Just Cause for War‪.‬

Perhaps it should be rather heartening that democratic leaders who wish to take their countries to war are now obliged to advertise the war as having a "just cause." Politicians now routinely invoke this rather quaint phrase drawn from the traditional theory of the just war. Indeed, when the administration of George H. W. Bush decided to invade Panama, it christened its war "Operation Just Cause," thereby appropriating a label that George W. Bush might later have found serviceable had it still been available. But despite the increasing prominence of the notion of just cause in political discourse, there are few serious discussions of it, and those there are tend to be perfunctory. The usual practice is to offer a simple characterization of the requirement of just cause--for example, that it is the requirement that there be a good or compelling reason to go to war--and then to observe that, at least until quite recently, contemporary just war theory and international law have recognized only one just cause for war: self- or other-defense against aggression. If is then often noted that the consensus on this point is currently being challenged by those who claim that the prevention of large-scale violations of people's human rights by their own government also provides just cause for war. Occasionally, skeptics of just war theory will also, for satirical effect, cite instances from the classical literature of causes for war that are now rejected but were once widely accepted as just, such as the punishment of wrongdoing and the spread of the Christian religion. In this essay I advance a conception of the requirement of just cause that is revisionist in the context of contemporary just war theory, but that has roots in an older tradition of thought about the just war with which contemporary theorists have lost touch to a considerable extent. This revisionist conception has various heterodox--indeed, heretical--implications that I will highlight and defend: for example, that a just cause is necessary for the satisfaction of any of the other conditions of a just war, that there can be various just causes for war other than defense against aggression, that both sides in a war can have a just cause, and so on. The conception of just cause for which I will argue must ultimately be assessed by reference to the moral plausibility both of these implications and of the larger understanding of a just war in which the conception is embedded. As I will make clear below, I mean by a just war something more than merely a morally justified war.