Preface

War is a horror, a scourge of humanity. There is no other way to describe it. It is, along with pestilence, famine, and death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and war is a significant contributor to the other three. Much of the human-caused suffering our species has endured over time has been the result of war. Yet there is an ethics of war. The just war tradition is an intellectual effort, spanning two millennia in the West, to come to moral terms with war. It is an attempt to balance the horror of war against the poor arrangements of the world that leave participation in organized inter-group violence as sometimes the only instrument available to rectify major injustices. This need makes war barely tolerable, while the horror demands its constraint. The ethics of war lies in that balance.

Just war theory is a systematic account of the ethics of war constructed from the materials of the just war tradition. This volume examines just war theory and its basis in the tradition. In addition to offering an account of the elements of the tradition, I argue for the thesis that the tradition is able to provide a moral analysis of contemporary war, despite the radical changes that war has undergone. I do this by developing a version of just war theory that takes these changes into account. In other words, I test the adequacy of the tradition by presenting a theory coming out of that tradition that (I argue) offers a satisfactory moral analysis of the nature of war as we find it in the twenty-first century.