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Contemporary Just War Thinking: Which Is Worse, to Have Friends or Critics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2013

James Turner Johnson
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Extract

The increasingly widespread and energetic engagement with the idea of just war over the last fifty years of thinking on morality and armed conflict—especially in English-speaking countries—presents a striking contrast to the previous several centuries, going back to the early 1600s, in which thinkers addressing moral issues related to war did so without reference to the just war idea.

Type
Special Section: Just War and Its Critics
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 25 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2013

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References

NOTES

1 The conception of just war here was substantially defined by the canonist Gratian in his Decretum and the work of his two generations of successors, the Decretists and the Decretalists, and summarized and placed in a theological framework by Thomas Aquinas. This conception reflected and incorporated the influence of Western churchly thought; the recovery and development of Roman law, including the ideas of natural law and ius gentium; and the practical experience of government and warfare. The classical conception of politics as directed toward the common good defined by three goods or ends (order, justice, and peace) was directly reflected in the major requirements of bellum iustum, just war: the good of order in the requirement that such uses of force be authorized by a temporal ruler with no temporal superior, the good of justice in the requirement that such uses of force be for regaining that which had been wrongly taken and punishing evildoing (not self-defense against attack, which was taken to be guaranteed to all individuals and communities directly by natural law), and the good of peace in the requirement that all just uses of force aim at reestablishing and protecting peace as the result of a just order within the political community. In these just war requirements, sovereign authority was given priority because of the sovereign ruler's personal responsibility, given in the natural law, to maintain order, justice, and peace; the ability to initiate the use of armed force followed from this responsibility. The conception thus defined endured well into the modern period and was only finally reshaped into an importantly different idea in the mid-seventeenth century. For detailed examinations of this historical development, see my early books, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar and Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. For more recent summary treatments of the framing of the idea of just war in this historical tradition, see my Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 44–51Google Scholar; and Ethics and the Use of Force (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), pp. 16–20Google Scholar.

2 For a detailed discussion of this transition, see my Ideology and Just War Tradition, cited above; for more recent summary discussion, see my Morality and Contemporary Warfare, pp. 51–57.

3 Of the many translations and edited publications of this work, I prefer Hugo Grotius, De Jure ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol. II, in Scott, James Brown, ed., Classics of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925)Google Scholar.

4 Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force, pp. 75–100.

5 Carnegie Institution of Washington, Classics of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911–ongoing)Google Scholar.

6 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), vol. II, p. 283Google Scholar.

7 For important excerpts, see Reichberg, Gregory, Syse, Henrik, and Begby, Endre, eds., The Ethics of War (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 357–59Google Scholar. The entire work is included in the Carnegie Institution series cited above.

8 Niebuhr later returned a bit more positively to the idea of just war in an article coauthored with the Episcopal bishop and theologian Angus Dun, which made use of several of the categories drawn from just war thinking (but without systematically engaging the historical tradition as a whole) to argue against a pacifist interpretation of the meaning of Christianity. Niebuhr never again returned to this argument in later writing. See Dun, Angus and Niebuhr, Reinhold, “God Wills Both Justice and Peace,” Christianity and Crisis 10 (June 13, 1955), pp. 75–78Google Scholar.

9 Osgood, Robert E., Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar.

10 The historical development of these two kinds of pacifism is examined in my The Quest for Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

11 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1983), pp. iii, 22 and 26Google Scholar.

12 Ramsey, Paul, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Ramsey, Paul, The Just War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968)Google Scholar.

13 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. xivGoogle Scholar.

14 Ramsey makes this point numerous times, in various ways, but the most concise and focused statement of it is in The Just War, pp. 142–47.

15 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xvi and elsewhere.

16 Ibid., pp. 61–62.

17 Childress, James F., “Just War Theories: The Bases, Interrelations, Priorities, and Functions of Their Criteria,” Theological Studies 39, no. 3 (1978), pp. 427–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 The Challenge of Peace, pp. 27–28, paragraphs 83–84.

19 Bellamy, Alex, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Brown, Davis, The Cross, the Sword, and the Eagle (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008)Google Scholar; Charles, J. Daryl, Between Pacifism and Jihad (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Phillips, Robert L., War and Justice (Norman, Okla.: Oklahoma University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Totten, Mark, First Strike (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weeks, Albert L., The Choice of War (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger Security International, 2010)Google Scholar; and White, Craig M., Iraq: The Moral Reckoning (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

20 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Just War Against Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003)Google Scholar.

21 McMahan, Jeff, “Just Cause for War,” Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 1–21, at p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 McMahan, Jeff, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Rodin, David, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., p. 187.

25 Orend, Brian, The Morality of War (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 4Google Scholar.

26 Yoder, John Howard, Nevertheless: The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1971)Google Scholar.