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War

Just War Theory

Keith Tidman thinks the world’s bristling arsenals and proneness to wars makes it all the more urgent.

To many people, the phrase ‘a just war’ sounds like an oxymoron. One might wonder, how can the lethal violence unleashed in war ever be just? Yet, realpolitik underscores that not all international quarrelsomeness lends itself to peaceful remedies. When is a country justified in going to war?

Notable thinkers in the ancient world, like Cicero and Plato, unsurprisingly weighed in on when and how war might be justified. Early attempts to codify this began with St Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century. Later, the 13th-century philosopher St Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, advanced the principles of ‘just war’ to a whole other level. His foundational work led to formal just-war principles, divided between the right to resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the right way to fight once war is underway (jus in bello). The so-called ‘father of international law,’ Hugo Grotius, in his early-17th-century work On the Law of War and Peace, initiated the reshaping of just-war theory – and its basis in moral, civil reciprocity – from the theory’s religious roots into secular terms. Much later, in the 20th and 21st centuries, came a third doctrinal category, the just way to act once a war has ended (jus post bellum).

Principles governing going to war came to include these:

• Just authority: Only legitimate, duly appointed national authorities may declare war;

• Just cause: The defense of self or allies, or intervening against the worst acts of inhumanity;

• Right intention: Staying focused on the just cause, and resisting the lure of material gain (that is, pillaging), expansionism, or intemperate militarism;

• Proportionality: Anticipated good outcomes must balance or outweigh anticipated bad consequences;

• Achievability: High probability of the war aims being fulfilled;

• Last resort: War is only permissible after sincere attempts to find peaceful solutions have failed.

Principles governing the fighting of wars include these:

• Targeting: only combatants and military sites, not civilians, captives, or medical resources;

• Proportionality: such that injury to lives and property aligns with expected military gains;

• Accountability: for the actions of individual soldiers and commanders;

• Necessity: such as resort to the least-harmful military options and force applied relative to objectives.

Principles governing behavior following a war’s end and during the transition to peace include these:

• Proportionality: in that peace terms should be reasonable and not the result of vengeance-seeking;

• Non-discrimination: ie not creating a framework that will treat vanquished parties unduly partially, punitively, or vengefully;

• Restorative: the peace should promote stability, redevelopment, institutional reinstatement, self-governance, and legal order;

• Accountability: to determine culpability and ensure that retribution is fair, respectful, reasonable, and measured, taking into account traditions.

To be just, a war needs to satisfy all of these criteria, not just some of them. And these need to be real, not merely token, measures, so that the temptation to breach peace for imagined gains is overshadowed by accountability to these principles.

Of course, modern, rapidly-changing military technology – being vastly more versatile, fast, furtive, farther reaching, and lethal – will necessitate revisiting the principles of just wars. The probable advent of fully autonomous weapon systems, which by definition will remove the human decision-maker all the way up to ‘pulling the trigger,’ points to further matters of ethics and accountability and threatens to exacerbate conditions. Folded into that array of frontline technologies are tactics like economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, proxy forces, asymmetric fighting, special operations, psychological operations, and mercenary insertion – individually and collectively impairing control over risk, behavior, and outcomes (intended and unintended).

Furthermore, the maturation of just-war theory from matters of states’ dominion to being part of human rights treaties and global law enforcement has led to a morphing of modern just-war theory. More of this needs to happen. Justice in war is the ultimate goal, in the face of the lamentable millennia-long predisposition of our species, perhaps hard-wired, to resort to warfare for all sorts of reasons. These have ranged from hegemonism to imperialism, ideology, fear/hatred of ‘the other,’ xenophobia, retribution, colonialism, religion, riches and resources, racism, pride, legacy, power and control, aggrandizement, dominion, and territoriality, among still others.

Current international laws and protocols, such as the aging and limited Geneva and Hague Conventions, aren’t foolproof. The often unbridled messiness and ‘fog and friction’ of modern wars have demonstrated this point, underscoring the need to bind assenting nations to obeying just war principles, perhaps in profoundly new, prescriptive ways that esteem human life. History’s chroniclers are watching. The abruptly changing landscape described above is all the more reason for philosophers and jurists to provide humankind with clear, well-crafted theories as to what constitutes ‘just war.’

Keith Tidman has written on philosophy and science, and is the author of two books: a philosophical anthology and a history of naval operations analysis.