In this course we are going to be thinking about war, and the morality of war. To understand what philosophers have written in this area, we need to distinguish two things. The first is a tradition of thought, and the second an area of philosophical enquiry.
The first, known as ‘the Just War Tradition ’ is a long historical tradition which is difficult to summarise in a non-controversial manner. It is, more or less, the claim that there is a set of conditions which can act as a kind of checklist for whether a war is just or not. The Just War Tradition takes its form because it originated as a source of advice for princes and kings who were considering whether or not to wage war. In particular, the early modern just war theorists were advising Christian princes on whether their warfare was justified. They were advised that, if their actions met the conditions specified the Just War Tradition, then they were morally justified in waging war. One reason why the Just War Tradition is important today is that it has been encoded in the rules of war – the laws covering international conflict – at the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention and so on. These conditions were conventionally divided into two groups, one concerned with when one may go to war and the other concerned with how one may fight. These two sets of conditions are standardly known by their Latin tags: Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello . The word ‘ jus’ refers to something like rightness, or justifiability, or justice; ‘ bellum’ and ‘ bello’ both mean war (the ending of the word changes in Latin, according to the role of the word in the sentence, just to make life difficult for schoolchildren); ‘ad ’ means ‘to’ or ‘towards’; and ‘in’ means ‘in’. ‘Jus’ is sometimes spelled with an ‘I’, but however it is spelled, the word is conventionally pronounced softly, with a ‘y’ sound at the start. For ease of reference I will shorten the Jus ad Bellum to JaB and the Jus in Bello to JiB . These conditions are summarised in the box below.
There are six conditions of Jus ad Bellum and two conditions of Jus in Bello . Here is the account given by a present-day just war theorist, Uwe Steinhoff.
The Jus ad Bellum ( JaB ) conditions:
The Jus in Bello ( JiB ) conditions:
Just war theory is a project, in philosophy, which considers the justifiability of war and killing in war, and concludes that there are occasions when it may be justified. Any theory that says that there can be a just war, even if only in theory, is a just war theory. Any sustained argument about the conditions of a just war is a contribution to just war theory. This is not a historical tradition, but (merely) an area of philosophy.
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