Jeff McMahan - Moralność wojny i prawo wojny (The Morality of War and the Law of War)

"There is a general presumption that the law should be congruent with morality—
that is, that the prohibitions and permissions in the law should correspond to the
prohibitions and permissions of morality. And indeed in most areas of domestic
law, and perhaps especially in the criminal law, the elements of the law do in
general derive more or less directly from the requirements of morality. I will argue
in this chapter, however, that this correspondence with morality does not and,
at present, cannot hold in the case of the international law of war. For various
reasons, largely pragmatic in nature, the law of warmust be substantially divergent
from the morality of war.1
Our understanding of the morality of war has for many centuries been shaped
by a tradition of thought known as the theory of the just war. In its earliest manifestations
in ancient and medieval thought, this theory emerged from a synthesis
of Christian doctrine and a natural law conception of morality. Its tendency was
to understand the morality of war as an adaptation to problems of group conflict
of the moral principles governing relations among individuals and to see just
warfare as a form of punishment for wrongdoing. Its concern was with a rather
pure conception of right and wrong that made few concessions to pragmatic
considerations and was unwilling to compromise matters of principle for the sake
of considerations of consequences. During this classical phase in the history of the
theory, the principles of the just war were quite different from the laws of war in
their current form...."...