Abstract
The ethics of war in the just war tradition is one that takes war to be morally neutral in itself.1 War could be justified if certain conditions were met, and war could be chosen as a morally acceptable means to achieve justified ends. If war is recognized as intrinsically evil, then the deliberate choice of war could not be justified in the way that just war theory attempts to do. Take for comparison how torture of human beings is intrinsically evil. There is consequently no “just torture theory” to distinguish between torturing justly and torturing unjustly. Given this, the only moral question to ask is whether it could be a lesser evil to torture than to allow some other great evil. Some would answer “no,” but even those who answer “yes” have to regret the evil they do and be required to make amends or accept punishment for doing evil, even if what they do is the lesser evil.
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Notes
For instance, the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili writes in De Jure Belli (1598) that “wars are just even though so many things which come from them are evil, because their final aim is good.” The Spanish Jesuit priest Francisco Suarez writes in his Disputation XIII on War (c. 1610) that “war, absolutely speaking, is not intrinsically evil, nor is it forbidden to Christians”. Contemporary just war theorist James Turner Johnson in The War to Oust Saddam Hussein (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 27–33, concurs with Michael Walzer’s conception of just war and criticizes the Conference of Catholic Bishops for “cast[ing] the just war idea as beginning with a general presumption against war.”
Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 7.
Card, The Atrocity Paradigm, p. 3. John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), offers a similar definition of evil as serious excessive harm caused by the actions of agents with malevolent motivations who lack morally acceptable excuse for these actions.
William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979).
Antony Beevor, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (New York: Viking, 2009).
Although the doctrine originated in the natural law ethics of Aquinas, its recent use has been in the form of a deontological constraint. Warren Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect” in Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 175–97, attributes a Kantian rationale for the doctrine.
In early human history, before the use of standing armies to fulfill the political aspirations of powerful rulers, “war” of ten took the form of raiding parties aimed at seizing crops and supplies without permanently occupying territory and avoiding violent confrontations, if possible. Apparently, this was the case in early Greece prior to the rise of Athenian and Spartan hegemony. Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996) describes fighting as taking place in a small window in the summer before the harvest, with citizen-soldiers returning to their farms when raiders had been driven off. In Chapter 2, I stated that I did not consider such fighting as the kind that should come under the concept of “war.” I will say more on the subject in Chapter 6.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 36–69.
Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, chapter 1; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), chapter 16.
Michael L. Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), disagrees because he takes the rules to depend on reciprocity and the violation of the rules by one side may prevent the other side from exercising its “right to a fighting chance.” Gross also discusses my next point in this paragraph: precision weapons which are thought to ameliorate the risk of direct harm to civilians.
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© 2012 David K. Chan
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Chan, D.K. (2012). War as an Evil. In: Beyond Just War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263414_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263414_5
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