War

Abstract

There is a long-standing set of criteria thoughtful leaders have used to help determine when engaging in war is the right thing to do. The criteria have also been long debated, and Larry May’s collection of fifteen original essays makes an excellent contribution to the discourse. Historical background is provided by Gregory Reichberg’s “Jus ad Bellum” and Nicholas Rengger’s “The Jus in Bello in Historical and Philosophical Perspective,” both of which are astutely concise descriptions of just war philosophical development from the western perspective. Most just war literature readily available to western analysts has produced by western thinkers, and international legal standards on war have been promulgated primarily through western interactions. But the rich Islamic tradition of just war jurisprudence and philosophy could have been included. The ninth-century scholar al-Shaybani, for instance, wrote about the rules of war and has been called “the Hugo Grotius of Islam.” Al-Farabi, the father of Islamic political philosophy, directly addresses the justice of war (although significantly the best he will say of any war is that it is not unjust), and many of his tenth-century principles are consistent with western thinking; the lack of discrimination between military targets and civilians is unjust in both traditions, for example. In his Selected Aphorisms, al-Farabi identifies innocents as illegitimate targets and even hints that forcibly drafted soldiers might be considered “innocents” when the war’s cause is unjust, thereby intertwining the ad bellum principle of just cause with the in bello principle of discrimination (Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles Butterworth [Cornell University Press: 2002]). Thomas Hurka shares al-Farabi’s idea of interdependence. His superb essay, “Proportionality and Necessity,” poses questions such as: “How many enemy soldiers can be sacrificed to save one of our own soldiers’ lives?” According to him, the right number differs according to the necessity and who is doing the calculating; in other words, jus ad bellum and jus in bello influence each other ...