contemporary society 1 the epochal changes that are occurred, and that are occurring, strongly undermine the assumptions and the potency of this theory. In this essay I will briefly outline the content of the aforementioned theory in his traditional formulation, hence I will go on to illustrate the main revisionist approach and critics, mainly based on the work of Luban, and finally I will discuss the most recent reductionist approaches due to the changing character of warfare in the last decades. Moreover, alongside these issues I will underline the ongoing cultural criticism based on the western implant not only of the Theory itself but even of his main critics and revisions.