The Just War Idea: the State of the Question

One of the most striking and most important developments in American 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