Abstract
For centuries, we have been puzzled by the question of if and to what extent war and morality might be accommodated, and if it makes sense to talk about justice and war in one and the same context in the first place. According to the traditional, realist understanding of organized violence, war is in many respects a situation of emergency in which military necessity overrules morality and in which proportionality sets out the furthest point we can go in facilitating moral norms and brutal warfare. From this starting point, even if war may not be an amoral enterprise altogether, its morality is drastically limited by military and political ends. At the same time, the just war tradition has always been interested in accommodating war and morality; the proponents of just war have throughout history maintained that war is not outside the sphere of deeper ethical evaluation, and that we can, and morally ought to, apply more than the basic principles of necessity and proportionality when we judge the ways in which war is waged. Even in an extreme situation of emergency such as war we are aware of right and wrong, just and unjust, and ought to act accordingly (for the development of just war thinking, see, e.g., Johnson 1984; Nardin 1996; Rengger 2002; Bellamy 2006).
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© 2013 Milla Emilia Vaha
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Vaha, M.E. (2013). The Ethics of War, Innocence, and Hard Cases: A Call for the Middle Ground. In: Navari, C. (eds) Ethical Reasoning in International Affairs. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290960_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290960_9
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