Just War

I commented on this post over at Anti-Climacus and I thought some readers here might be interested:

I'll have more to say about this and some related considerations on just war later, but for now, I want to flag this sentiment:

This doesn't make the theory useless by any stretch, but it's useful primarily because it provides a broad framework of restraint: If you're thinking about questions of justice, you're less likely to commit an injustice, even if no perfect consensus exists on the distinction between a licit campaign and an illicit one.

It's not clear to me that this is true, in the way Ross might want to claim it is: in part, because he's speaking only of jus in bello justice considerations, but jus ad bellum thinking complicates justice (in the minds of many); in part because his conception of justice (and mine) have a heavy objective component, but as a fact of politics it's by no means clear that there is; and there is an underlying assumption that double effect (which Ross doesn't mention but clearly has in mind) tends towards restraint and not license (that may be true, but it needs to be argued for, not asserted).

I have no problem with Ross asserting it. You don't believe that somebody thinking about justice is more likely to act justly than somebody who isn't? I mean, to the extent that justice must be understood doesn't it necessitate that one must think about it before one can act justly? I guess one could argue that a person, or nation, can act according to some universal conception of justice that they are completely ignorant of by pure happenstance...