Jeff McMahan - Wojna sprawiedliwa (Just War)

"There are three broadly defined positions on the morality of war. The fi rst is pacifi sm,which holds that it is always wrong for a state to resort to war and always wrong for
an individual to participate in war. The second is ‘political realism’, the view that war
lies beyond and is unconstrained by morality. The third, which occupies the broad
space between these opposing extremes, is that war is sometimes but not always morally
permissible and that there are moral constraints on the conduct of war.
This middle ground between pacifi sm and political realism is dominated by a tradition
of thought known as the ‘theory of the just war’ that has evolved over many
centuries, beginning roughly with the writings of Augustine of Hippo and persisting
with remarkable continuity to the present. It is perhaps surprising that the main contributors
to the development of this theory have been theologians and jurists rather
than philosophers. There is little about the morality of war in the work of the great
fi gures in the history of philosophy, and even today this subject tends not to attract the
attention of the most eminent philosophers. One exception is Michael Walzer, whose
Just and Unjust Wars, published in 1977, has been highly infl uential..."...