As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about just war, I’m passing along this TCS Daily piece by Prof. Bainbridge, “Just War for the Sake of Argument” (it’s also discussed at The Remedy and Bainbridge’s own blog).
Bainbridge’s piece measures the current Lebanon/Israel conflict by the standards of just war, and finds it wanting. He makes the following important point: “Although Catholic scholars and theologians have thus made valuable contributions to the just war tradition down through the centuries, the principles of that doctrine apply to everyone, not just Catholics. Just war is a part of both the natural law and the positive international law.”
I have wondered about these issues the past week in various forms. Here are some attempts to formulate the question: Must all acts committed in a war meet the just war standard in order for the war to be just? That is, must a just war be perfectly just? If not, must the aggregate of the acts simply weigh in favor of a preponderance of justice? Or must the officially commanded actions and campaigns meet the standard, while the actions of individual soldiers are exempt?
One of the points here is that just war is not simply about justification for war, but also about the way in which that war must be conducted. Just how many unjust acts can a just war encompass before it ceases to be a just war? Does the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the firebombing of Dresden, for example, mean that World War II is not a just war?