Category
War & violence
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What is the difference between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, and why keep them apart?
I am on a gap year and reading a lot of history, and I keep meeting two Latin phrases: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I understand roughly that the first is about whether going to war is just, and the…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies254 views -
How much of just war theory is really in Augustine?
Every introduction I read says that Augustine founded the Christian theory of just war. So I went looking for the treatise. I have read a fair amount of The City of God for other reasons and could not find one. What I…
Started by Siobhán Keane4 replies198 views -
Pacifism is the most consistent ethics of war, not a refusal to have one
I grew up among Jain neighbours in Hyderabad and came to Gandhi through them. Gandhi credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) with a large influence on him, so the pacifist line I have absorbed runs from Mahavira through…
Started by Anand Pillai6 replies280 views -
Reading group: Vitoria’s lectures On the American Indians and On the Law of War
Francisco de Vitoria gave his relectiones at Salamanca in the 1530s. Two of them, usually known as On the American Indians and On the Law of War, both from 1539, are where a Dominican theologian asked whether his own crown's conquest in…
Started by Valentina Ríos4 replies154 views -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War at staff college as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies192 views -
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Brennan6 replies176 views -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies126 views