The question of justice and war is precisely a question: Can war ever be the task of justice?

Pacifism is one clear response to this question. There are different pacifisms, certainly, but they seem to converge at the point of policy. There is a pacifism which may be called experiential, in the sense that one's reading of the history of armed conflict forces one to conclude that, on balance, war will never produce good fruit. There is another which may be intuitional or deontological, in that one somehow knows, independently of inductive, logical processes, that the life-taking which war is, is intolerable. Both positions yield a general policy posture: War may not be done.