Joseph Warren

Mr. Morgan

ERH 207W-03

10/1/2015

Should War Be Just?

The United States has at least since the first World War acted (at least nominally) in accordance with the Just War Theory, which I’ll spell out in further detail below, but it essentially provides a moral argument for why a nation should go to war. There have always been activists who’ve argued against whether any particular war that America has entered is just or not, but every single one has been packaged that way. That is a good thing. A very necessary thing. Wars absolutely should be just, there must be some sort of moral argument for why the taking of another person’s life is the right thing to do. In this essay I intend to explain Just War Theory, and why it should be applied to modern conflicts, while addressing the opposing view, which while not formally named, shall be referred to in this essay as Realism. Realism will also be addressed more in depth later in the essay, but the short version is that a Nation should always take actions that it perceives to be to its benefit, morally justifiable or not, and that, in certain schools or thought, that Nations cannot behave morally at all. The ideas of Thomas Aquinas will be at the root of the argument, though other Philosophers (Augustine etc…) have addressed the subject as well, and I plan to address some of their views as well, but more generally.

The idea of wars motivated by moral principles and not just practical considerations of a nation has probably been around since warfare itself, with references to divine (moral) reasoning for war in both the Christian bible, and in ancient Greek texts.  The first philosopher to notably address the question of “What makes a war just?” head on is St. Augustine a fourth century monk, who viewed war as part of the fallen human condition, and that just men sometimes had to participate in it to cope with the world them. His tenets for what actually make a war just share much in common with the more modern and widely accepted writings of Thomas Aquinas, so aren’t of much interest to this essay, as they fall into the “classical just war theory” that Aquinas propagates and that will be explored and explained in this essay.

St. Thomas Aquinas was also a monk, but he lived just a couple hundred years later in the thirteenth century. He argued that war was not always a sinful act, and was sometimes the morally (and divinely) right thing to do, if it satisfied all of his three criteria.

• “First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged.”
• “Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault.”
• “Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.”

Aquinas elaborates on the concept further in a succinct and well written article, but those bare bones will suffice to provide an understanding of “Classical” Just War Theory. The modern interpretation of the theory, according to the Catholic Catechism, provides a number of additional tenets that a nation would have to follow to justify their war:

• The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• There must be serious prospects of success;
• The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

That should adequately cover what Just War Theory will mean in the context of this essay, now to describe the slightly less defined “Rationalist” or “Realist” approach to war, whose famous practioners include Henry Kissinger, and Otto Von Bismarck.

The realist approach doesn’t reject morality, its proponents aren’t a bunch of moustache twirling villains. It’s not that they don’t believe in morality, but rather that it shouldn’t be applied to a nation, and particularly that nations foreign relations. They believe that war should only be entered if it is truly in the best interests of the nation. There are essentially two schools of thought that fall under the umbrella of realism; “Descriptive Realism”, and “Prescriptive Realism.” To extremely simplify these views, Descriptive Realism’s man point is that states cannot, or at least do not behave morally, while Prescriptive Realism states that states should not behave morally.

Descriptive Realism proponents believe that states operate in a sort international anarchy which if dealt with in a moral manner, would be a danger to the states citizens. The state’s duty to its citizens should be its first consideration, morality an expense that states simply cannot afford to pay in the execution of this duty. The state isn’t structured to operate morally, it’s designed to look out for its own international power and the security of its citizens. They believe that while people are moral creatures, a state simply can’t display that same morality; it’s not designed to.

Prescriptive Realisms tenets on the other hand state that a state that a state can act in a moral manner, and should at home with its own citizens, but shouldn’t act morally when dealing with other nations, instead looking out for number one. They too believe that a nations first duty is to its citizens, and that all other considerations should be secondary. The main distinction is that they don’t believe that a state’s structure prohibits its morality.

Realism has seemingly a lot of merit. Why, after all, should nations behave in a moral manner towards each other if it’s not in the interest of its citizens?  Or is it really in the best interest of the nation to act morally in war? Should the welfare of its citizens be the nation’s highest goal, or should it strive to be internationally just as well? It seems that if these questions could be answered then the question of, “should war be just?” would be answered as well.

To begin, why should a nation behave in a moral manner towards other nations, if it’s not in its best interest? It would seem to boil down to that it is the “right” thing to do. The golden rule of “Do unto others as you would want done unto you” certainly seems to apply here. While it may not be in the best interest of a nation in the short term to act in accordance with Just War Theory, it certainly will be in the long term. Germany in World War one is a great example of this idea. They (rightly or wrongly) were viewed as the aggressors in an unjust war, and they suffered horribly for it after the fact. A nation will not always win, so it is probably in their best interest to play fair. Germany after the war was hit with draconian sanctions and loss of territory. This unfair treatment has no place in just war theory, and shows the consequences of not playing by the rules. As a note, the modern just war theory includes ideas about how exactly to deal with aggressor nations and rebuilding after the war, which in summary says, “Do exactly the opposite of the Treaty of Versaille.” There’s a very good reason for that too, as the world has watched as what started as a just war, on the part of the French, British, Americans, et al, in WWI became an unjust peacetime afterwards, and the world felt the full consequences of these injustices in the flames of WWII.