Can unjust wars be fought justly?

I do not think that Rommel acted permissibly. I don’t even think he acted admirably or honourably. He’s like a housebreaker who has a code that says, ‘Well, when we break into houses and steal things, we don’t cause unnecessary harm to the inhabitants and we don’t burn the house down and don’t torture the animals and that kind of thing, while we’re doing it.’ In other words, he’s somebody who’s engaging in completely wrongful action but obeys some rules that do constrain the wrongful activity in desirable ways; so one of the things that Rommel wouldn’t do was to execute prisoners on certain occasions. That’s certainly better and more admirable than executing prisoners, but it doesn’t do anything to justify his actual military action; it just makes him less bad than many of the other Nazi commanders.

So we can think of Rommel, on your account, as a murderer, not as someone who simply fought in an unjust cause according to the rules of war. There are no strongly extenuating circumstances for him?

Well, that’s maybe putting it a bit strongly, because the understanding of the morality of war that was dominant at that time was the traditional theory that I have been attacking, and it doesn’t condemn Rommel as long as he obeys the rules. And of course he knew that, so, subjectively, from his point of view, he thought he was acting permissibly and acting honourably by obeying the rules, and that isn’t characteristic of murderers. That is, we have a mens rea requirement for a charge of murder – that is, a guilty mind. Now, I’m not going to try to explain all that that involves, but Rommel was not pursuing his aims for self-interested reasons or that sort of thing; he thought he was fulfilling his moral duties as a soldier. So I wouldn’t want to say he was a murderer, but what I can say is that when he was leading tanks in battle and that sort of thing, he was acting wrongly. And whether he had some good excusing conditions for that is another question.