The Nature of Justice

Paper Summary:

To gain insight to the nature of justice as it relates to war in the 21st century, this paper uses three books that review its role: Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars", Michael Howard's, "War in European History", and Kauppi and Viotti's "The Global Philosophers: World Politics in Western Thought".

From the Paper:

"Walzer is unique in that he portrays war as a matter of morality, when conventionally it is almost always thought of as a matter of interest. In his book, Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer attempts to make a distinction between "the good fight" and other kinds of fighting. War has been traditionally thought of as force employed in the interest of those that possess the power and will to successfully employ it. However, because the soldier in the battlefield faces uncertain death, moral arguments are necessary to compel him to fight unless his ability to vanquish is consummate; plunder seldom befits a coffin. In their absence, social arguments that befit the initiation of force must serve in their stead. The Viking who failed to join a raid so that he might see the sun rise over the fjords another day faced almost-universal ostracism at the hands of his surly peers.
Although he makes many references to wars that were fought throughout history, the wars that Walzer concerns himself with are modern; 21st century no-holds barred variety; he echoes the argument of Karl von Clausewitz, who claimed that war was a potentially unlimited act of force. This, he claims, is a result of escalation: "there can be no imaginable act of violence, however treacherous or cruel, that falls outside of war, that is not war, for the logic of war simply is a steady thrust toward moral extremity." As von Clausewitz puts it, the limits are those of force itself. Because the initiator of conflict is the originator of this recursive exchange of violent force, Walzer argues that this initiator is responsible for all outcomes of the war, whether they be within the aggressor's initially defined interests or not. Walzer uses ancient wars to demonstrate moral principles: in that he makes prescriptions for wartime behavior, they almost always relate to the current geo-political structure."

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