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I'm no expert on ethics but what I've read about just war is unconvincing. It's just not clear to me what a reasonable justification is. Say it's if you're bein

I'm no expert on ethics but what I've read about just war is unconvincing. It's just not clear to me what a reasonable justification is. Say it's if you're being attacked... I guess we'd all agree if your neighbor is driving armor over the border, you're being attacked. But can you attack them before they get the border? Surely yes, why would you wait until they have the greatest advantage? What about when the order is given? Surely yes, why wait two weeks for them to organize themselves? Hit them while they're getting ready to kill you. What about while they're deciding? Of course, thinking about attacking is threatening too. Get them while they're deciding, that way you minimize the amount of harm you have to cause to them. What about if they're simply driving their armor around, building up just in case you attack them? That seems fair, doesn't it? But why should you let them threaten you into giving any concessions? It just never really seems like it ends. There's always some wrinkle where you can say "but he started it" and it's not actually all that clear. By the same logic, I don't see how you can really say your war is just, just because you follow certain rules. "We won't kill any civilians" seems fair, but like it says in the article, there are no civilians. They're either driving a tank, or they built the tank, or they clean the tank, or they bought the tank, or they trained the driver, or they say nice things to the tank driver. Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. I mean sure, if you can roll into their capital and everybody thinks it's great, we won't have to pour agent orange all over. But if it's not going our way, we will lower our standards. First by saying things that aren't nice, then by doing things that aren't nice. This is why international conflicts are not simply decided by a tug-of-war or a game of football. We can't accept the result thus far, so we will do something not nice, anything between sending diplomats home to ICBMs, until we get our way. The fact is there are no rules, we only say there were rules and that the loser broke them. If we'd lost, they'd say we did something wrong. /rant

watwut 5y ago
> Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. If they happen only after things are desperate enough, it is already improvement. Some countries seem to do them routinely, whether things are desperate or not.
icegreentea2 5y ago
What's your take away from the difficulty of delineating just war? Is it that we should just abandon just war as a whole, or that only strictly defensive wars (the other punch must land first) are just? If we suppose the usual bits and bobs about how states work, then just war is important for two reasons. We should expect a states' population (and army) to not support their country in waging unjust wars, and we should expect other state's to not support other states that are waging unjust wars. From that perspective, the difficult of delineating just wars just kind of becomes irrelevant. Functionally, the people must decide if they support a war or not, and other states must decide if they support a war or not. Just war theory provides two things: * An attempt to wrangle predictability out of chaos * An attempt to pre-emptively inject some sort of "normal" ethics and morality into the framework. A state can claim a just war all they want. But the more the claim hinges on pushing on the edges, the less likely the people (their army) and other nations will support that claim. And because as you say "there are no rules", your claims of justice will just ring hollow, and consequences (which may or may not be just) will follow.
- paganel 5y ago
  > We should expect a states' population (and army) to not support their country in waging unjust wars Not saying you are wrong or right, just wanted to point out that's not what happens in real life, or it has not happened for the last 100 or so years. The most famous example are the Germans and WW2, for better or for worse the war was popular among the German population until 1943 (maybe late-1942). That was definitely not a just war. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine is obviously seen in a good light by the majority of the Russian population. And, less dramatic for the West, but the Iraq war (also an unjust war) had a ~70% approval rate among the US public in May 2003. Wars tend to become unpopular only when defeat gets closer. There's also the famous exception (that kind of confirms the rule) of the Vietnam War, which probably did not have the support of the majority of the US population. I say "probably" because I haven't read that much about that war, nor was I alive back then, so maybe the famous "silent majority" that Nixon was talking about was also in support of the war, I wouldn't know.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I think the takeaway is that just war is simply a part of the debating furniture. You're always going to talk about it as if it's the thing that decides whether we do it or not, but realpolitik is what's actually deciding. We decide we need to invade someplace, then we massage the message to say it was just. That doesn't mean anything at all is possible of course, there's a debating window offered by cultural history as to what we might be able to use as an excuse.

watwut 5y ago

> Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. If they happen only after things are desperate enough, it is already improvement. Some countries seem to do them routinely, whether things are desperate or not.

icegreentea2 5y ago

What's your take away from the difficulty of delineating just war? Is it that we should just abandon just war as a whole, or that only strictly defensive wars (the other punch must land first) are just? If we suppose the usual bits and bobs about how states work, then just war is important for two reasons. We should expect a states' population (and army) to not support their country in waging unjust wars, and we should expect other state's to not support other states that are waging unjust wars. From that perspective, the difficult of delineating just wars just kind of becomes irrelevant. Functionally, the people must decide if they support a war or not, and other states must decide if they support a war or not. Just war theory provides two things: * An attempt to wrangle predictability out of chaos * An attempt to pre-emptively inject some sort of "normal" ethics and morality into the framework. A state can claim a just war all they want. But the more the claim hinges on pushing on the edges, the less likely the people (their army) and other nations will support that claim. And because as you say "there are no rules", your claims of justice will just ring hollow, and consequences (which may or may not be just) will follow.

paganel 5y ago
> We should expect a states' population (and army) to not support their country in waging unjust wars Not saying you are wrong or right, just wanted to point out that's not what happens in real life, or it has not happened for the last 100 or so years. The most famous example are the Germans and WW2, for better or for worse the war was popular among the German population until 1943 (maybe late-1942). That was definitely not a just war. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine is obviously seen in a good light by the majority of the Russian population. And, less dramatic for the West, but the Iraq war (also an unjust war) had a ~70% approval rate among the US public in May 2003. Wars tend to become unpopular only when defeat gets closer. There's also the famous exception (that kind of confirms the rule) of the Vietnam War, which probably did not have the support of the majority of the US population. I say "probably" because I haven't read that much about that war, nor was I alive back then, so maybe the famous "silent majority" that Nixon was talking about was also in support of the war, I wouldn't know.
lordnacho 5y ago
I think the takeaway is that just war is simply a part of the debating furniture. You're always going to talk about it as if it's the thing that decides whether we do it or not, but realpolitik is what's actually deciding. We decide we need to invade someplace, then we massage the message to say it was just. That doesn't mean anything at all is possible of course, there's a debating window offered by cultural history as to what we might be able to use as an excuse.