War, Peace, and Christianity E-Book

J. Daryl Charles

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 803

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

With issues of war and peace at the forefront of current events, an informed Christian response is needed. This timely volume answers 104 questions from a just-war perspective, offering thoughtful yet succinct answers. Ranging from the theoretical to the practical, the volume looks at how the just-war perspective relates to the philosopher, historian, statesman, theologian, combatant, and individual—with particular emphases on its historical development and application to contemporary geopolitical challenges. Forgoing ideological extremes, Charles and Demy give much attention to the biblical teaching on the subject as they provide moral guidance. A valuable resource for considering the ethical issues relating to war, Christians will find this book's user-friendly format a helpful starting point for discussion.

Leseprobe

War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War PerspectiveCopyright © 2010 by J. Daryl Charles and Timothy J. Demy

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

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First printing 2010 Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

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Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-1383-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2419-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-1384-8 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-1385-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataCharles, J. Daryl, 1950–

War, peace, and Christianity : questions and answers from a just-war perspective / J. Daryl Charles and Timothy J. Demy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-1383-1 (tpb) ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-2419-6 (ebk) ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-1384-8 (pdf) ISBN-10: 1-4335-1383-8 (tpk)

1. War—Religious aspects—Christianity—Miscellanea. 2. Just war doctrine— Miscellanea. 3. Peace—Religious aspects—Christianity—Miscellanea. I. Demy, Timothy J. II. Title.

BT736.2.C44 2010

261.8'73—dc22

2009035013

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

SH         21    20    19    18    17    16    15    14    13    12    11    10 14   13   12    11    10      9       8      7      6      5      4      3      2      1

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: . . . a time for war, and a time for peace.

ECCLESIASTES 3:1, 8 ESV

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

C. S. LEWIS

For both extremes a remedy must be found, that men may not believe either that nothing is allowable, or that everything is.

HUGO GROTIUS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Just-War Tradition and the Philosopher

1. What is the role of natural-law thinking in just-war moral reasoning?

2. Is there a development of natural-law thinking in the classical philosophical tradition?

3. What about cultural relativism? Aren’t “truths” relative to the culture in which they are held?

4. What is the relationship between law, natural law, and coercion?

5. Isn’t “just war” a contradiction in terms?

6. Doesn’t just-war thinking really serve as a justification or pre- text for violence?

7. Don’t just war and pacifism represent two opposing poles on the spectrum of force?

8. Aren’t all wars, because of the tragic loss of human life, inherently unjust and immoral?

9. Aren’t there different varieties of pacifism?

10. Don’t pacifists and just warriors want the same goal, namely, peace?

11. Doesn’t the sanctioning of force inevitably lead to violence?

12. Isn’t it a weakness of the just-war tradition that it can justify a war that is unjust?

13. What is the difference between a preemptive war and a preventive war?

14. What about the statement “All is fair in love and war”?

15. Isn’t there a “presumption against war” in the just-war tradition?

16. What is the relationship, if any, between human rights and just-war thinking?

17. What about warfare and the environment?

18. What are the shortcomings of the just-war tradition?

19. What good is the just-war tradition in a secular and multi-faith world in which not everyone accepts it?

20. Does the just-war tradition prevent or promote war?

21. Does just-war moral reasoning apply to the problem of terrorism?

Part Two: Just-War Tradition and the Historian

22. In the history of ideas, is just-war moral reasoning a uniquely religious or specifically Christian perspective on war and peace, or are there precursors?

23. What is the significance of these just-war parallels in pre- or non-Christian cultures?

24. Given the clear traces of an emergent just-war thinking in early Christian history, what were early Christian attitudes toward war and military service? Was pacifism pervasive and universal?

25. What were attitudes toward military service and war among particular early fathers of the church?

26. When in the early centuries A.D. does just-war moral theory begin to develop in the Christian historical tradition?

27. Why is legitimate authority so important in the just-war thinking of Thomas Aquinas?

28. Isn’t just-war thinking a pretext for crusading and imperialism?

29. What effect did the Protestant Reformation have on the church’s understanding of war and military service?

30. What were Luther’s views on war and military service?

31. What were Calvin’s views on war and peace?

32. What about the “radical Reformation”? Not all Protestant Reformers shared the views of the high Reformers like Luther and Calvin.

33. Were the Crusades examples of the just-war tradition?

34. Isn’t the just-war position really just a Western and European justification for war?

35. How was the American Revolution understood from the standpoint of war?

36. How are we best to understand the American Civil War, and what were prevailing attitudes toward war?

Part Three: Just-War Tradition and the Statesman

37. What are the core criteria for going to war in just-war moral reasoning?

38. What are the prudential criteria in just-war moral reasoning, and how do they differ from the core criteria?

39. What about last resort and exhausting all possible nonviolent alternatives? It seems as if just-war proponents will inevitably justify going to war.

40. If the criterion of just cause is not satisfied, does this render a war unjust?

41. What is the role of the United Nations in a nation’s decision to declare war?

42. How does just-war moral reasoning apply in the context of international relations?

43. Why should governments and people of religious persuasion in particular respond to genocide and egregious human-rights violations?

44. Isn’t the just-war position really a pretext for an uncritical nationalism?

45. What about humanitarian intervention? Short of all-out war, should nations intervene to prevent or retard egregious human-rights violations or catastrophic geopolitical developments, and on what basis? What about a nation’s claims to sovereignty?

46. What is the nature of humanitarian intervention? How does this differ from war?

47. What are the different types of humanitarian intervention?

48. What about the case of former Yugoslavia?

49. What are post bellum (“postwar”) contributions that just-war thinking can make?

50. Can the just-war tradition accommodate the “war” on terrorism?

51. What is a preemptive war?

52. What is a preventive war?

53. Can preventive war be accommodated in traditional just-war categories?

54. How does the concept of “supreme emergency” relate to the just-war tradition?

55. Can just-war thought accommodate a world with weapons of mass destruction?

56. What about the statement “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”?

57. What is the relationship between Islamic terrorism, Islamic resurgence, and Islam’s conflict with Western culture?

58. Is the just-war idea limited to self-defense?

59. What are the implications of just-war thinking for jus post bellum (“justice after war”), and what might this suggest in contemporary geopolitics?

60. How much flexibility is there in the just-war tradition to grow and accommodate new challenges?

Part Four: Just-War Tradition and the Theologian

61. Doesn’t Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to “turn the other cheek” and not resist evil require pacifism on the part of Christian faith?

62. Doesn’t Jesus set aside the law in favor of a new ethic?

63. Isn’t retaliation counter to Jesus’ teaching and thus unchristian in spirit?

64. Doesn’t St. Paul in Romans 12 require nonretaliatory, nonviolent responses to evil?

65. What about “rendering to Caesar”? After all, Jesus seems to have exposed Rome’s pretensions of sovereignty.

66. Hasn’t Romans 13 been used to justify much evil by political regimes throughout history?

67. Isn’t political power a “necessary evil,” if not inherently evil, as portrayed in the Revelation?

68. Since Christians are called to be “peacemakers,” shouldn’t our highest human goal be to strive for peace around us?

69. Isn’t war immoral since taking human life is a violation of the sixth commandment?

70 What is the relationship between peace and justice?

71. Doesn’t love require us to forgive our enemies?

72. Shouldn’t the Christian trust the eschatological judgment by God of evil rather than fight or go to war?

73. What is the relationship between mercy and justice? Aren’t we commanded to show mercy to all people?

74. Isn’t “turning the other cheek” rather than retribution the more Christian response to evil?

75 Is there a difference between retribution and revenge? Surely, a vengeful spirit is counter to loving one’s enemy.

76. Aren’t fighting and warfare a denial and contradiction of the Lamb of God, whose image projects sacrifice?

77. What is the church’s role in a nation’s decision to go to war? Should the church be involved in deciding what is just cause?

78. Why does God allow war?

79. Can a Christian legitimately serve in the military?

80. Is the just-war idea only a Christian construct, or can other religions embrace it also?

81. What is the view of war in Roman Catholic social teaching?

82. How does Islam view war and peace?

83. Is the concept of “supreme emergency” theologically valid?

84. Is the concept of just war merely for Christians?

Part Five: Just-War Tradition and the Combatant

85. Does deterrence really work?

86. What about nonlethal weapons?

87. Are mercenaries permitted within the framework of just-war thought?

88. How does the just-war tradition understand asymmetric warfare?

89. How relevant is the just-war tradition in a world of high-tech weapons?

90. How does noncombatant immunity affect conflict and war?

91. Aren’t all wars “just” to the victor?

Part Six: Just-War Tradition and the Individual

92. Why do people, including those of religious faith, disagree so strongly about war and peace?

93. Don’t charity and resort to force or going to war stand in blatant contradiction?

94. What about self-defense? Does Christian faith prohibit force in this context?

95. Doesn’t Gandhi demonstrate the effectiveness and necessity of pacifism?

96. Isn’t pacifism a legitimate position for the religious believer who takes seriously his or her faith?

97. In light of Jesus’ call to “peacemaking,” doesn’t the New Testament require pacifism of the Christian disciple?

98. Aren’t strife and conflict always sinful, the product of the human heart?

99. How did C. S. Lewis view war?

100. What about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s example? How are we to reconcile his attraction to pacifism with his willingness to participate in the attempt on Hitler’s life?

101. What are common misunderstandings or misuses of just-war doctrine?

102. Aren’t issues of war and peace matters of individual conscience for religious believers?

103. What should an individual do whose country is involved in an unjust war?

104. From the standpoint of religious conviction, doesn’t going to war mean that fellow Christians from different countries will kill each other?

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

Many people are involved directly and indirectly in every publishing project. We are especially grateful for the enthusiasm and support of friends at Crossway. Allan Fisher shared our concern for the topic of this book from the beginning and embraced the project wholeheartedly. Thanks also go to Jill Carter for keeping us on track, to Josh Dennis for his management of design, and to Thom Notaro for his editorial skills and dedication.

We owe a great debt to James Turner Johnson, who has steadfastly articulated and upheld the moral substructure of the just-war tradition. The fruit of his work has been to bring clarity and understanding to the historical development of the tradition, as well as to bring much-needed wisdom from the tradition to bear on contemporary geopolitical affairs. His character and writings have been exemplary, bearing Christian witness in a hostile world.

I (Daryl) am supremely grateful to Professor Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and to Dr. Bradford Wilson, executive director of the James Madison Program, for the invitation to serve during the 2007–2008 academic year as William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life. That invitation provided the luxury of incomparable resources at the university, continual interaction with university faculty and students, and rich fellowship and exceptionally stimulating conversation. This volume is part of the fruit of research done during that fellowship year.

Special thanks must go to Madison fellows with whom I served. Robert Clinton (Southern Illinois University), David Ericson (George Mason University), Jack Barlow (Juniata College), and Paul Kerry (Brigham Young University) in particular helped sharpen my thinking through their friendship, their penetrating questions, and their thoughtful personal engagement.

I (Tim) have been blessed with friends without whose encouragement this work would not have been completed. Gary Stewart enthusiastically supported the work from the beginning and offered many valuable insights. Lynn Barnes and Carrie Wood were persistent in keeping me focused and adding daily support. I owe Tommy Ice, Wayne House, and Bob Allums thanks for their friendship and expertise.

At the U.S. Naval War College, I am grateful to the former provost, Dr. James Giblin, whose encouragement to pursue this work reaffirmed its need and relevance. Other colleagues likewise strengthened my efforts and helped minimize my shortcomings. Especially helpful were Professors Stan Carpenter, Doug Smith, Jay Hickey, John Meyer, Gene Andersen, Martin Cook, Dayne Nix, Gary Ohls, and Tom Grassey. Navy Chaplains Kyle Fauntleroy, Phil Gwaltney, and Michael Gore also provided helpful insights and counsel.

During two years of study at the University of Cambridge, I was challenged to review and evaluate my understanding of war, peace, and international relations. I am indebted to Professors Tarak Barkawi, Charles Jones, and Philip Towle for their intellectual stimulation. Cambridge friends of the Selwyn Club also provided many hours of discussion, sharpening my analytical and communication skills. In the midst of these studies I was privileged to use the facilities of Tyndale House, Cambridge, and benefited greatly from that experience and the spiritual refreshment it offered. Especially pertinent for this work were conversations and concerns shared with visiting scholar Peter Jones.

I owe special thanks to my wife, Lyn, a steadfast supporter and the wisest person I know.

From 1981 until 2008, I served as a Navy chaplain afloat and ashore with U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps units. I owe a great personal and professional debt to hundreds of colleagues, shipmates, and members of the U.S. Armed Forces with whom it was a privilege to serve. They daily demonstrated exceptional professionalism and a commitment to upholding justice in war and peace. They did so with their words, their actions, and, sadly, sometimes their lives. You will not be forgotten.

Introduction

Although spirited and often contentious debates over war and the use of coercive force have characterized the post–Cold War era, a sturdy and philosophically robust reexamination of the rich tradition that qualifies both war and peace is urgently needed in our day. Fully apart from U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “war on terrorism,” the new geopolitical challenges to security around the world call attention to the need for exploring the ethics of war, peace, and interventionary force.

Alas, the end of the Cold War did not bring an end to human suffering, cruelty, and catastrophe, nor did it usher in the new peaceful order that some had projected and for which many had longed.1 If anything, it heralded new contexts in which human depravity might show itself—from Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan to Bosnia-Kosovo-Herzegovina and Rwanda, to Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, to Somalia and Sudan. And these are wholly aside from the production of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by sundry unruly nations, drug trafficking on most (if not all) continents, and the breathtaking rise of a maturing international terrorism that is often religiously motivated and increasingly worldwide. These crises, at the very least, herald the need for reinvigorated debates about the merits and moral substructure of interventionary force.2

But the political or geopolitical challenge is perhaps not the greatest. More pressing may be the West’s inability to make moral judgments that, in the end, bear upon serious statecraft and, ideally, translate into responsible policy considerations. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt, whose postwar reflections on the “banality of evil” are well known, ventured to predict in an essay titled “Nightmare and Flight”3 that the problem of evil would be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe. Yet, strangely, already in the 1950s, even when atrocities associated with the Holocaust remained a permanent scar on the European psyche, concern with moral evil and the political problems that it causes had begun to disappear from Western political thought.4 Thus, for an American president to speak of “evil” in the geopolitical context, as have several of our recent presidents, is to invite scorn of the greatest magnitude, both at home and abroad. For the moment, however, let us agree to put aside our own political sympathies; what was unforgiveable to most people was the fact that someone in public office would name evil and then contextualize it in the field of international relations.5

But how indeed might those who are responsible for policy propose to deal with the scale of humanitarian need that in our day is massive and frequently the result of unstable regimes?6 And what moral and political resources might inform our response to such situations— situations that fall short of formal war per se but require some measure of interventionary force for humanitarian purposes?7 Should governments respond and intervene to prevent—or retard the effects of—genocide, mass murder, enslavement of peoples or people groups, and egregious human-rights violations? Why or why not? If so, then when, by what rationale, and by what criteria? As it affects foreign policy, few questions will be more pressing in the years to come.

Because issues of war and peace are literally issues of life and death, the tragedy of war must be neither forgotten nor minimized. Surely, conventional wisdom is not far from the mark in reminding us that the horrors of war are the closest approximation to hell on earth. War changes lives forever in ways that are otherwise unthinkable; hereon both secular and religious viewpoints agree. As seen from a wider religious and Judeo-Christian perspective, war entails the death and killing of people who are fashioned in the likeness of their Creator and who therefore possess inherent dignity and incalculable worth. Yet, the very same Weltanschauung affirms that war is sometimes necessary.

Few (if any) world-and-life views eschew war in all circumstances, and no faith tradition is monolithic in its dogma and practice regarding war and peace. This is certainly the case with Judaism and Christianity, whose values have undergirded our own cultural tradition. Throughout its millennia-long history, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition has justified, rationalized, restrained, and informed war, the conduct of warfare, and the conditions for peace. In various times and by diverse means, it has both upheld and departed from biblical standards, and both ecclesiastical and secular leaders have appealed to its teachings for national guidance and support.

This volume is based on the wider social, moral-philosophical, and political assumption that the sturdiest, wisest, and most well-defined position (whether secular or religious in orientation) regarding war and peace is lodged in the mainstream of the classic just-war tradition. Some aspects of this rich tradition, based on natural-law moral reasoning, predate the Christian era, extending back not merely to classical Rome and Athens but to ancient Israel. Theoretical development of the tradition, at the same time, is firmly grounded in early Christian history and theology stemming from theologians and thinkers such as Ambrose and Augustine. Important medieval construal of qualifying war can be found in the thinking of Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom—from Jewish and Christian perspectives respectively— are authoritative interpreters of law and its application. Significantly, both Maimonides and Aquinas, who are the beneficiaries of a renewal in Aristotelian thinking, wrestle with war as both prerogative and political duty; both individuals, moreover, view law as teleological and undergirded by divinely instituted moral predicates that are known through the “natural law.”

Further aspects of the just-war tradition are developed or refined by seminal thinkers such as Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, against the backdrop of religious wars in Europe, as well as “new world” discoveries in the Americas. Refinement and application of the tradition during this early-modern period are critical to the emergence of international law, which imposes legal and moral sanctions on the community of nations. And yet other parts of the tradition are mirrored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as seen, for example, in the accent on human rights, humanitarian concern, and emergent political-legal developments. At bottom, the tradition has always been multidisciplinary and far-reaching with regard to the social-political, legal, and philosophical net cast by it proponents.

At the same time, it also needs emphasizing that European warfare, in its various historical expressions, cannot be thought to mirror adequately the just-war tradition. Thus, for example, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and wars associated with colonial expansion represent violent and unjust episodes in Western history that not infrequently failed to uphold the values and goals of the just-war tradition. Indeed, very often it was in reaction to such brutal and savage conflict that the just-war tradition responded.

To understand properly the mainstream of the classic just-war tradition is to appreciate the theoretical and moral-philosophical assumptions that undergird the tradition. As James Turner Johnson so aptly writes:

The just war idea is not free-floating, to be given whatever content one may think appropriate in whatever context. Understanding its meaning means engagement with the tradition out of which it comes and entering into dialog with the classical statement of the just war idea within that tradition. . . . Just war tradition has to do with defining the possible good use of force, not finding exceptional cases when it is possible to use something inherently evil (force) for the purposes of good.8

Misconstrued by many as a means to endorse any war by throwing a mantle of “just” or “justice” over a nation’s intrusion, just-war thinking is best understood as an approach to comparative justice applied to the considerations of war or intervention. Justice in the present life is always approximate. To acknowledge the possibility of error or human fallibility in moral reasoning is not to give up on the ideal of justice. Nor is it to abdicate, as imperfect human beings, the social-political necessity of working for justice on behalf of those who need it. Justice, after all, is the moral tissue that holds “civil society” together. Philosophically, just-war thinking understands itself as a mediating position between the ideological poles of Realpoli-tik or militarism, on the one hand, and pacifism, on the other. This “mediating” posture might well be illustrated through our attempts at “criminal justice” in the domestic context: we neither acquiesce to violent crime, on the one hand, nor tolerate police brutality, on the other. Authentic justice is lodged somewhere in the “messy middle.” That requires of imperfect men and women the resolution to work for justice (albeit imperfectly) in order to preserve the common social good; anything less is morally and socially deficient. In the words of Hugo Grotius, justice insists neither that everything is always permissible nor that nothing ever is.9

Moreover, just-war moral reasoning is rooted in a certain moral realism about human nature. Such realism influences how we construe power and the use of coercive force. Consequently, it encourages a healthy skepticism and uneasiness about the use and abuse of power without opting out of political reality altogether in favor of utopian fantasies. It understands that moral judgments, and subsequent actions, must proceed in a world of limitations, estrangements, and partial justice, thereby fostering recognition of the provisional nature of all political arrangements. Yet, it recognizes self-defense against— and, on occasion, active opposition toward—unjust aggressors and agents of oppression, while refusing to legitimate imperialistic crusades and the building of empires in the name of peace.10

In his seminal treatise On War (Vom Kriege), the noted Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed that war and conflict are multidimensional, touching the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of the human experience. “Theory becomes infinitely more difficult as soon as it touches the realm of moral values,” he notes.11 And indeed, religious and ethical sentiments are most assuredly part of the domain he termed “moral values.” Although military forces of hundreds of thousands might clash in global conflict (as evidenced by the twentieth century), it is ultimately individuals acting as moral agents who determine the fate of nations. Rarely cited, however, are Clausewitz’s further observations:

Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.

. . . moral values can only be perceived by the inner eye, which differs in each person, and is often different in the same person at different times.12

Whether one is a combatant, noncombatant, political leader, philosopher, concerned citizen, or policy maker in the context of any given conflict, ethical values inform our social-political views, either in support of or in dissent against that conflict. Values, alas, always have consequences.

The present volume, in its affirmation of the classic just-war tradition, in no way represents an attempt to glorify or promote war; such, it needs pointing out, has been a persistent criticism of the last decade and particularly since 2003. Rather, it seeks to answer common and persistent questions about war and peace from within the moral logic that inheres in the just-war idea. In so doing, we have chosen to engage the reader through a question-and-answer format, hoping that such might stimulate readers to probe issues of specific socialcultural, historical, and geopolitical concern. We do not consider any of the answers here to be exhaustive. Rather, they are starting points for necessary reflection on topics that are typically complex, usually culturally conditioned, and often having a long history.

This volume is a collaborative effort. It mirrors converging ideological perspectives and convictions of the two authors, even while one of us writes from the perspective of moral and political philosophy and the other approaches questions from a professional military vantage point. Both of us write as theorists as well as practitioners—one having done criminal justice research before entering the university classroom full-time, the other continuing to train officers in professional ethics and moral leadership at one of the nation’s military war colleges. And both of us embrace the broader philosophical commitments of the just-war tradition in its classic expression, even though one of us grew up in the Anabaptist tradition (and still retains an appreciation for its religious commitments). Although in conversation one might detect different nuances in our individual understandings of social arrangements, moral philosophy, theology, or political views, we stand in essential agreement. This unity of perspective, in the end, has its roots in the depth and breadth of just-war moral reasoning.

To be sure, many secular and religious thinkers have sought in fresh ways to address the perennial concerns of war and peace in recent years; one need only consult the literature since 2003. But frequently this is done without an adequate social-political and philosophical grounding that joins past and present.13 Our modest proposal is to join a centuries-long conversation, in the hopes that enduring resources— resources that imbue our own cultural tradition—might bear upon contemporary geopolitical challenges. And in a post-consensus cultural climate, such resources—for the politician, the educator, or the thoughtful layperson—are urgently needed.

1 It is surely no overstatement to suggest that the end of the Cold War found policy makers poorly prepared to deal with geopolitical crises that have since arisen. In fact, it laid bare a severe lack of moral discourse related to these developments. Moreover, for those who viewed the Cold War as the consequence of defects in the international order, the post–Cold War period was thought, however briefly, to usher in an era of increased power and prestige for the United Nations. The tragic geopolitical reality is that catastrophe after catastrophe have visited the international community, leaving the UN to scramble for any sort of coherent and effective approach, and showing most nations to be relatively nonresponsive. As one Burmese human-rights activist recently lamented, “There are no countries in the world which have gained liberation through the help of the United Nations” (Ludu Sein Win, veteran Burmese and Rangoon-based journalist, cited in The Irrawaddy, April 2008, 5).

2 Surely the frequency of U.S. intervention, or assistance with intervention, in other countries since the end of the Cold War—from Haiti to Kuwait and Iraq, to Somalia and Zaire, to Bosnia-Kosovo— has been surprising (and indeed alarming) to many. Few would have anticipated the sheer density of geopolitical catastrophes that have occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

3 This essay is reproduced in Jerome Kohn, ed., Hannah Arendt: Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

4 This post–World War II development, in our view, has been correctly observed by Nicholas Rengger and Renée Jeffery, “Moral Evil and International Relations,” SAIS Review (Winter 2005): 3–4.

5 The point, we should emphasize, is not whether making moral judgments can be done in a more nuanced or diplomatic fashion; it is only that international relations are generally ill-prepared to deal with moral categories. At the very least, such a state of affairs might invite thoughtful, multidisciplinary moral discourse that is not severed from geopolitical realities.

6 This instability may be characteristic of new states, failed states, or those states on the verge of collapse.

7 Here we are using the term humanitarian in its narrower sense, wherein intervention is undertaken to promote the welfare of humanity, especially through the elimination of gratuitous pain and suffering.

8 James Turner Johnson, The War to Oust Saddam Hussein: Just War and the New Face of Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 35–36.

9 This logic forms the heart of Grotius’s just-war thinking found in The Law of War and Peace (1625).

10 So Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Just War and Humanitarian Intervention,” Ideas 8, no. 2 (2001): 18–19. This wider logic of thought undergirds two very different volumes by Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Power (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), and Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

11 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (1832; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 136.

12 Ibid., 136–37.

13 Notable exceptions are the writings of Michael Walzer, e.g., Just and Unjust Wars, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), and Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); James Turner Johnson, e.g., Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Oliver O’Donovan, e.g., The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jean Bethke Elshtain, e.g., Just War Theory: Readings in Social and Political Theory (ed.) (New York: New York University Press, 1992), and Just War against Terror; and Brian Orend, e.g., War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), Michael Walzer on War and Justice (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), and The Morality of War (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006).

PART1JUST-WAR TRADITION AND THE PHILOSOPHER

Q. 1 What is the role of natural-law thinking in just-war moral reasoning?

Natural-law moral reasoning proceeds on the baseline assumption of a shared nature in all human beings, regardless of culture or location. Part of that “nature” is a moral intuition that discerns between good and evil and expresses itself at the most rudimentary level by eschewing moral evil and doing good (so, Thomas Aquinas). Thereby it provides a common moral grammar for all people—for people of religious or nonreligious persuasion— and facilitates moral discourse in a culturally and socially diverse context.

What needs emphasis is that human beings demonstrate this moral intuition on a daily basis at the most rudimentary level. In traveling, for example, we have the option of taking the plane, the car, the bus, or the train. And along the way, we might opt for yogurt, a hamburger, a burrito, or Chinese food. None of these decisions, as they concern travel or eating, is infused with moral meaning; each has legitimacy. If, however, we were to decide between eating a hamburger and eating human flesh, then our decision would take on considerable moral significance. And if the purpose of our travel were to eliminate human beings in the service of the Mafia, our travel would suddenly acquire a moral cast. Why? One need not be a religious person to discern the difference.

The fact that natural-law thinking goes against the stream of contemporary moral and political philosophy, as well as jurisprudence, says nothing about its efficacy or its viability. It is only to point out that human reflection on what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things” is perceived as out of step with the contemporary Zeitgeist.1 Perhaps the cultural or ethical relativist might offer a rejoinder. Perhaps, one might argue, as does one criminologist in the journal Criminal Justice Ethics,2 cannibalism has moral and social significance in a particular culture and therefore should be honored.3 And perhaps killing relatively innocent human beings because they stand in the way of business is permissible. Recall the cultural relativist’s insistence that morality is social and culturally constructed, that there are no objective or transcendent moral guidelines for humans universally. In general, then, it would appear that moral principle, if we may call it such, inevitably comes into conflict with self-interest, not only in the cases of cannibalism or Mafia business-as-normal. And this, as one political philosopher has well argued, is the perennial problem for a society that wishes to order itself meaningfully and justly.4 But the fact of conflict does not in and of itself explain the presence of moral principle. When confronted with an option, why not opt for human flesh? And who is to say that killing for the Mafia is wrong? After all, it would seem that, at least in some cases, one man’s murder is another man’s business savvy.

While most social scientists are not in the habit of reading Aristotle, they would surely benefit from his musings on human culture. In Politics, Aristotle formalized what most human beings intuit: the community—and specifically, the political community (the polis)—is a “natural” human association—“natural” in the sense that it corresponds with our inherent nature. To argue that our nature is social—and thus moral—is to argue for what is self-evident; hence, the organic link between Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. By implication, Aristotle was arguing that the human propensity for an ordered community sets human beings apart from animals. Moreover, the capacity of language, as Aristotle well understood, is an inherently moral capacity, insofar as language can “declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse,” just as it can “declare what is just and what is unjust.” Herein human beings distinguish themselves from the broader animal kingdom.5 And although in the last three decades arguments have been proffered by certain sociobiologists and primate philosophers that human morality has its genesis in evolution and that this “evolving” can be observed in nonhuman animals, such arguments are purely speculative and ignore very basic differences between humans and nonhumans. Chief among these is that we do not expect animals to offer excuses or justifications for their actions—a moral realm that presupposes reason plus expression through language. To be able to employ a language or grammar of morality is to possess moral agency—the freedom to choose particular types of action over others, which then can be deemed praiseworthy or blameworthy.

In religious terms, Christian theology distinguishes between a general and a more particularized mode of revealed knowledge operative among humankind. Accordingly, what unites all people is the former, a knowledge of moral “first things” that is prior to any knowledge they might acquire. This “prior” knowledge—what we can’t not know, in the words of one social philosopher6—is precisely what one New Testament writer wishes to describe when he refers, in his letter to the Romans, to a moral law “written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:14–15). Pagan Gentiles, he notes, “do by nature the things required by the law”; thereby “they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts.” Because of this “law” that is rooted in human “nature,” nonreligious peoples’ “consciences [are] bearing witness” and “their thoughts . . . accusing” them. This is none other than the language of the natural law. It is “nature” because it describes the way things are, and the fact that not everyone gives assent to the natural law does not assail its universal reality.7 It is a “law” because nothing can change our essential nature. Since moral depravity is actual and total in extent but restrained in degree, the potential in humans to express depravity, devastating as it may be, neither eliminates our ability to choose to do good (freedom) nor releases us from the sense of moral obligation (culpability, the common good).

To employ the language and logic of morality is to presuppose of necessity that (1) there is a right and a wrong and (2) humans exercise a moral “freedom” with respect to particular choices. This freedom, in turn, means that people can be held responsible for their actions. Thus, for example, when people are rewarded or punished not for the moral quality of their acts but for the accident8 of their racial background, it must be said that racial discrimination is wrong of necessity and not merely on the basis of perspective, circumstance, or social location.9 This conclusion is a moral predilection that all people everywhere and at all times intuit, even when some people in some cultural locations refuse to honor it. Moral “first principles,” it should be emphasized, cannot be proven or “demonstrated” through experiment since they are anterior to human experience and experiments. The proposition that “all men are created equal” cannot be “demonstrated”; it is a “necessary truth” based on the reality of human nature. For this reason, as one political philosopher observes of the moral skeptic:

The person who seeks to deny the existence of morals will spend most of his days trying to flee from the perils of contradiction and the tangle of his own argument. He will discover, again, that for the man of reason the existence of morals must hold the place of a necessary assumption or a first principle in the ground of his understanding.10

Clearly, in the exercise of human moral freedom, there are differing degrees of culpability and guilt—among individuals and among nations. And these must be handled in differing ways according to a moral “system” that is consistent and coherent. Both “criminal justice” in the domestic context and classic just-war thinking draw from the same “system” of moral reasoning. Both proceed on the basis of certain fundamental baseline moral discriminations. For example, we discriminate between relative guilt and relative innocence, we discriminate between greater and lesser forms of evil and injustice, and we discriminate qualitatively between criminal and punitive acts. Moreover, both draw from the same canons of moral principle in the pursuit of justice: for example, sufficiency of cause for justifying intervention, the rationale of a greater good or right intention in applying coercive force, proportionality with respect to means, and publicly legitimized authorization for applying coercive force.

The natural law is acknowledged both in the classical philosophical tradition and in the mainstream of the Christian moral-philosophical tradition, both of which generously inform the Western cultural tradition. In Thomistic thought we observe a particularly sophisticated development of natural-law thinking. Aquinas is careful to explain the link between human intuitions and the natural law and to establish the natural law as the basis for just, rightly ordered relations. Early-modern just-war thinkers build upon Thomistic thought, applying natural-law moral reasoning to questions of territorial sovereignty and international relations.

To the surprise of many, the notion of the natural law is resolutely affirmed in the writings of the Protestant Reformers, who thought deeply about issues of government, legitimate authority, civil society, and the common good, and not merely about matters of faith, the church, and ecclesiastical culture. However deeply entrenched a present-day bias against natural-law thinking would seem to be among Protestant thinkers,11 it cannot be attributed to the sixteenth-century Reformers themselves. While it is undeniable that they sought to champion a particular understanding of grace and faith that in their estimation was utterly lacking,12 their emphasis was not to the exclusion of modes of moral reasoning that were rooted in natural-law thinking.13

Both Luther and Calvin believed that the “golden rule,” as it is expressed in both Plato and Jesus’ teaching, was simply the restatement of a higher inviolable law, or norm, rooted in a moral universe, by which human deeds are judged. Calvin writes that “there is nothing more common than for a man to be sufficiently instructed in a right standard of conduct by natural law.”14 It is significant that even Luther, for whom grace is so crucial, insisted that law and an uneasy conscience are the first point of contact between the Creator and all human beings. The uneasy conscience, as Luther understands it, is nothing more than the expression of an internal “law.”

It goes without saying that the age of Augustine and Aquinas and that of early-modern thinkers differ greatly in the sort of dilemmas that needed addressing. Given the cultural synthesis of the Middle Ages, for example, medieval theorists developed their understanding of just war explicitly from religion and secondarily from natural law. This relationship is reversed in the Age of Discovery and the early-modern period, when new challenges to just-war thinkers emerge. These challenges concern people outside Christendom as well as a divided Christendom. Regarding the first: Does just-war thinking apply to non-Christian peoples? What about cultures and nations that find themselves outside Christendom? Do the very same just-war criteria apply? Why or why not?

Three early-modern theorists who provide an important adaptation of just-war principles on the basis of an appeal to natural law are Francisco de Vitoria (1480–1546), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). By the year 1510, disquieting reports had reached Spain that Native Americans were being denied basic liberty and property. The immediate challenge confronting Vitoria was the Spanish vision to colonize the new peoples of the Americas. Spain was prepared to justify war with Native Americans to possess their land and seek their “conversion” to the Christian faith. Vitoria’s task was to challenge the Spanish king on the basis of the unjust treatment of the American Indians. Against conventional thinking his argument was nothing short of scandalous: neither the king, nor the pope for that matter, could authorize war against the Indians. Neither religious nor economic nor political reasons alone make coercion and warfare just, Vitoria argues in Reflections on the Indians and the Law of War; Indians and Spaniards have equal rights. The only cause for war that is just is a wrong that is intuited through natural moral law, a wrong that is discernable to all people everywhere through reason. Going to war based on religious differences or “the spirit of discovery” is not justifiable. No war is just that inflicts upon a population unprovoked injustice. And even were the Indians to attack the Spanish, a just response would be only a defensive response that sought to minimize loss.

In Vitoria are to be found the beginnings of international law, that is, of principles governing all nations that are anchored in natural moral law. Vitoria’s argument is significant because it acknowledges an international community of independent states or people groups that have rights, territorial sovereignty, and reciprocal duties as to conduct. Unlike just-war thinkers before him, Vitoria grounds the notion of just war not in Christian theology per se, but in moral obligation that is known through natural-law reasoning. What natural reason has established among the nations is that certain rights and privileges, rooted in justice, are inviolable. Nature establishes a bond between all men; man is not a wolf to his fellow man; he is another man. If principles of just war are applicable to non-Christian peoples, then the rationale, the very basis, for justice and peace could not be narrowly Christian. Human-rights violations and justification for going to war are the same for all people everywhere; they are rooted in moral realities that are unchanging and universally applicable.

Central to the work of Suárez are the emphasis on natural law and the matter of how states are to conduct themselves. Whereas civil law is alterable, based on customs and usage, the law of nature is universal and unchanging, governing how human beings as well as nations deal with one another. All aspects of justice flow from this reality. Under the rubric of charity, Suárez scrutinizes the role of the state in both defensive and offensive modes: “A required mode and uniformity as to it [warfare] must be observed at its beginning, during its prosecution and after victory.”15 This mode of moral conformity, Suárez was careful to maintain, is founded upon the natural law and is common to religious and nonreligious alike.16

Considered the father of modern international law, Grotius confronts the dilemma of just limits to war in much the same way as Vitoria and Suárez. The results of his work would be foundational for just-war thinking in the modern era. In his important work The Law of War and Peace (1625), Grotius argues that how nations relate to one another is governed by universally binding moral principles. These are “binding on all kings” (1.1.10) and “known through reason” (1.3.16). This argument has important implications for both the church and the state, for it places limitations on both. It also places limitations on whether nations may go to war justly and how warfare is to be conducted. Given the reality of the natural law, such rules of military engagement are valid for all people. Historian Paul Christopher has well summarized the importance of Grotius’s work, observing among his more enduring contributions: (1) international law, grounded in the “laws of humanity” that govern international relations, (2) advocacy of universal, natural laws that impose moral and legal restrictions on nations, and (3) clearly articulated rules of international law for the conduct of war that specify jus ad bellum and jus in bello requirements.17

Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius understand justice to have deeper roots than mere religious confession. Justice is known through nature and is intuited universally as binding upon all people everywhere. Thus the “law of nature” becomes a “law to the nations” (jus gentium), holding people groups accountable to the unchanging demands of justice, which orders right relations. As an extension of antecedent Christian moral thinking, just-war principles find confirmation in the natural law and not solely an appeal to religious faith.18

Natural law presupposes both the existence of universal moral norms and a basic awareness of these in all humans. Natural law is assumed to exist among all peoples, based on a shared humanity. It is a “natural” system of ethics that neither depends on one’s being religious nor contradicts religion. Something is forbidden because it is wrong in sic.19 For this reason, natural-law thinking is foundational to just-war theory. The just-war thinker holds certain moral truths to be self-evident. This applies both to individual criminals, who need restraint and punishment in the local community, and to nations that violate basic moral norms in the wider human community. The very premise on which just war rests is that there is a universal “moral sense” that informs human beings, in relative terms, as to what is good, just, and acceptable over against what is evil, unjust, and unacceptable. The question of how we decide, procedurally and internationally, to deal with these gross violations is a secondary—though by no means unimportant—matter, calling for wisdom and prudence.

The natural law might be construed as an imprint made on (human) nature itself. Justice represents the basic obligation of human beings as creatures. “Nature,” confirmed through conscience, reveals to all people everywhere an awareness of basic moral reality that may not be transgressed. To wit: “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” and “You shall not covet” are known not only through the Hebrew Scriptures in the form of the Ten Commandments (literally, the “Ten Words”), which were given to ancient Israel as the backbone of its covenant relationship to the Creator. Rather, these injunctions are known and intuited by all human beings, “written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:15), woven into the very fabric of creation. Cain knew this, and he fled (Gen. 4:1–16). But all people prior to the giving of the law on Mount Sinai knew it as well, including those who formalized the Hammurabi Code in the eighteenth century b.c. The relevant question is, How did they possess this basic moral knowledge?

The implications of natural-law moral reasoning extend further. The natural moral law makes us aware of a fundamental distinction between killing in self-defense and premeditated murder.20 The fact that secular law, as is practiced in contemporary culture, even makes this distinction (unaided by scriptural revelation or theology) is witness to this universal fact. Just-war moral reasoning proceeds from this moral starting point. It distinguishes at the most fundamental level between justice and injustice, between “defense” and “aggression.” Applying political prudence, it clarifies situations and conditions in which a state might go to war and what sort of response might or might not be permissible. Just-war thinking requires that responsibility and accountability, not the lust for violence or conquest, be sufficient cause for action. Political ethicist Jean Elshtain describes the heart of just-war thinking in a way that, in extended fashion, deserves repeating:

Just war argument sustains a worldview that construes human beings as innately and exquisitely social. It follows that all ways of life are laced through with moral rules and restrictions that provide a web of social order. For St. Augustine . . . God’s natural law was written in human hearts; thus, unsurprisingly, all ways of life incorporate basic grammars of injunctions and prohibitions which regulate important things—the taking of life, sexual relations, the administration of justice. . . . What happens in families bears a reference to what sort of society one lives in overall; domestic peace and civic peace are related, are of a kind, rather than being entirely separate concerns. We can assess a people and a way of life by looking at what this people lifts up and loves; by what it shares in common and by what it rejects or thrusts aside.21

Seen in this way, just-war thinking is rooted in a certain view of reality. It understands the individual to have overlapping social commitments and loyalties. These entail family, civil society, and the state. While these realms are not identical, they are nevertheless related. All need to be ordered. And all are ordered by just notions of “peace” that have their foundation in universal moral standards or norms. Social relations as well as political action in a just society will mirror some measure of indebtedness to those enduring values.

The natural law, then, corresponds with the human beings’ most rudimentary moral intuitions, according to which human behavior must be ordered. It facilitates “civil society,” apart from (though in harmony with) religious conviction, to determine what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable, what is morally just and unjust. While religious faith may be viewed by its adherents as providing the highest expression and fulfillment of human virtue, the natural law written on the human heart, as it were, witnesses in all people to basic moral obligations and to the basic distinction between good and evil. Murder, theft, lying, infidelity, harming the innocent, and the like are readily intuited moral violations. For this reason, there are basic prohibitions against these actions that find expression to varying degrees in all cultures.22 A moral order is protected “on its border,” so to speak, by negative commands; great social good arises in a society from positive motivation, namely, from the growth of virtues in its citizens. Natural law has the function of protecting these “borders.” It will guard against the error of rationalism, on the one hand, which fails to take into account the sinfulness of humans, and the error of relativism, on the other hand, which denies the validity of moral norms. If natural law provides general moral guidelines, known to all through reason,23 for what is just and unjust, then the problem of war and the just use of force furnish a useful example of how those guidelines might be applied.24

Q. 2 Is there a development of natural-law thinking in the classical philosophical tradition?

Despite the observation that all things change, Heraclitus (ca. 536–470 b.c.) believed that wisdom points to a wider “law” of the universe, a transcending logos or reason, to which human nature and human ethical striving are ordered. All human laws are informed by and issue from one “divine” law. Such, Heraclitus taught, was intuited through wisdom: “Wisdom is the foremost virtue, and wisdom consists in speaking the truth, and in lending an ear to nature and acting according to her. Wisdom is common to all.”25 Heraclitus’s attempt to understand a “natural moral law” as unchangeable stands in noted contrast both to the demagoguery of the Sophists and the capriciousness of the population. The Sophists of Heraclitus’s day, like the sophists of any era, refused to venerate the “natural moral law,” since they viewed laws as artificial constructs that merely serve the interests of those in power. It is in this light that we perhaps understand Socrates’ and Plato’s veneration of the nomoi, the “laws”; so, legal historian Heinrich Rommen: “The philosophers spoke of the . . . laws with great respect: the peoples who had no polls were to them barbarians. Hence, it happened, too, that Socrates, despite his distinction between what is naturally right and legally right, pronounced the laws of Athens to be ‘right’ without qualification.”26 Something in the classical philosophers’ observations about human nature strikes us as enduring, for Heraclitus’s understanding of the “natural law” would serve as a precursor to the Stoic notion of the logos that pervades and unifies all of the cosmos while placing upon all humans certain ethical obligations.

Natural-law thinking in Plato and Aristotle is characterized by a high regard for the polis. All of life, for them, is therefore “political” insofar as the city-state subsists in rightly ordered relationships. Our natural inclinations and abilities should order the ideal society. Both Plato and Aristotle reject a subjectivism about what is “good.” The good, for Plato, consists, for example, in knowledge and beauty and is self-evident, independent of a human reference point. Aristotle differs, however, on one point. He holds the good to be understood in terms of human nature, for which an analogy is helpful. An acorn derives from the genus oak by nature, from which all oaks, regardless of their maturation point or variety or utility, are identified. Yet despite their differences on what constitutes the good, we observe in both Plato and Aristotle a care to preserve the social order. As a result, both place strong emphasis on ethics, on what is just, and how human laws might reflect enduring moral norms. Significantly, both recognize that what is legally just may or may not be what is naturally just.

Plato acknowledges that laws might protect the narrower interest of a particular class and not all of society. Bona fide justice, by contrast, is thought to inform proper laws, since justice will seek to provide for and protect the common good.27 While positive laws are arbitrary and subject to change, the demands and obligations of justice remain unchanging. In this way they mirror a higher moral standard. In the end, then, the polis or state exists as a teaching mechanism to test the moral character of its citizens. Its function is to make human beings virtuous to the extent that they embody justice. In this way, humans accord with the “law of nature.” In a “naturally” ordered society, each person utilizes those abilities with which “nature” has endowed him.28

Even when direct appeals to nature as the foundation of unchanging ethical norms are not developed very explicitly in Plato, the basic argument found in his Republic is that there exists an order in both physical and human nature that is objective and universal. The proper use of reason, coupled with the ordering of impulses, becomes the source of human moral obligation. To violate this is to create disorder and unhappiness.29

In Aristotle we find perhaps the high point of the development of pagan ethical theory,30 and certainly one that furnishes a steppingstone toward natural-law thinking, even when it is incomplete. Aristotle believes that everything occurring in life has a purpose or proper place (telos), resulting in a “natural” order of all things.31 The intrinsic nature (physis) of anything can be known by identifying its end, its telos. Given this order, we may determine what is “good” in its essence. Nature, then, serves as a guide for citizens, for politicians, and for statesmen.32

When this is transferred to social-political life, the aim of each member of the polis is to pursue what is virtuous and just and thereby embody good citizenship. Human beings are free to act in accordance with reason, that is, to do what ought to be done. Ethics, therefore, as Aristotle makes clear, is to act in accordance with our fundamental nature. Nature, consequently, where it is illumined by right reason, guides human beings in distinguishing between virtue and vice. The implication, in social-political life, is that laws can be legally justified yet morally unjust. Natural law therefore describes both how things are in their essence and how they ought to be. By analogy, morality can be compared with gravity to the extent that it is grounded in natural-law thinking. That is, there are moral first principles that are self-evident and needing no explanation.33

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle acknowledges some human behaviors to be intrinsically wrong—for example, murder, theft, and adultery.34 Moreover, a distinction between “conventional” justice, by which constant change is to be expected, and unchanging “natural” justice surfaces later in the same work.35 Also found in Nicomachean Ethics is a clear distinction between natural law and positive or conventional law. What is legal is not inevitably moral; Aristotle is not inattentive to the difference.36

In Aristotle, as in Plato, justice is not the domain of private individuals. Freedom is legitimate only to the extent that one acts in accordance with nature. Justice expresses itself corporately in the city-state among the citizens; hence, the veneration of the polis.37