CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

2.1 Introduction
CHAPTER 2: THE REQUIREMENT FOR ETHICAL
JUSTIFICATION
The survey of the historical development of just war doctrine in the preceding chapter
ended with the UN Charter: the establishment of a legalist paradigm in which states’
sovereign right to use force was curtailed almost entirely and the right to authorise
violence was vested in a single supranational body. Moreover, in establishing a
supranational body with the authority to resolve disputes, the Charter paradigm
effectively reduces states to the position occupied by private citizens in Aquinas’
doctrine. With a higher authority to which their disputes can be referred they no longer
have legitimate cause to resort to force. In Vattel’s terms (see p52) there was now a
‘voluntary law’ that fully determined jus ad bellum, leaving little room, therefore, for
ethical discussion: in the second half of the 20 th Century use of force was either lawful,
in accordance with the UN Charter, or it was not. The role of ethics, then, was
narrowed to considerations of jus in bello and the focus of the debate became the moral
acceptability of certain types of weaponry and most especially the moral legitimacy of
nuclear deterrence (with a side-bar discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s over the
particularities of the war in Vietnam) 1 .
This chapter will first argue that the legal paradigm has failed to the point that it is now
all but redundant. It failed in that it was too often held in abeyance by (mis-) use of the
veto; in that it lacked an effective enforcement mechanism; in that nations have shown
little faith in its institutions for peaceful dispute resolution; and that it has done little, in
practice, to check nations’ actual resort to force. Finally, having been established to
contain the threat of inter-state-conflict, it has proved unable to respond to a changing
geo-strategic environment in which the greatest threat to peace and security is more
likely from intra-state conflict or internal oppression.
Having argued that the legalist paradigm has failed, this chapter will then argue that
there remains a need for justifying the use of force, which if it cannot be found in law
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