UFR de philosophie : Master en Ph.

Politique Luis Miguel Ramos (Étudiant étranger)

Prof: Jean Billier Sorbonne Université
CM. Applied Ethics

Can war ever be just?

War is one of the oldest phenomena of humanity and perhaps the most astonishing and
excessive manifestation of human conflict and at the same time is at the heart of political
thought, if we understand it as an effort to find a type of social organization where man's
conflictuality can be reduced by promoting his abilities to have a virtuous life or through the
protection of individual rights. Indeed, many philosophies take it as the beginning of all
political thought, as the main feature of the pre-political life, before the foundation of the
society, that comes to resolve the principal problems between humans - a remarkable version
of this vision is notably sustained by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, ​where the state is
born as the result of a rational choice which tries to suppress the conflict inherent in man in
his battle for goods or glory -, but this state is also theorized as the point of comeback if a
part of the social body decides to deviate from the established laws by seeking its own
interest, when he judge that he is more capable of govern over society than those who are
currently in power and refuse the laws established by the social contract. In this moment of
the social collision, that we can call of civil war and where we don’t have a pre-political
situation but an conflict in the state and where a part of society disobeys the law causing
disorder with warlike intentions, imposes a type of conflict in which the legitimate authority
of the state, as the source of social order, can wage a ​just ​war against these dissident
elements, with the intention of take away the nuisance that a chaotic state of dispersion of
social forces can perform on the entire population. Thus, war becomes just as a means of
guaranteeing order, understanding an irregular situation as more harmful than any defect in
the State which could function as a motivation for dissident elements. But we can also
consider the justice of a martial context if we consider the war as an important subject, an
subject ​sui generis t​ o the specific dynamics of the life of already established and stable
political regimes, if we think the war under the idea of the trait protective of the State and one
of his most important tasks: defending the interests of the social body under his control,
against any interference from the outside. This point of view can show us a possible
justification for war according to the protective logic of the state: it is right for a state to wage
war once the security of its citizens is threatened for the violence exercised by another State
and in this sense the justice of its action comes from a principle of self-defense of his own
existence and of his citizens: it is rational and just to make war to preserve the integrity of the
State, which is threatened for an external violence, which is not under my control but which
risks the destruction of the guaranties of my existence. This consideration raises a series of
important questions in relation to the limits of this self-defense, since one can ask where is
the limit for this self-defense, at what point one exceeded the limit to arrive at a
disproportionate aggression without return. Where we can stop the right of ​punishment a​ nd
retaliation which arises for the defending State.

It should be noted how this vision is based on a determined ​understanding of the political,
under the category of state as the sole legitimate agent and guarantor of the security of a
population and therefore the ultimate source of all sense of justice. Only the State can use the
violence legitimately, under a principle of protection of its owns citizens and always framed
in the empire of the law. This constitutes a criterion of formal understanding and moreover
problematic when we find ourselves in front of non-state actors, who towards his act of war
did not want to change the rules of the game imposed for any State, an action with a political
motivation, which ultimately aims to impose another institution that we consider more just or
suitable to the interests of a people, but which are somehow challenging the State from a
different logic, as is the case with wars against entities that we can consider basic illegitimate,
like the Mafia or the terrorists, who have every intention of damaging the order without any
intention of imposing any political program, but also without any respect for international law
in war matters, a right that has always been conceived as interstate. It is thus not another
defined not as a political enemy, another State with particular interests and with which one
can possibly negotiate in a legal framework, but it is rather an element considered not only as
illegal but also far from being another legitimate one in his act of violence. This
conceptualization of war, so common in the contemporary world, where the legality and
moreover the justice of war wishes to fall under a cloak of incomprehension by replacing
military logic for a police logic, reveals to us the importance which takes interstate legal
frameworks as the fundamental logic of any sense of justice in a war, since if one does not
understand war in certain legal frameworks, the only solution to confront the other is
punishment or absolute annihilation, until 'at the end of martial efforts, considering the other
as non-political and yet an element that one can always punish in a legitimate way and with
which negotiation is possible, in the same way that one can punish a bandit. Thus, we note
that the legal framework becomes an a ​priori ​for determining the justice of a war since it
establishes a procedural framework with which one can find agreements under the
understanding of a just war, in its two fundamental dimensions : jus ad bellum and jus in
bellum, that is to say, it’s thanks to the empire of the law that one can determine when a war
is just, as an act of defense before an aggressor State, but also when we have waged a war
just in the sense that we have tried to harm the other not in an irrational way with the sole aim
of harming him, but by maintaining ethical behavior in verse of his enemy during the course
of the war .