CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Vattel’s ‘voluntary law’, nevertheless, through privileging states’ sovereignty above all
else, it also enshrines a value set that gives primacy to order above all else – and, in
particular, in preference to justice. This is the genesis of much of the contemporary
dissatisfaction with the paradigm.
1.3 Summary
This chapter set out to show that there is a part for ethics to play in, at least, helping to
determine when and how armed force should be used. To do so it has considered three
broad schools of thought that can be argued to have greatest influence on contemporary
international policy makers: realism, which at least in its stronger forms conventionally
argues that warfare is beyond the realm of ethics; liberalism, which regards international
relations as very much within the ethical arena but encompasses, at one end of its
spectrum, pacifism, treating all war as immoral, and, at the other, a crusading moralism
that can be as prone as realism, if not more so, to use of force; and international society,
a more modern construct recognising continually competing ‘voices’ of realism,
rationalism and revolutionism and which, in its reaction to war, both accepts the
realists’ inevitability of conflict and the liberals’ placing of it within the guiding
constraints of ethical deliberation.
Realism, with its roots in the writings of Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli, holds
that the determinant of when to use force is what is necessary (in the interests of the
state), not what is right. Realists are sceptical about universal moral standards which
can be seen to be, all too often, an attempt by some to identify their own values as those
of the world as a whole. They emphasise the importance of power; it is required
internally to a state to enforce order and its absence in the international setting is seen as
rendering impossible an analogous community of nations. By contrast, a balance of
power is necessary to preserve order and minimise conflict.
Realism can be seen either as descriptive or prescriptive. If the former then, it has been
argued here, it is patently wrong; the history of war is replete with examples of moral
deliberation and courageously moral action. If realism is taken to be prescriptive then
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