rightful government. As Aquinas says, a just war requires "the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war."3
3. The war should be fought with the right inten tions. W rs ust be waged for the sake of the just cause, not moved by some illegitimate motives such as bloodlust, greed, empire expansion, and ethnic hatred. Aquinas continues,
[l]t is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advance ment of good, or the avoidance of evil. ... For it may happen that the war is declared by the legitimate authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention.
4. Armed conflict should be a last resort. For a war to be just, all peaceful means of sorting out differences between adversaries should be tried first. Diplomacy, economic pressure, world opin ion-all these avenues and others should be exhausted before employing guns and bombs.
S. The good resulting from war must be propor
tional to the bad. The good expected to come from fighting for a just cause must be weighed against the tremendous eVils that will inevitably accom pany war-death, destruction, pain, and loss on a mass scale.
6. There must be a reasonable chance of success.
Futile wars should not be waged. Mass killing with no likelihood of achieving anything is unjust. So only if success is reasonably probable should a state resort to war.
just war theorists believe that it is possi le for
a resort to war to be morally permissible while the conduct of that war is morally abhorrent. They therefore are concerned not only with jus ad el lum but also with jus in bello, right action dunng
3-fhomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in BasJC• Wn'tings o.f
•• Saint Thomas Aqum. as, ed. an d annotated Anton C. Peg1s
(New York: Random House, 1945), Second Part of the
Second Part, Question 40, Article 1.
CHAPTER 16: WARFARE 0 611
the meting out of the violence. They explicitly reject the popular notion that once war com mences, there are no TIOral restraints whatsoever on what can be done to anyone or anything dur ing the conflict. Michael Walzer, the leading con temporary advocate for just war theory, asserts that the popular view is ''profoundly wrong":
War is indeed ugly, but there are degrees of ugliness. and humane men must, as always, be concerned with degrees....Surely there is a point at which the means employed for the sake of this or that political goal come into conflict with a more general human pur pose: the maintenance of moral standards and the survival of some sort of international society. At that point, political arguments against the use of such means are overshadowed, or ought to be, by moral arguments. At that point, war is not merely ugly but criminal.4
Traditionally, requirements for jus in bello-the
so-called rules of war-have inc;luded:
1. Discrimination. Those fighting a war must distinguish between combatants and noncombat ants, never deliberately targeting the latter. Peo ple who should not be intentionally attacked are said to have noncombatant immunit:y, a sta tus traditionally reserved for women, children, the elderlyand the sick and injured. Though some nohcombatants are almost certain to be killed or harmed in any war, such tragedies are supposed to be unavoidable or unintended and therefore pardonable.
The distinction between combatant and n"'on combatant is often not very cleat, especially when a conflict involves fighters wearing civilian clothes and operating among peaceful inhabitants. Michael Walzer offers a helpful distinction by saying that noncombatants are t1:10se who are not "engaged in harm." But somthinkers have tended to blur
the line between people usually thought to have noncombatant immunity and those who do not.