CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

if we take Willard’s analogy, it is just as appropriate to limit the means of war,
notwithstanding the end. Or, as Michael Howard 112 argues:
War … is not a condition of generalized and random violence … It is on the
contrary a highly social activity – an activity indeed which demands from the
groups which engage in it a unique intensity of societal organization and control.
… ….
… A breakdown of order leading to random and indiscriminate violence, as at
My Lai (1969) is as repugnant to the professional military as it is to transcendent
ethical values.
Such order and control is required in order to conserve both moral and material forces.
There is to this, then, both an intuitionist moral dimension but also, perhaps more
appealing to our realist-skeptic, a consequentialist perspective. Howard elaborates:
Whatever the objective aimed at or the weapons used, the plea of military
necessity has to be brought into focus with two other requirements, arising from
the nature of man as a moral and as a social being. The first imposes an ethical
rule: one does not cease to be a moral being when one takes up arms, even if
required by military necessity to commit immoral acts. ……And the second
imposes a prudential rule: one should not behave to ones adversary in such a
way as to make subsequent reconciliation impossible. War is instrumental not
elemental: its only legitimate object is a better peace. 113
Leaving the way open for subsequent reconciliation is a theme found in both Kant - ‘No
state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual
confidence impossible during a future time of peace.’ 114 - and Hegel: ‘..the
determination of war is that of something that ought to come to an end. War
accordingly entails the determination of international law that it should preserve the
possibility of peace …’ 115 A common moral understanding, or at least framework for
moral understanding, must be a necessary condition for determining which acts are
acceptable (for all is not fair in love and war) and which undermine the possibility of
peace.
Related to this is the issue of reciprocity and escalation. Whilst such considerations
might be purely practical in nature, they have a morally beneficial effect. Hitler’s other
atrocities – and his use of chemicals in his extermination camps – belie any claim that
he may have abstained from the use of chemical weapons against the UK or against
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