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II. Just War and Imagination Are Not Mutually Exclusive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2018
Extract
The Appeal declares, “We believe that there is no ‘just war,’” because it has been “used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war,” and it “undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.” In what follows, I offer a response to the latter part of the Appeal’s criticism, one that has been similarly made by the Protestant pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the Irish Catholic theological ethicist Linda Hogan—namely, that JWT prevents us from imagining alternatives to war. For Hauerwas and Hogan, “just war” has been a dangerous figment of our imagination since the time of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, and it has thereby impeded Catholics’ ability to imagine nonviolence as a faithful and practical way for addressing conflict. Similarly, the Appeal asks us to imagine a church without “just war” and, instead, with “just peace.” However, while I take both the Appeal’s criticism of just war and its call for nonviolence seriously, I think its portrayal of just war is a distortion and fails to acknowledge that just war theorists actually have imaginatively developed tools and capacities for addressing conflict that are directed toward protecting and building just peace. In the end, I will also suggest that the Appeal lacks consideration of the ethic behind just war, which actually provides a method for moral thinking about the use of all forms of force—not only war, but also nonviolent resistance, which is also a form of force—and, indeed, many other questions in applied ethics.
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References
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38 Hogan, Linda, “The Ethical Imagination and the Anatomy of Change: A Perspective from Social Ethics,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 68 (2013): 18–30Google Scholar. For my response, see Tobias Winright, “Response to Linda Hogan's ‘Conversion and the Work of Ethical Imagination: A Perspective from Social Ethics,’” ibid., 31–35.
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42 Roger Williamson, along with others, has noted, “The report is set within the intellectual framework of the just war tradition, which includes criteria relating both to the decision to use military force and on the conduct of war.” See Williamson, Roger, “Further Developing the Criteria for Intervention,” in The Responsibility to Protect: Ethical and Theological Reflections, ed. Asfaw, Semegnish, Kerber, Guillermo, and Weiderud, Peter (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005), 60Google Scholar. In the same volume, see Sturla J. Stålsett, “Notes on the Just War Tradition,” 28–30, who observes that the criteria for R2P in the various reports are in line with the “tradition on the justifiable use of coercive force” (29). See Winright, Tobias, “Just Policing and the Responsibility to Protect,” Ecumenical Review 63, no. 1 (2011): 84–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Allman, Mark J. and Winright, Tobias L., After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010)Google Scholar; and Allman, and Winright, , “Growing Edges of Just War Theory: Jus Ante Bellum, Jus Post Bellum, and Imperfect Justice,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 32, no. 2 (2012): 173–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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45 Steffen, Ethics and Experience, 33.
46 Ibid., 15.
47 Capizzi, Politics, Justice, and War, 1, 3, 14, 28, 36.
48 Steffen, Ethics and Experience, 52.
49 I suggest an “integral peacebuilding” or “integral peacemaking” in my chapter “Peace on Earth, Peace with Earth: Laudato Si’ and Integral Peacemaking,” in All Creation Is Connected: Voices in Response to Pope Francis's Encyclical on Ecology, ed. DiLeo, Daniel R. (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2017), 195–211Google Scholar. Pope Pius XII first used the phrase “integral peace” in his Christmas message of 1942, “The Internal Order of States and People,” http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius12/p12ch42.htm. I am grateful to Gerard F. Powers for bringing his use of this term to my attention.