Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2419-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Kein
Ranging from the theoretical to the practical, the volume looks at how the just-war perspective relates to the philosopher, historian, statesman, theologian, combatant, and individual—with particular emphases on its historical development and application to contemporary geopolitical challenges. Forgoing ideological extremes, Charles and Demy give much attention to the biblical teaching on the subject as they provide moral guidance.
A valuable resource for considering the ethical issues relating to war, Christians will find this book's user-friendly format a helpful starting point for discussion.
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Introduction Although spirited and often contentious debates over war and the use of coercive force have characterized the post–Cold War era, a sturdy and philosophically robust reexamination of the rich tradition that qualifies both war and peace is urgently needed in our day. Fully apart from U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “war on terrorism,” the new geopolitical challenges to security around the world call attention to the need for exploring the ethics of war, peace, and interventionary force. Alas, the end of the Cold War did not bring an end to human suffering, cruelty, and catastrophe, nor did it usher in the new peaceful order that some had projected and for which many had longed.1 If anything, it heralded new contexts in which human depravity might show itself—from Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan to Bosnia-Kosovo-Herzegovina and Rwanda, to Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, to Somalia and Sudan. And these are wholly aside from the production of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by sundry unruly nations, drug trafficking on most (if not all) continents, and the breathtaking rise of a maturing international terrorism that is often religiously motivated and increasingly worldwide. These crises, at the very least, herald the need for reinvigorated debates about the merits and moral substructure of interventionary force.2 But the political or geopolitical challenge is perhaps not the greatest. More pressing may be the West’s inability to make moral judgments that, in the end, bear upon serious statecraft and, ideally, translate into responsible policy considerations. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt, whose postwar reflections on the “banality of evil” are well known, ventured to predict in an essay titled “Nightmare and Flight”3 that the problem of evil would be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe. Yet, strangely, already in the 1950s, even when atrocities associated with the Holocaust remained a permanent scar on the European psyche, concern with moral evil and the political problems that it causes had begun to disappear from Western political thought.4 Thus, for an American president to speak of “evil” in the geopolitical context, as have several of our recent presidents, is to invite scorn of the greatest magnitude, both at home and abroad. For the moment, however, let us agree to put aside our own political sympathies; what was unforgiveable to most people was the fact that someone in public office would name evil and then contextualize it in the field of international relations.5 But how indeed might those who are responsible for policy propose to deal with the scale of humanitarian need that in our day is massive and frequently the result of unstable regimes?6 And what moral and political resources might inform our response to such situations— situations that fall short of formal war per se but require some measure of interventionary force for humanitarian purposes?7 Should governments respond and intervene to prevent—or retard the effects of—genocide, mass murder, enslavement of peoples or people groups, and egregious human-rights violations? Why or why not? If so, then when, by what rationale, and by what criteria? As it affects foreign policy, few questions will be more pressing in the years to come. Because issues of war and peace are literally issues of life and death, the tragedy of war must be neither forgotten nor minimized. Surely, conventional wisdom is not far from the mark in reminding us that the horrors of war are the closest approximation to hell on earth. War changes lives forever in ways that are otherwise unthinkable; hereon both secular and religious viewpoints agree. As seen from a wider religious and Judeo-Christian perspective, war entails the death and killing of people who are fashioned in the likeness of their Creator and who therefore possess inherent dignity and incalculable worth. Yet, the very same Weltanschauung affirms that war is sometimes necessary. Few (if any) world-and-life views eschew war in all circumstances, and no faith tradition is monolithic in its dogma and practice regarding war and peace. This is certainly the case with Judaism and Christianity, whose values have undergirded our own cultural tradition. Throughout its millennia-long history, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition has justified, rationalized, restrained, and informed war, the conduct of warfare, and the conditions for peace. In various times and by diverse means, it has both upheld and departed from biblical standards, and both ecclesiastical and secular leaders have appealed to its teachings for national guidance and support. This volume is based on the wider social, moral-philosophical, and political assumption that the sturdiest, wisest, and most well-defined position (whether secular or religious in orientation) regarding war and peace is lodged in the mainstream of the classic just-war tradition. Some aspects of this rich tradition, based on natural-law moral reasoning, predate the Christian era, extending back not merely to classical Rome and Athens but to ancient Israel. Theoretical development of the tradition, at the same time, is firmly grounded in early Christian history and theology stemming from theologians and thinkers such as Ambrose and Augustine. Important medieval construal of qualifying war can be found in the thinking of Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom—from Jewish and Christian perspectives respectively— are authoritative interpreters of law and its application. Significantly, both Maimonides and Aquinas, who are the beneficiaries of a renewal in Aristotelian thinking, wrestle with war as both prerogative and political duty; both individuals, moreover, view law as teleological and undergirded by divinely instituted moral predicates that are known through the “natural law.” Further aspects of the just-war tradition are developed or refined by seminal thinkers such as Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, against the backdrop of religious wars in Europe, as well as “new world” discoveries in the Americas. Refinement and application of the tradition during this early-modern period are critical to the emergence of international law, which imposes legal and moral sanctions on the community of nations. And yet other parts of the tradition are mirrored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen, for example, in the accent on human rights, humanitarian concern, and emergent political-legal developments. At bottom, the tradition has always been multidisciplinary and far-reaching with regard to the social-political, legal, and philosophical net cast by it proponents. At the same time, it also needs emphasizing that European warfare, in its various historical expressions, cannot be thought to mirror adequately the just-war tradition. Thus, for example, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and wars associated with colonial expansion represent violent and unjust episodes in Western history that not infrequently failed to uphold the values and goals of the just-war tradition. Indeed, very often it was in reaction to such brutal and savage conflict that the just-war tradition responded. To understand properly the mainstream of the classic just-war tradition is to appreciate the theoretical and moral-philosophical assumptions that undergird the tradition. As James Turner Johnson so aptly writes: The just war idea is not free-floating, to be given whatever content one may think appropriate in whatever context. Understanding its meaning means engagement with the tradition out of which it comes and entering into dialog with the classical statement of the just war idea within that tradition. . . . Just war tradition has to do with defining the possible good use of force, not finding exceptional cases when it is possible to use something inherently evil (force) for the purposes of good.8 Misconstrued by many as a means to endorse any war by throwing a mantle of “just” or “justice” over a nation’s intrusion, just-war thinking is best understood as an approach to comparative justice applied to the considerations of war or intervention. Justice in the present life is always approximate. To acknowledge the possibility of error or human fallibility in moral reasoning is not to give up on the ideal of justice. Nor is it to abdicate, as imperfect human beings, the social-political necessity of working for justice on behalf of those who need it. Justice, after all, is the moral tissue that holds “civil society” together. Philosophically, just-war thinking understands itself as a mediating position between the ideological poles of Realpoli-tik or militarism, on the one hand, and pacifism, on the other. This “mediating” posture might well be illustrated through our attempts at “criminal justice” in the domestic context: we neither acquiesce to violent crime, on the one hand, nor tolerate police brutality, on the other. Authentic justice is lodged somewhere in the “messy middle.” That requires of imperfect men and women the resolution to work for justice (albeit imperfectly) in order to preserve the common social good; anything less is morally and socially deficient. In the words of Hugo Grotius, justice insists neither that everything is always permissible nor that nothing ever is.9 Moreover, just-war moral reasoning is rooted in a certain moral realism about human nature....
