Challenges Just War Theory: Replies
Calhoun, Laurie
LANGUAGE IS multiply interpretable, as Walzer correctly observes. However, the primary uses of just war theory have been propagandistic and its consequences catastrophic. While references to...
...Ordinary people do not back "just homicide...
...We should reject just war theory because its use has led to untold pain, misery, destruction, and death...
...Walzer is not a relativist...
...The Christopher citation to which Walzer alludes illustrates that a leader needs only to label his enemy "Hitler" in order to gain popular support for a ghastly campaign against "Hitler's" nation...
...Although theorists such as Walzer care a lot about jus in Bello, the people who wage wars appear to be realists, who deny the relevance of morality to the conduct of war...
...Military campaigns by powerful nations breed violence by generating new victims who interpret themselves as unjustly harmed and often seek revenge...
...and thwarting progress toward the establishment of an effective international tribunal for the prosecution of criminal leaders...
...rather, he appears to embrace utilitarianism, according to which individual acts of apparently impermissible execution prove to be permissible, when viewed in the grander scheme of things...
...directly effecting the proliferation and dissemination of weapons...
...But history makes it clear that deadly force does not save lives: even less does it maximize utility...
...Although the devastating effects upon civilian populations of landmines have been amply documented, the United States, Russia, and China refuse to sign the Ottawa treaty...
...All's fair in ...war" is a cliché for a reason...
...To Walzer's claim that I am morally obliged to explain how to deal with mass murderers, I reply, first, that just war theory specifies conditions upon not the obligatory but the permissible execution of war...
...And how might one better explain the rampant prevaricatory practices of U.S...
...leaders during Vietnam...
...To my claim that bombing campaigns are no less wrong than the use of terroristic and deadly force by smaller factions against innocent people, Walzer responds that there is justice, and then there is justice...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 87...
...But if people rejected the just war paradigm, then mass murder by groups would never be committed...
...Consider the high incidence throughout history of rape by soldiers at war...
...Or the control of the media by the U.S...
...While references to "compassionate conservatism" are often disingenuous, they do not, as do allusions to "just war," lead directly to mass murder...
...Department of Defense and their surreal depiction of the Gulf War as a bloodless sporting event...
...I have no solution to the problem of the existence of evil, but I do have one proposal for its diminution: that the exportation of weapons be halted immediately...
...The evidence is overwhelming that wars are waged and orchestrated by strategists who use just war theory for retrospective rationalizations of what would be crimes during peacetime...
...Second, in placing the problem of the existence of evil upon the shoulders of the war opponent, the just war theorist ironically blames her precisely where just war theory has been "abused...
...providing a negative role model for smaller nations and informal factions (and individual people), thus increasing the incidence of terrorism and perpetuating a "culture of killing...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
