Structural Racism and Just War Theory in Post-World War II America: Susan Choi and Toni Morrison on Violence, Imagination, and Human Flourishing

conceives of a constellation of persons and their social relations ordered around and towards a common good. Their community is defined by shared culture and language, common experiences and memories that provide fundamental meaning to their lives as individuals and as a people. These are great goods; perhaps even the greatest human goods as without them other goods are simply unintelligible. They are goods of such magnitude one can imagine dying for them and, short of that, they justify the exercise of ordering power by those in positions of governing authority. (73)