Universe: Can there be a just war?

World history is a history of wars, conquests and defeats. War is not an exception but a rule. While war and disquietude are the natural conditions of man, peace is something for which one must make a conscious and deliberate effort.

Like many western thinkers, S Radhakrishnan upholds that “peace is not a possession but a perpetual aspiration”. It is not a natural state. One has to strive hard to achieve it. Immanuel Kant, too, asserts, “A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis).”

The state of peace is disturbed by selfish and vested interests for their vicarious happiness by inflicting ‘lasting, grave and certain’ damage to individuals and the nation. Special efforts must be made to achieve, establish and maintain peace. The most effective of these is to retaliate to maintain a peaceful world order and avoid the damage. St Augustine, justifying reprisal, says, “We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against and bring them to the prosperity of peace.”

The happiness of sinners ought to be taken away, even if one compulsorily uses excessive force. It is permissible and justified on the ground that it is used for protecting the common good. A just war is the exemplar of the middle path preached by Buddha, and the Aristotelian doctrine of ‘Golden mean’ between realism and pacifism.

While realism treats war as a natural phenomenon, a necessary evil, whose roots are in the human DNA itself and the innate human nature, pacifism upholds that war can never be acceptable. Its guiding maxim is: ‘Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’

A just war is essentially a defensive war. It is not a preemptive war. As in the case of the Iraq war, a preemptive war has the possibility of going wrong if the presumptions go wrong, or if there is a miscalculation, or if there is misinformation.

The quintessential ingredients of a just war are its being the last resort, right cause, limited objective and right intention. Mahatma Gandhi identifies a just war with non-violence and considers it everyone’s duty to participate in it.

Just-war theorists unanimously agree that the source of war lies in the misplaced ambitions of an individual, or a group, or a nation. It is only when ‘all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective’ that one wages a just war.

Since a just war is waged after all the means of avoiding it have failed, the destroying of property and environment, even killing, cannot be regarded as a sin. However, irrespective of the justness or unjustness of war, we must remember what JS Mill said, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”

Let me conclude with a prayer of St John Paul II: “May people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes and war in international ones.”

— The writer is former professor of philosophy, Delhi University