Just War vs Just Cause

From: Aaron

As events have been unfolding in Israel and Gaza, I’ve been thinking about Howard Zinn’s distinction between a “just cause” and a “just war”. This article is from back in 2007; I’m not sure I agree with everything he writes, but I do think it’s worth reading.

https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/just-cause-not-just-war/

Dear Aaron,

I finally read this piece by Zinn. And I agree with it.

It was Augustine who came up with the “just war” theory and its criteria. I suppose it was better to put some limits on war rather than to let it happen as Rome declined in war after war.

The foundation for justice in war has been debated by political thinkers for a long time. You remember that President Obama preached just war theory when he ironically accepted the Peace Prize of Nobel, the producer of the modern weapon of war against nature and humanity.

I’m reading Wolin’s Power and Vision, a book great in size and content on the whole development of political theory that shows that “justice” is a pretty slippery concept. Liberals like Rawls use social contract theory and equality as fairness to make the case for justice. Utilitarians and nominalists starting with Hobbes say it means whatever individuals say it means to create stability and make peace — and that can be enforced by whoever has a monopoly on the means of violence, i.e, Leviathan, the state.

War as the “extension of politics by other means” is as violent as it gets. I see no way that modern war can not exceed the criteria for a just war. I agree with Arendt saying “violence can never be justified.” There is no just war. But violence including war is sometimes deemed necessary to preserve the existence of people as individuals or as publics.

But that’s the human condition; and does not relieve humanity from the responsibility from thinking about and stopping violence. Violence is only a means for the immediate removal of violence.

So we condemn but understand violence by both combatants. Zinn’s “just cause,” as separate from a just war, is the right mind to put on. No violence is the condition for justice which can only be achieved through the restoration of politics (I believe “democratic” or accountable politics.

Politics is a place where all concerned persons have what they need to live and achieve their happiness (personal and political actualization). It is removing humanity from the realm of necessity (which utilitarians call the realm of nature) to the realm of freedom which is the political realm).

I would argue with that any institution that is autocratic, despotic, that promotes wealth as the highest goal for persons or nations and thus limits the realm of politics will eventually be violent, not only as means, but as end. I also argue that the neoliberal western capitalist order, including the values that promote its expansion by whatever means, is what we public thinkers and local citizens must confront.

That is the just cause and the condition for justice.

Sorry to be too long on this. But of course I’ve been thinking about this a long, long time.

Dad