The Just War Idea: the State of the Question

THE JUST WAR IDEA: THE STATE OF THE QUESTION By James Turner Johnson I. Setting the Context One of the most striking and most important developments in Amer- ican moral discourse on uses of military force over the past forty-odd years has been the recovery and practical use of the idea of just war to guide moral analysis and judgment. As a result, various forms of just war discourse can be found today in religious, philosophical, military, political, and legal contexts, and while there is an important common substratum uniting these, there are also notable differences and even tensions. What should be said about this? How should these contemporary forms of just war reasoning be tested against historical just war reasoning (which has also taken diverse forms), or indeed, should it be tested in this way at all? In particular, what is to be said about new themes that have appeared in recent just war discourse and have in some versions of the contemporary just war idea become the principal moral criteria for whether a resort to force is justified or not? In short, what should be the parameters within which contemporary just war reasoning develops? This essay examines the idea of just war in two ways. Section I is historical and thematic, identifying major benchmarks in the recent recovery of just war thinking, exploring characteristic elements in each, and setting them against the deeper just war tradition which first came together in the Middle Ages and has continued to develop in the modern period. Section II identifies and analyzes several major themes that have been put forward in contemporary just war discourse, judging them by reference to the deeper tradition of just war. Throughout the essay, I argue for a contemporary conception of just war that is solidly grounded in this deeper moral tradition. This leads me to be critical of certain elements in the recent recovery and restatement of just war thinking. My aim, in short, is to answer not only the question of what the contemporary just war idea is, but also what it ideally should try to be. In the United States, before the contemporary recovery of just war thinking began, moral discourse on war was largely polarized between various forms of pacifist rejection of all war as inherently evil and an embrace of total war, expressed sometimes in terms of political realism and at other times in the language of crusade, as the necessary means of combating and wiping out evil when thrust upon us. Indeed, these two © 2006 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA. 167 168 JAMES TURNER JOHNSON poles tended to converge in practical terms, since the pacifist’s rejection of war in any form, for whatever reason, as inherently evil left nothing to say about possible moral limits to war once it had begun, while the idea of total war ruled out such limits in principle. Thus, the carnage in the trenches of World War I, the destruction of entire cities by strategic bomb- ing in World War II, and even the introduction of atomic weapons could be looked at, from the pacifist’s perspective, as evidence of the inherently evil nature of war, while from the opposite end of the spectrum they could be justified as what was necessary to defeat the aggressors who had started the war. What was missing in these two extreme approaches to moral discourse about war was a conception of the use of force that accepted it as a sometimes necessary tool of good statecraft, but at the same time set strict yet meaningful moral restraints on the resort to force and the practical application of such force. A. The shaping of the classical just war tradition There was, of course, an old and deeply embedded tradition in Western culture that understood war in a very different way from either of the polar opposites I have mentioned. This was the just war tradition. On the terms of this tradition, the use of armed force might serve good or evil depending on whether it was undertaken on the authority of a sovereign, that is, a person or persons responsible for the common good of his/her/ their political community, whether it was undertaken to protect that common good, or the broader fabric of relations on which all political communities depended, against injury or the threat of injury, and whether it was undertaken out of a right intention —not to do an injustice to another but to seek to preserve or establish peace. The deepest roots of this tradition reach back into the history of biblical Israel and into the thought and practice of classical Greece and Rome. A specifically Chris- tian version of it traces at least to Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. A coherent and systematic form of this tradition came together in the Middle Ages, over roughly the three centuries from the canonist Gratian’s magisterial collection, the Decretum, in the mid-twelfth century to the end of the Hundred Years War in the mid-fifteenth century. At the beginning of the modern period, seminal thinkers from Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) assumed the terms of this tradition and applied them to the political conditions of their own times. The tradition these thinkers inherited had taken shape as a broad cul- tural consensus, one whose content had been shaped by inputs from a wide variety of sectors of medieval culture: church law and theology; secular law, including the recovery of the Roman legal concepts of jus gentium and jus naturale; the code of knighthood (the chivalric code); works of political theory, especially the literary tradition defining the THE JUST WAR IDEA 169 responsibilities of the good ruler; and the practical experience of govern- ment and of warfare. In its classic form as it had come together by the end of the Middle Ages, the just war idea consisted of two parts: one defining when resort to armed force is justified (later called the jus ad bellum), the other defining right conduct in the use of armed force (the jus in bello). The jus ad bellum included three requirements: that only someone in sovereign authority, and thus responsible for the common good of the political community, could justly authorize resort to armed force; that there must be a just cause, specifically defense of the common good against serious injury, recovery of something wrongly taken, or punishment of wrongdoing; and that resort to armed force must manifest right intention —not aggression, domination, implacable enmity, just plain cruelty or the like, but the intention to protect, restore, or establish peace. These three requirements corresponded directly with the three ends of good politics in the Augus- tinian tradition of political thought: order, justice, and peace. Thus defined, the justified use of armed force was understood to be a tool for aiding the achievement of these ends and protecting them when established. All other uses of force were by definition unjust, notably including all uses of armed force by private persons on their own authority and all uses of force manifesting tyrannical intent. The jus in bello included two major elements: a listing of classes of persons who normally, by reason of their personal characteristics (age, gender, degree of mental or physical com- petence) or social function, were to be regarded as noncombatants and not to be directly, intentionally attacked during a just war; and some rather moribund efforts to define certain means of war as impermissible because of their inherently indiscriminate or disproportionate effects. B. Development of the just war idea in the modern period Beginning in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this unified common tradition broke apart and subsequently developed in separate streams of thought and practice. Grotius effectively began one of these separate streams in his De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), where he took the inherited tradition of just war, reinterpreted it in terms of natural law and the common practices of nations, and refashioned it into a theory of the law of nations or international law. Another distinct stream developed within the military sphere, with such writers as Pierino Belli (1502–75) focusing on that portion of the just war tradition having to do with conduct in war and, at the same time, with the emergence of codes of military discipline that remade just war ideas from a system of morality into a set of rules for disciplined conduct under arms. A third stream led into the realm of secular philosophy, eventuating in the “perpetual peace” movement of the Enlightenment era and effectively losing contact with the just war idea as reflecting perennial necessities of statecraft. In the 170 JAMES TURNER JOHNSON religious sphere, Protestant theology gradually lost conscious sight of just war tradition, while Catholic thought maintained it as a doctrine but generally paid no attention to it. With the rise of the absolutist state beginning in the seventeenth century, the just war jus ad bellum decayed into the idea of a liberum jus ad bellum, the right of the absolute sovereign to initiate war for reasons of state. At the same time, the requirement of a public declaration of war came to be stressed, so that others could judge the decision to go to war and react as they might. The moral restraints of the just war jus ad bellum thus effectively disappeared, being replaced by calculations of interests and the relative likelihood that other states might respond to a declaration of war by making war against the initiator.

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