Just Cause and the Continuous Application of Jus Ad Bellum

Abstract

What one is ultimately interested in with regard to “just cause” is whether a specific war, actual or potential, is justified – for example, the concrete historical 2003 Iraqi war against the invading Coalition forces, or a war one is contemplating in response to some concrete aggression. I call this “the applied question.” Answering this question requires knowing the empirical facts on the ground, but answering it with reference to any concrete historical or potential war is beyond the scope of the present chapter. However, an answer to the applied question regarding a specific war requires a prior answer to some more general questions, both descriptive and normative. It is these questions that are the subject of this chapter: What kind of thing is a “just cause” for war (an aim, an injury, or wrong suffered or something different altogether)? I call this “the formal question.” Then there is what I call the “the general substantive question.” Depending on the answer to the formal question, the general substantive question can be formulated as follows: Which causes are just? or as Under what conditions is there a just cause? A final question, which has recently elicited increased interest, is what I call “the question of timing”: Does the just cause criterion only apply to the initiation of a war or also to the continuation of a war; that is, can a war that had a just cause at the beginning lose it at some point in its course (and vice versa)?

In the following I argue, regarding the formal question, that a just cause is a state of affairs. Moreover, the criterion of just cause is not independent of proportionality and other valid jus ad bellum criteria. One cannot know whether there is a just cause without knowing whether the other (valid) criteria (apart from “right intention”) are satisfied. The advantage of this account is that it is applicable to all wars, even to wars in which nobody will be killed or when the enemy has not committed a rights violation but can be justifiably warred against anyway. This account also avoids the inefficiency of having proportionality considerations come up at two points: in a separate criterion of just cause and in the criterion of proportionality proper.