by Joe Miller
If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that I started my career teaching just war theory at West Point. That means I spent several years of my life reading, writing and talking about the morality of fighting wars.
Israel’s various conflicts with its neighbors pose a famously intractable problem. Scholars have written entire books about those conflicts, and there’s still very little in the way of consensus around the topic. I’m certainly not going to resolve the problem in 800ish words.
But one thing that phil-osophers are good at is making distinctions that can help bring clarity to conversations. That is something that’s (kinda, sorta) doable in a few hundred words.
Because the just war tradition dates all the way back to the days when everyone wrote in Latin (and also, if we’re being honest, because academics are a little pretentious), we use two Latin phrases to distinguish between two aspects of war and morality.
Jus ad bellum translates to justice of war. It deals with questions about when it is morally permissible to wage wars.
The most accepted model for thinking about the justice of war (and the one we taught at West Point) gets its clearest articulation in a book called (appropriately enough) Just and Unjust Wars, by Mich-ael Walzer. Walzer argues that people have the right to choose how they want to live. From that, it follows that groups of people have the right to decide to come together and form countries.
Those countries then inherit rights from their inhabitants. Specifically, countries have the right to state sovereignty and to territorial integrity.
That’s basically a fancy way of saying that a country can pass whatever laws its citizens allow, and it can keep whatever territory its citizens inhabit.
On this account, countries are justified in fighting wars for the same kinds of reasons that individuals are justified in acting from self-defense. If your neighbor punches you in the nose, you’re allowed to defend yourself.
Similarly, if one country invades another, the invaded country is justified in defending itself.
On Walzer’s account, only one side can be justified in fighting a war. It’s possible (though rare) to have a war in which neither side is justified. But it’s not possible to have a war in which both sides are justified.
Philosophers like to talk about World War II because it’s the clearest case of a just war. Japan attacked the United States. The U.S. was justified in defending itself by going to war against its attacker.
Walzer goes on to introduce a lot of additional complexities. For example, Walzer argues that other countries are justified in defending an attacked country in much the same way that it’s morally permitted to come to the defense of a smaller kid who is being bullied on the playground.
Here, too, WWII is instructive. The Germans invaded Poland. The UK, the Soviet Union and the United States were all justified in coming to Poland’s defense.
So jus ad bellum tells us when it’s morally permissible to fight a war. Our second Latin phrase—jus in bello, or justice in war—tells us what kinds of things it’s morally permissible to do once we’re fighting a war.
The rule here is pretty simple: don’t wantonly kill noncombatants.
Here, too, philosophers have a paradigm case, though this time it’s a case of what not to do.
In 1968, Lt. William Calley led his company into My Lai, Vietnam, where they proceeded to slaughter everyone in the village. The massacre ended, in part, when American pilots positioned their helicopters between villagers and the US soldier and threatened to shoot Calley’s troops if they didn’t stand down.
West Point implemented the course I later taught (which is required of all second-year cadets) in response to My Lai and similar atrocities during the Vietnam War.
Walzer argues that soldiers (intended broadly to include sailors, airmen and Marines) have a moral responsibility to avoid killing noncombatants—even when doing so increases risks to their own lives.
Soldiers, after all, have agreed to place their lives in jeopardy in the name of warfighting. Noncombatants have not.
A failure to distinguish between the justice of war and justice in war is at the heart of a lot of the disagreement about the Israel/Gaza conflict.
Supporters of Israel point to Hamas terror attacks of October 7 as an attack on Israel’s territorial integrity and argue that Israel is justified in defending itself.
Palestinian supporters point out that Israel’s tactics—food blockades and indiscriminate artillery attacks—are killing a lot of noncombatants.
There’s a good case to be made that everyone is right—that Israel is waging a just war in an unjust manner.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
