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Can There Be a Just War Without a Just Peace?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Abstract

This essay explores the political and legal problem of legitimate wars in relation to the theological question of justice and peace. It begins by charting a brief genealogical account of how in the modern era the Christian ‘just war’ tradition was formalised and thus drained of much of its substantive and practical context.

The essay also examines and rejects a number of contemporary attempts to use ‘just war’ theory in order to legitimate modern warfare. The argument is that both neoconservative realism and political liberalism instrumentalise the ‘just war’ tradition to defend and extend central state power. Christian pacifism has a compelling critique of realism and liberalism, but it fails to offer a genuinely transformative ontology and politics.

The essay concludes by calling for a metaphysics of peace that can resist the modern primacy of violence and make real the divine promise of a harmoniously ordered cosmos.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The author 2007. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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References

1 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa IIae. Q. 40, a. 1, resp. 2

2 St. Augustine, De Musica VI, xiii, 38.

3 Ibid., VI, xvii, 57.

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25 Weigel, ‘Moral Clarity in a Time of War’, p. 17. Weigel fails to consider the possibility that ‘duly constituted public authorities’ might dispose of incomplete information or might make errors of judgement.

26 Michael Novak, ‘War to Topple Saddam is a Moral Obligation’, The Times 12th February 2003; George Weigel, ‘The Just War Case for the War’, America 188.11 (31st March 2003). For a theological critique of Weigel's position, see the lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, ‘Just War Revisited’, Lecture to the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Chatham House, 14th October 2003 (online at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/031014.html).

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31 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 11–88. Cf. Rawls, Collected Papers, pp. 91, 197.

32 ‘Justice as fairness is a political conception in part because it starts from within a certain political tradition. We hope that this political conception of justice may at least be supported by what we call an “overlapping consensus”, that is by a consensus that includes all the opposing philosophical and religious doctrines likely to persist and to gain adherents in a more or less just constitutional democratic society’. Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical (1985)’, in Collected Papers, p. 390 (my italics).

33 Rawls, ‘Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice (1963)’, in Collected Papers, p. 90.

34 ‘And given the fact of pluralism, there is, I think, no better practicable alternative than to limit ourselves to the shared methods of, and the public knowledge available to, common sense […] is not motivated by scepticism or indifference to the claims of comprehensive doctrines; rather, it springs from the fact of pluralism, for this fact means that in a pluralist society free public reason can be effectively established in no other way’. Rawls, ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus (1987)’, in Collected Papers, pp. 429–30 (my italics).

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39 Rawls, ‘Justice as Reciprocity (1971)’, in Collected Papers, pp. 190–224.

40 See Rawls' reflection on Hiroshima in Collected Papers.

41 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars. A moral argument with historical illustrations, 3rd edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000Google Scholar [orig. pub. 1977]), pp. 3–20; Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 322Google Scholar.

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47 Hauerwas, ‘September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response’, p. 432.

48 Hauerwas, ‘September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response’, pp. 426–27.

49 Hauerwas, Performing the Faith. Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London: SPCK, 2004), pp. 3372Google Scholar, pp. 75–109, 169–22; quote p. 174.

50 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, No Rusty Swords (New York: Harper & Row, trans. Bowden, John, ed. Robertson, Edwin, 1956), p. 168169Google Scholar, quoted in Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, p. 13.

51 Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, resp. p. 26 and 174.

52 Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, pp. 182–83. Cf. Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living in Between (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001)Google Scholar, esp. ‘Taking Time for Peace: The Moral Significance of the Trivial’, pp. 89–97.