Justified: Just War and the Ethics of Violence and World Order

Abstract

This volume’s final Part VII on the impact of legal claims in war discourses is introduced by Chris Brown. In this chapter, he fundamentally questions the relevance of international law as a frame of reference for the justification and limitation of war. Brown turns our attention back to just war which we have discussed earlier in this volume (ch. 2 by Anthony Lang, Jr): Brown argues that, properly understood, the just war tradition can be defended against most of its critics, the exceptions being those Clausewitzian realists and Gandhian pacifists who refuse to make the kind of discriminations upon which the tradition is based. More problematic are some of the newer friends of the tradition, analytical political theorists who reject its praxis-oriented dimension, and focus on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, discounting the importance of collectivities. These writers are, in some respects, closer to the medieval tradition than are defenders of contemporary international humanitarian law, but their reliance on the ability of philosophers to decide matters of justice leads to a dogmatism uncharacteristic of the just war tradition, and their emphasis on the individual undermines the link between theory and practice. This chapter defends a traditional, albeit post-Christian, reading of the notion of justified war against both its overt opponents and its supposed friends.