Our public conversation about the use of American military power needs deeper answers to complicated questions

Let's Talk About Just War

by  Nathaniel Peters

In a country where we oscillate between the extremes of realism and pacifism, learning the history of the just war tradition is important. 

A new book by David Corey and J. Daryl Charles offers us an introduction.

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Our public conversation about the use of American military power needs deeper answers to complicated questions. We need wisdom from cultures and time periods not our own, and guidance from a debate about the right use of lethal force that spans many centuries. In seeking both of these things, the just war tradition can guide us.

For this we need look no farther than David D. Corey and J. Daryl Charles’s The Just War Tradition: An Introduction. It’s easy to think that just war theory is a shell game that allows leaders to justify any action they favor, or a set of boxes that nations must check before attacking their enemies. Corey and Charles, however, challenge those conceptions. They see just war not as a convenient, compact theory, but as a conversation that has unfolded over time—a tradition, like those associated with Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas, in which different voices bring new questions, distinctions, and conclusions to the debate about whether, when, and how war is morally permissible.

To help us understand what the just war tradition is, Corey and Charles first distinguish it from two philosophies it isn’t: realism and pacifism. 

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com