Justifying war: Sir Michael Quinlan argues that the classic framework of Just War remains valid but that thought must be given to applying it in modern circumstances.

• Author: Quinlan, Michael
• Position: War

The last century or so has seen wide swings in attitudes to war even within the developed West, let alone elsewhere in the world. At the beginning of the 1900s there was still a widespread popular sense which Sir Michael Howard has called 'bellicism', as contrasted with pacifism--a sense, not confined to the Kaiser's Germany though very marked there, that war could be glorious and purifying for the nation. The experience of the two world wars, alongside the enormous fact of nuclear weapons and perhaps also the increasing spread and immediacy of vivid information about what war is really like, put an end to that illusion. I recall a very notable US soldier, General Bernard Rogers, saying in a debate at Oxford some years ago 'Anyone who has ever been in combat knows that war is a bad and a stupid way of doing business'. The inoculation against war has held well as between advanced states--war has virtually disappeared from the menu of options that they regard as available for conducting their relations with one another. In addition, a sense of the intolerable costs of major war has been partnered by a useful, though still uneven, advance in institutions and procedures for resolving or managing inter-state disputes more sensibly.

Amid these changes there has come to be heard more and more often the voice of pacifist witness--the voice for meeting the idea of war not just with reluctance but with refusal. When Pope John Paul visited Britain in 1982 he urged passionately that 'war should belong to the tragic past, to history; it should have no place in humanity's agenda for the future'. But we have not yet escaped internationally, and perhaps we will never be entirely sure of doing so, from the reality encapsulated in that savage little couplet by Hilaire Belloc--'Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight; but Roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.' To take a clear-cut recent example, the world surely could not have accepted that Saddam Hussein should hold on to Kuwait; and no-one can plausibly suppose that anything less than force would have got him out.

Countries of the West have had, perhaps rather unexpectedly, to face the possibility of war more frequently and diversely, if less acutely, in the last dozen years than in most of the preceding forty. This may be partly because of the removal of the Cold War straitjacket; partly also, perhaps, because of the rising awareness of inequality and grievance, helping to fuel terrorism involving states; partly, I admit to suspecting occasionally, because technical supremacy has made war seem, at least for those who possess that supremacy, at least superficially less painful than in the past; partly also, more creditably, because of a deepening sense of human duty to do something to stop or rectify appalling happenings even in distant places. Whatever the reasons, war is still very much with us, and we cannot count on its ceasing to be so.

Needed ethic

It follows from that, coupled with the fundamental truth that human beings cannot ever escape being morally accountable actors, that we continue to need an ethic of war. In this article I will discuss how such an ethic should be shaped and applied in the future. We have recently experienced, in Iraq, an episode posing a test of this that was exceptionally interesting (to use an antiseptic adjective). Although I was opposed to the Iraq War, this survey is not intended as a tirade against it; but I refer to it at several points because of its powerful illustrative significance for the wider theme.

We do not start with a blank sheet. People have been thinking about the morality of war--what was and was not allowable--for at least three thousand years. But the prime and most developed framework of analysis is that called Just War doctrine. As a matter of history Christian thinkers have primarily carried out the development. It is, however, not in any narrow sense a churchy affair, a dogma dependent upon scriptural references or ecclesiastical authority or the like. It is simply the product of careful ethical reflection and dialogue, over many centuries, about the problems of war, and it is entirely accessible to those of other faiths or to humanists--indeed to anyone who accepts the special value of individual human life. Its approach underlies much of the modern international humanitarian law of war--some of the content of the Geneva Conventions, for example about noncombatant immunity, could almost have come straight from Thomas Aquinas. So it is the best starting point.

The doctrine starts from recognition that killing or injuring other people is prima facie wrong, that war is therefore in itself a very bad thing, but that it is not always the worst thing--that there may sometimes be duties and responsibilities so important as to prevail over a general presumption against killing. The doctrine then sets out a range of criteria that must all be satisfied if war is to be ethically justified. They fall into two groups. One concerns the morality of going to war--jus ad bellum. The other concerns the morality of actions within war--jus in bello.

Six criteria

There are six criteria under jus ad bellum:

[] Just Cause. We must have a proper reason for going to war--to protect the innocent, for example, or to restore rights wrongfully denied, or to re-establish just order. Revenge will not do.

[] Proportionate Cause. Besides being just, our cause must be grave enough to warrant the massive step of engaging in war, with all its certain or likely evils. It will, for example, not be...