1. How and for what purposes, if at all, war should be conducted has been considered in many traditions of thought throughout the ages. In the West, just war thinking has been heavily influenced by Christian teachings. Perhaps the single most important work in this classical tradition is St Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologicae, which has bequeathed to contemporary thought a remarkably robust philosophical structure with which to conceptualise 'just war'. It has changed only in certain details, a fact which might suggest that the moral issues of conflict can be more or less adequately addressed by this long-lived, 'tried-and-tested' approach. Whether this suggestion is valid will be considered in what follows.
2. The 'war against terrorism' that the U.S. and its allies have waged against the al-Qaida network and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has dramatically highlighted how this venerable tradition of just war theory continues to structure debates about the morality of such conflict. One can spot its various elements being deployed in the arguments of both supporters and critics of the military action. However, it is also true to say that some of the voices in these debates have not used just war theory systematically. That is to say, they have used elements of the theory in isolation from some of its other tenets and this has contributed to the generation of rival claims about the war's morality. (Examples of this will be mentioned below.) Hence, it is valuable to restate the theory in its entirety, in order to allow it a fair chance at guiding our moral thinking towards reasoned conclusions about the justice of this, and other, conflicts.
3. Despite the obvious importance of just war theory, it is perhaps surprising to note how low its profile currently seems to be in contemporary moral philosophy. Intellectual work is beset by fashions and, like other fashions today, they wax and wane and then recreate themselves in future generations. For example, in the American academy, the Vietnam War generated much debate about its form and content in the 1960s and early 1970s, whilst Cold-War era threats of nuclear destruction produced distinctive reflections on the morality of preparing for war in the early 1980s. Since then, international relations moral theory has burgeoned as an important sub-discipline but has largely concentrated on questions of international distributive justice and the ethics of global environmentalism and stable development. The morality of conflict between states has not featured particularly prominently in this literature, despite the post Cold-War instances of humanitarian intervention which could justifiably be classed as (potentially) just wars. Given September 11 2001 and its aftermath, however, it is reasonable to suppose that this may change.
4. It is highly significant that our leaders feel the need to offer moral justifications for the wars they wage and so they, as much as critics of war, need a specific moral theory to frame their arguments. As the citizens in whose name these leaders exercise power, it is therefore appropriate - and perhaps in some sense morally required - that we confront our politicians on the moral grounds which they claim to occupy, and consider - carefully and sincerely - whether these grounds are sound. If not, it might be argued that citizens have a duty to oppose the actions of their governments: why, after all, should they tolerate the waging of immoral conflicts in their name and become implicated in such injustice? Just war theory promises to equip all participants in this debate with a shared theoretical framework to address this question. Although this would not guarantee unanimity of final opinion, it should furnish them with the same questions to ask about a conflict in their search for any moral justification which might attach to it.
5. I call just war theory 'captivating' because, no matter how incompletely it has been used, the debates about war - which sadly remain all-too-necessary - tend in general to appeal to it. However, I also call it 'flawed' because in certain respects it is crucially indeterminate. This indeterminacy is not borne out of its failure mechanically to produce complete and logically irresistible judgements on the morality of each and every conflict. No moral theory such as this can properly prejudge the outcomes of the serious practical debates people have when they address specific historical events. Just war theory aspires to guide such debates and it has not necessarily failed if reasonable interpretations of its tenets nevertheless yield more than one judgement. But there must be a threshold here: a degree of indeterminacy beyond which a theory ceases to be an illuminating or useful guide to our moral deliberation. I will suggest that critical elements of just war theory may not pass this threshold, a conclusion which suggests that just war thinking as it currently stands is radically incomplete.
II
6. The structure of just war theory is divided first into two elements: [1] an identification of what counts as a just cause of war (Jus ad Bellum); and [2] a specification of the conditions of the just conduct of war, those which determine when a (just) war is being waged in a just way (Jus in Bello). Each of these two elements is broken down into numerous constituents.
Just Cause:
[1] The reason for waging war must be based upon one or more of the following criteria:
[a] it is defence against aggression (self-defence or rescuing others);
[b] it corrects (catastrophic) injustice which has been uncorrected by legitimate authority elsewhere;
[c] it seeks to re-establish a just social order;
[d] it is therefore undertaken with the intention of ultimately bringing about peace.
[2] At least one of these criteria must be the direct intention of waging war.
[3] War can only be waged by a legitimate authority (one that has the right to use military force thus), which should formally declare war as a precursor to action.
[4] War must be a last resort, and must not be a futile undertaking (i.e. with certain defeat or mutual destruction as the reasonably foreseeable outcome).
Justice in the Conduct of War:
[5] Proportionality: the amount of force used/threatened must be morally proportionate to the end sought by the war, to help ensure that the justice of its outcome is not eclipsed by the injustice of its other effects.
[6] Discrimination: force must never be used to make non-combatants and innocents the intentional objects of attack. Only combatants are legitimate targets.
This principle is qualified by
[6a] The principle of 'double effect': when a specific use of force can be foreseen to have actual or probable multiple effects, some of which are evil, culpability does not attach to the combatant if the following conditions are met:
(i) the action must be intended to produce morally good effects;
(ii) the evil effects are not intended as ends in themselves or as means to another end (good or evil);
(iii) the amount of unintended evil caused (often disingenuously referred to as 'collateral damage') caused must not be out of proportion to the overall good intended in the conduct of the war.
7. This type of theory, when it is sincerely used in guiding decisions about conflict, aspires to limit both the numbers of wars fought and the ways in which they are fought. Motivations for war such as imperialism and retribution, which were openly used in the past (or, rather, were equated with 'justice' when defending the resort to war) are basically considered - officially, at least - as unacceptable nowadays (and even if the 'official' justification unjustly departs from the real motivation, it can nevertheless act as a powerful constraint upon politicians and strategists, furnishing reason for criticism and opposition which may have much force given the already-observed fact that politicians' justifications for war tend to appeal to moral grounds). Stipulations for just conduct also seek to limit the immoral excesses of war, or again provide powerful critiques of the way war is conducted. These have been particularly important in both justifications for, and critiques, of the aerial bombing tactics that have been the West’s central military tactic of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Kosovo/Serbia.
8. The theory presents us with numerous criteria which a conflict must meet before it deserves to be called 'just'. The failure to employ the theory systematically, to which I referred in section 2, occurs when only certain criteria and not others are cited as reasons for passing a particular judgement on a war. Sometimes, the failure is as basic as the assumption that 'just cause' is enough to make a war just. Clearly it is not; it is conceptually possible to argue that there was a morally just reason for going to war, but the particular war that is fought is unjust because of the way it is being fought. At other times, the failure involves an incomplete accounting for each of the 'sub-criteria'. For example, even if a conflict is motivated by a concern to correct disastrous injustice, the theory also enjoins us to judge whether there is no reasonable alternative to war before the justice of the cause can be plausibly posited. (Indeed, I think we are meant to be able to substantiate the idea of 'catastrophic injustice' in terms of whatever can only be remedied by conflict alone.) Nor is justice in war's conduct to be yielded simply on the basis of one sub-criterion being met. For example, 'discrimination' may be sincerely adhered to, but the war would still be unjust if disproportionate force was used (eg if far more military personnel were targeted than was necessary to secure the war's objective).
9. The rigour of the criteria suggests that this theory does not take war 'lightly'; without ruling out its permissibility altogether, it nevertheless posits a demanding set of tests for a conflict to pass before it can assume a moral mantle.
III
10. The captivating nature of just war theory lies in its comprehensive rigour: insisting upon stringent tests and describing the various moral considerations that many typically invoke when considering the justice of conflict. This section will try to show how the power of the theory is bolstered by the inadequacy of some familiar alternative approaches.
11. To believe that it is possible to distinguish between just and unjust wars obviously requires us to believe that it is meaningful to posit 'justice' and 'injustice' as objective moral categories. Because a just war implies that the 'enemy' is unjust, it presumes that we can speak objectively about who and what is right/just and who/what is wrong/unjust. One direction from which just war theory may be opposed, therefore, would reject the meaningfulness of such objectivist moral discourse.
12. The so-called 'realist' school of international relations might be thought to offer one such form of opposition. This school is not necessarily committed to the rejection of the idea of objective morality, but it insists that the latter does not figure in the explanation of how states behave, of why politicians make the decisions they do. Therefore, insofar as just war theory requires politicians explicitly to deliberate with its tenets in mind, realism is denying that wars can ever be just. But it is also implying that the moral questions are essentially irrelevant: since the world does not operate by moral criteria, there is no point in positing them even as ideals.
13. Just war theory is not, of course, meant to be a description of the way the world is. One could agree with the realists' interpretation of how politicians and states have behaved and still affirm its view on what would have to be the case for a war to be just. What the theory rejects, of course, is the idea that morality is irrelevant to politics - and a major argument in its favour here is, as already noted, that politicians themselves clearly think it important to cite moral justifications for their actions (which, of course, does not necessarily mean that they are not being hypocritical in doing so; it is, however, implausible to think that politicians are incapable of ever adopting moral criteria in their deliberations. Too often, vulgarly simplistic analyses of politics treat them 'blanketly' as some kind of uniquely amoral, cynical species). Also, politics is not just about what politicians do; it is about what 'ordinary' citizens think, want and campaign for (which can influence how politicians behave) and realism gives us poor reason to doubt the sincerity of the moral campaigns and movements that citizens initiate in their political lives.
14. Some might say justice is a real moral quality but can never be achieved on earth and we should delude ourselves otherwise by entertaining theories such as ‘just war.’ Following Immanuel Kant, we might then despairingly wonder whether life on earth is really worth living if we commit ourselves to such a view. Surely, we can retain an idea of what is just and unjust, and strive to promote justice in the world. Perfect justice may not be achievable, but that does not mean we should give up on justice altogether: some justice is better than none. It is, in this instance, irrational to give up on something which might be achievable in part simply because it is not considered achievable in its perfected entirety.
15. Another source of opposition to just war theory is a relativising moral equivalence which would deny that any objective justice/injustice distinction can be justifiably drawn. One instance of this, which has been heard recently, may be thought to lie in the claim that 'we cannot say that the "war against terrorism" is just, because one person's "terrorist" is another person's "freedom fighter."’ The idea here is typically 'subjectivist', presuming that there is nothing outside of one's opinion as to what is right and wrong to determine what, objectively, is right and wrong. So if A says 'X is just and not-X is unjust' and B says 'not-X is just and X is unjust', we have no way of saying who is right and we must therefore accept the two viewpoints of what justice is to be equally valid.
16. This subjectivising equivalence seems to be deep-rooted in contemporary culture. It is, however, profoundly flawed. For a start, it is self-refuting. It does not follow from the claim that ‘we have no way to evaluate the claims of A and B outside of what they themselves say’ that ‘we must therefore evaluate them as equivalent, equally valid’. Given that they themselves certainly do not believe their views to be equivalent, how can we come up with judgement of equal validity when we have supposedly refuted the idea that we can evaluate them outside of their own perspectives? 'Equivalence', after all, is just such a judgement and, on this approach's own terms, there is literally no grounds whatsoever from which it can be made.
17. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how such an approach could actually be 'lived'. Do we really want to say that the Nazi 'war against Judaism' is no better or worse than a war of resistance against Nazism? Or that a view which says people's lives and dignity should be respected as much as possible is no better or worse than the views of those who believe that men of certain races deserve to be shot and dumped in mass graves, their women multiply raped before having their throats cut, their children impaled on spikes for fun? Everyone, whether they are fully conscious of this or not, live their lives with a set of judgmental, moral criteria which are part of how they interpret the world and their place in it, and how they act accordingly, and which they do not collapse into relativised ‘personal opinions’ treated as being no better or worse on a par with all other possible views. A full-blown commitment to relativising moral equivalence betrays a naïve ignorance of this fact; lives lived by it would in all probability destroy the possibility of meaningful agency in the world.
18. Of much more philosophical interest is the pacifist position as a critique of just war theory. Pacifists argue that just war theory actually deludes us into thinking that war is justifiable under certain circumstances when in fact it is never justified. They may believe this because they affirm [a] that no one has the right to take the life of another (a view which may still be compatible with the belief that certain crimes are so awful that their perpetrators no longer deserve to live - Christian pacifists, for example, believe 'life or death' decisions as opposed to mere judgements are matters for God alone); [b] that the consequences of war are so awful that they could never be confidently predicted as being better than if peace is maintained. [b] is compatible with a belief that, although a just war is a logical possibility (ie it is not, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms), in reality the circumstances of conflict mean that the criteria for just war are never actually met.
19. Many think that absolute pacifism may well be untenable in this deeply imperfect/immoral world of ours. 18 [a] may be too absolute in the sense that, sometimes, killing others is a necessary evil to avoid a great evil. The ‘lesser of two evils’ is still an evil and we may consider ourselves in some kind of moral tragedy if such an act is the best we can do ('tragedy' here is defined as a situation in which it is impossible to act in any other than a bad way). And we cannot be sure a priori that the factual assumptions of 18[b] will always hold true. (One might continue to be a pacifist as a purely personal ideal of conduct - but note, therefore, that there can be a big distinction between you having a conscientious objection to killing others yourself, and believing that no one else can be morally entitled under any circumstances to kill).
20. Maybe conditional pacifism, or pacificism, is more plausible than the absolute variant. This is defined by a strong commitment to non-violence but it concedes the possibility of truly extraordinary circumstances justifying resort to violence to secure a lasting peace. Yet this position effectively collapses the pacifist argument into a version of just war theory: strong evidence that it is indeed a captivating theoretical paradigm for conceptualising the morality of war.
21. Concluding remarks in favour of just war theory: it enjoins those who wage war to act according to an ethic of responsibility, which subdivides thus:
[a] to have justice on their side, it is incumbent upon combatants seriously and sincerely to consider and verify that their actions will meet the criteria;
[b] the combatants must be accountable for their actions: be prepared to justify them and take responsibility for failures as well as successes;
[c] they must take responsibility for the consequences of their actions: shouldering the burdens of the aftermath.
Similarly, critics of warring governments who invoke just war theory are enjoined to use it responsibly: again, sincerely employing its tenets to prosecute their case. (In the US/Afghanistan case, for example, it thus seems important not to drag prejudicial anti-Americanism into the argument separately from the criteria.)
IV
22. We now turn to some arguments which claim that just war theory has certain crucial flaws and indeterminacies. The first issue looks at the nature of the war-wagers: do they have the right to be the ones to wage war? Remember that only a 'legitimate authority' is granted the right. This was originally inserted into the theory to bar the morality of mercenary-led combat; it assumed only the official armies of states could fight just wars. But states may not always be legitimate and in the modern world they are not the only organisations which may be thought to have rights to wage war. So we must consider what makes a war-making body legitimate - and whether this criterion always strictly necessary? It is typically assumed today that, for wars to be just, one side has to have the backing of the international community - ie the United Nations - and perhaps the just side of the war should actually be fought under the auspices of the UN. But the political structure of the UN, in which certain individual states wield disproportionate power over its decisions, often disables it from action. Does this mean that no war fought by anyone else could be just simply because of this political blockage? In 1999, a Russian veto precluded the UN from overseeing intervention in Kosovo, which was subsequently conducted by NATO which, strictly speaking, had no legal right or responsibility so to act. Now assume for the sake of argument that only force could indeed have stopped the catastrophic injustice of 'ethnic cleansing' and that NATO succeeded in this aim: do we really want to say that its actions were nevertheless unjust and it shouldn't have acted? 'Legitimacy', as it is conventionally/legally understood, may well be dispensable in certain circumstances.
23. Governments which wage what they claim to be just wars are often accused of hypocrisy: eg. ‘the West was only bothered about Kuwait in 1990/91 because of the oil.’ Selectivity of causes alone is often taken as evidence of hypocrisy and hence suggests unjust attitudes/motivations that disqualify a conflict from the 'justice' category. Critics who level the hypocrisy charge often do not articulate what behaviour they think should result instead. For a start, they overlook the possibility that not every cause can be taken up even by the powerful West, in which case selectivity is unavoidable. But let us now posit a war which could be characterised as having a just cause, but where the supposedly just combatants have indeed acted for hypocritical means: they are claiming the mantle of justice whilst acting cynically on self-interested grounds. The critics are therefore justified in claiming hypocrisy: but so what? What should be done instead? Are they saying that a war with a just outcome but fought for the wrong reasons should never have been fought, even if no war would have allowed a great injustice? Contrary to what some such critics appear to think, maybe hypocrisy is not the greatest of sins: a just war fought hypocritically may be better than no war … in which case the 'sincerity of motive' criterion is also possibly dispensable.
24. Proportionality has also obviously featured heavily in the debates about many wars: eg was the bombing of Afghanistan proportionate to the official aims of the war? Yet can we give any content to this notion in order to begin to operationalise it? There are reasons to doubt this, which would render this criterion insufficiently determinate as it stands to provide us with much moral guidance. First, it is unclear that strategic considerations are always or even often likely to cohere with whatever intuitions we may have about what is morally 'proportionate'. (This seemed abundantly clear when contrasting moral critiques of civilian deaths in Afghanistan with the military's arguments concerning the justification of the targets they selected and the means used to attack them.) Does an adequate just war theory have to dispense with purely strategic considerations (in which case it is in danger of losing sight altogether of how wars of any kind tend to have to be conducted)? But in incorporating strategic considerations there is the opposite danger that moral considerations are completely supplanted - particularly if we think that calculating 'moral proportionality' may be difficult to do in any other than an arbitrary, impressionistic manner.
25. The double-effect principle is designed to excuse the deaths of innocents when they are unintended and all reasonable effort has been taken to avoid them. Again, this was an absolutely crucial element of the US/UK defence of the bombing in Afghanistan. But 'innocence' is a deeply problematic category: whose deaths are just combatants trying to avoid? Who are unproblematically 'fair game'? Traditionally, 'innocence' is equated with 'non-combatants'; hence, the guilty are those who bear arms. But as a moral distinction this is probably far too crude. On the unjust side, reluctant conscripts, child soldiers and those duped by propaganda are materially guilty in the sense that they bear arms for an unjust cause but can we say that they are all morally responsible for the injustice? Is there really no moral problem in killing soldiers who have no choice but to fight for a cause they do not know/understand? Conversely, non-combatants are not materially guilty but that does not mean they bear no moral responsibility for the unjust aggression: political leaders and propagandists, arms manufacturers and so on. Hence, 'innocence' as it stands seems to be too indeterminate to provide much guidance.
26. But now let us assume that we can operationalise 'innocence' (as we certainly can to a degree: babies in a maternity hospital, say). Why should lack of intention to kill be so decisive in justifying the death of innocents? One may not intend such deaths but still be perfectly capable of foreseeing them - and if causing the deaths of innocents is so morally bad, why should they be considered permissible by claiming that they are not intended when we are perfectly capable of foreseeing them? The status of 'intention' in the theory seems to be unjustified. Yet modern warfare - despite the often misleading talk of 'smart bombs' and the like - is usually so messy that one can be fairly sure of innocent casualties, in which case a 'foresight' criterion would disqualify most actions from the justice category. This, I submit, is another indeterminacy in the theory which requires significant philosophical reassessment.
27. Finally on 'innocence': it is clear that, in the putative moral justifications offered by the West for the Afghanistan actions, the deaths of obviously innocent people is considered deeply regrettable but nevertheless not sufficiently terrible to outweigh what is regarded as the overall justice of the cause. Would the deaths of innocents be similarly tolerable if they were incurred in a military assault on a terrorist cell in one of the (supposedly) just combatants' states? There seems to be an underlying presumption that the lives of citizens of unjust states are slightly more expendable in the moral calculations of just combatants. Can this be at all justified? (The claim becomes more disturbing in the light of theories that take membership of a state or some such similar community as being of prime moral significance - eg forms of nationalism and other communitarianism. Such theories may mean citizens do become morally tainted by the unjust actions of their states. Once again, there has been insufficient philosophical reflection on this part of just war theory to think the latter is adequately equipped to deal with it.)
28. One theme to summarise here: does each criterion in the just war theory really have to be met before war can be justified? Perhaps a combination - potentially variable - of selected criteria alone would be enough to say whether a just cause can justifiably be taken up through war. If so, we need to think much more carefully about which combination of criteria may suffice. The indeterminacy of other criteria indicates the other main area in which just war theory, as it currently stands, fails to provide an adequate moral guide. These questions suggest that the traditional theory, despite its hold on our moral thinking, remains damagingly and frustratingly indeterminate. Perhaps we might say that, ideally, a just war ought to meet all the criteria but it wouldn’t cease to be just if it didn’t … but that is when we would need to specify which criteria are necessary preconditions of a war being sufficiently just to be morally permissible. It may be, of course, that if we think of war as always an evil, and hence of a just war as the least worst option in a morally tragic situation, it will always be extremely difficult to try to bring any genuinely moral criteria to bear on questions of its ‘permissibility’. Yet — and this is the ‘captivating’ quality again — can we really afford to give up on the possibility of distinguishing between just and unjust wars?