Thinking Historically about Just War

Abstract

This essay responds to the six essays on my thought above, doing so both directly on particularly important points and indirectly through my own reflections on how I understand my work and its development.

Keywords:

• Authority
• international law
• force
• historical reasoning
• just war
• pacifism
• shari‘a
• tradition

Let me begin by acknowledging the honor these essays pay me. I deeply appreciate the attention the authors have given to my work, and I am especially grateful to Cian O'Driscoll for conceiving this symposium of ideas, organizing it, and seeing it through to publication. That the publication of these essays appears in a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics, and indeed marks my retirement as Co-Editor of JME, a position in which I have served since its founding, is another source of pleasure to me, and I thank the Editor of JME, my colleague Bård Mæland, for his support to Cian in making this special issue possible.

This contribution of mine is the result of my having been asked to provide a response to these six papers. I want to use the opportunity not chiefly to critique what they say but to build on, clarify, nuance, and in a few rare instances offer a bit of correction building on what these six authors have said, but also to offer something of my own perspective on what I have been doing all these years.

There is a great deal of use of the term ‘just war’ in contemporary literature on the ethics of war, but sadly, much of what appears under that heading is consciously or unconsciously unconnected to the broad cultural and moral tradition that historically has defined just war as a conception and body of practice. My work, by contrast, has been focused on the tradition that has developed and carried this idea historically and the implications to be drawn from this tradition of just war for present-day reflection and, maybe, practical decision-making. The six papers above also engage this historical tradition, though (as is to be expected from any group of individuals) from different angles and in different ways. Broadly, these papers define a kind of conversation about the meaning of just war both as shaped and transmitted in a historically defined tradition and as having worth for present-day thinking about the ethics of war. This response of mine aims to continue and extend that conversation.

While each of these papers has its own distinctive character, I think of them as belonging to two groups. The first three papers, those by O'Driscoll, Kelsay, and Zehr, bear on the question of how to use history in ethical reflection; that is, their main focus is methodological. The second group of three, those by Lang, Sharma, and Bellamy, all deal with specific problems in applying just war thinking to contemporary uses of armed force. Both concerns, of course, are found in my work, and the distinction I draw between these two groups of papers broadly mirrors that between my three books focused on the Western normative tradition on war (Johnson 1975, 1981, 1987) and those explicitly seeking to apply the conception of the ethics of war identified there to contemporary issues in the use of armed force (Johnson 1984, 1993, 1999, 2005; Johnson & Weigel 1991).The two books I co-edited with John Kelsay on relating the traditions of just war and jihad of the sword (Johnson & Kelsay 1990; Kelsay & Johnson 1991) fall into the first camp, and so does my own book on the idea of holy war in the Western and Islamic traditions (Johnson 1997). But a close look at all these books will reveal that the difference is hardly absolute. Indeed, in my thinking both sorts of concerns are always present right alongside one another, since my historical investigations are about moral traditions and their implications in particular historical situations, and my efforts at applied ethics proceed by extrapolating from how just war tradition was applied in such historical situations to how its meaning should be understood in present contexts.

Not everyone has been able to make sense of the results of this admittedly complicated way of ‘doing’ ethics. John Kelsay above comments on Terry Nardin's bewilderment at it; I have given papers at societies of academic historians when clearly some in the audience wondered why I did not simply trace the historical facts and not spend so much time on how those facts define an ethical tradition; and there are certainly numbers of contemporary philosophers (and religious ethicists as well) who simply do not see that history has anything at all to do with ethical reasoning. To my mind, of course, this last attitude has led to what is wrong with large parts of recent thinking put forward under the rubric of ‘just war’, but this is not the occasion to go further into that.

Two of the papers above, O'Driscoll's and Lang's, point to the similarity between my way of thinking and that of Alasdair MacIntyre on historical tradition and meaning. Whatever commonality there is probably traces to the interest both of us have in medieval thought and the use of Aristotle there. MacIntyre's After Virtue appeared the same year (1981) as my second book on just war tradition, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, and in that book I was already deeply engaged in giving voice to my understanding of the importance of history for ethical reflection and particularly for the ethics of war. I didn't read MacIntyre's work till somewhat later and was delighted to find that we seemed to be speaking different dialects of a common language. In subsequent work I have tried to use his thinking to sharpen my own on certain points, but whatever methodological faults lie in my work are my own, not MacIntyre's.

The case of Edmund Burke is rather different. I read some in Burke thirty-odd years ago in the process of educating myself to teach a course I was woefully unprepared for, but I have never consciously thought of my work as Burkean. It was not an unpleasant surprise, though, to have O'Driscoll point to the likeness. In O'Driscoll's words, Burke's view was that ‘historical experience, embodied in tradition, provides the best tutor for political practice’ (O'Driscoll 2009: 171). I not only agree, but would add ‘and ethical reflection and practice.’

To what conscious influences would I trace my approach to the ethics of war? There were three particular individuals whose work on just war led me into my focus on this topic as the major theme of my scholarship: Paul Ramsey, Michael Walzer, and William V. O'Brien. Ramsey was my doctoral mentor at Princeton, and while I wrote my dissertation on an entirely different topic, his two seminal books from the 1960s (Ramsey 1961, 1968) introduced me to the idea of just war as a conception of Christian ethics. But along with many positive influences, there was an important negative one: Ramsey wrote as a theologian, developing his particular understanding of just war as an extrapolation of the Christian norm of love of neighbor; he did not engage the historical tradition of just war in its own particulars but lifted out themes from thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas as they fitted his theological purposes. My first just war book (1975) was quite consciously an effort to engage the historical tradition, to uncover and follow how Augustine, Aquinas, and others were actually used there. Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977) appeared between my first and second just war books; I found his use of history engaging and provocative and discussed it in a chapter in my 1981 book; but again, he was not interested in engaging or drawing out the historical tradition, and I was. O'Brien, who drew me closely into the debates (theological, military, and academic) surrounding the writing of the United States Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983), in important ways incorporated the idea of just war in his personal life: a retired Army colonel, a professor of government deeply involved in understanding the meaning of international law and its implications for international relations and the use of military force, a deeply committed Catholic convinced of the importance of tradition, and a serious and substantive scholar of ethics, law, and war (see O'Brien 1981, 1991). He brought a real-world experience and a level of common sense to thinking about the ethics of war that remains rare among academics writing on just war. My long-time engagement with military thinkers, particularly in the war colleges and the service academies, as well as my long-running debate with Catholic thinkers on war (I'm not myself Catholic) is a result of O'Brien's influence and example.

For my convictions about the importance of historical tradition as the basis for finding meaning and guiding that meaning the most important influence was definitely my coursework in the history of Christian thought while I was a divinity student in my early twenties. This experience is also the ultimate root of my impatience with contemporary Christian thought on the ethics of war that misunderstands, misuses, or sometimes completely ignores the historical Christian tradition on just war and its placement in theology, moral teaching, and the interrelation between religion and its social context. Just war tradition is not simply a tradition of Christian thought and practice, but within the broader tradition there is a specifically Christian one, and I believe contemporary Christian moral reflection on the ethics of war is not keeping faith with those who went before when their work and its implications are disregarded, misunderstood, or misused. At the same time, like Burke and MacIntyre, I think it essential to take account of historical experience and traditions encapsulating that experience in politics and ethics.

Let me now turn more explicitly to the papers above. Both O'Driscoll and Zehr note my emphasis on what I call the ‘classic’ expression of the just war idea, and both find a tension between this emphasis and my earlier argument for viewing just war tradition as a ‘rolling story that reflects the sum of its own historical development’ (O'Driscoll 2009: 171). Zehr (2009: 200) is troubled by this, arguing as follows in her conclusion:

Johnson's ‘classic’ just war category suggests an essentialist account of just war thinking. However, such a position is difficult to maintain, as moral communities are always engaged in the task of giving reasons for their values. With changing historical circumstances, these reasons, and consequently these values, are likely to change.

O'Driscoll, by contrast, reads the tension between the two themes in my writing more positively, arguing that this is where the distinction between reading me as a hedgehog and reading me as a fox breaks down and judging the result to be ‘not a failing but a strength’ (O'Driscoll 2009: 176). It is perhaps merely human that I prefer O'Driscoll to Zehr on this matter.

O'Driscoll very engagingly and usefully employs the hedgehog–fox categories, as well as his own slightly expanded categories of conservatism, progressivism, and reflectivism, as lenses through which to view my work. These are specially ground lenses, to be sure, as each one brings different details into focus. Or maybe ‘perspectives’ would be a better word for these five categories, as this word suggests looking at the subjects I have treated from different vantage points, seeing different elements of the whole as more or less prominent from each perspective. I confess O'Driscoll's fine-grained and nuanced analysis has led me to thinking about my own thought in ways that had not occurred to me before (e.g., my similarity to Burke noted earlier). But more often his categories serve to raise to light elements in my thinking which I recognize and acknowledge and which are important, though I have not always stressed them. A case in point is O'Driscoll's (2009: 172) argument that my ‘historical hermeneutics reflects a project that is driven by a desire to learn from the past, not just for its own sake, but so that we might build a better future’. Hear, hear! It is because of this that I regard it as so utterly and sinfully wrong to forget – as far too much that passes for just war reasoning in contemporary debate does by accident, emphasis, or design – that just war is about seeking to achieve the end of peace.

But perhaps O'Driscoll's approach does not entirely satisfy Zehr's concern. Accordingly, I would add that I admit to having stressed particular matters in different contexts. We speak, after all, of discussion of the ethics of war as a ‘debate’, and in a debate one needs to identify, meet, and refute the shortcomings of one's opponent's position. Especially in my earlier writings I was heavily concerned to make the case for historically based reasoning in ethics as opposed to various other prominent forms of ethical reasoning. This debate is still going on, of course; recently I had to argue the importance of a broader account of history in the development of just war thinking about noncombatant immunity against another writer on ethics who argues that the development of noncombatant immunity is simply a logical working out of ideas already found in Aquinas. Different readers will gravitate to one or the other of these positions, but my point here is that the nature of the question being debated shapes how one argues, and it has shaped what I have stressed at different times with regard to the idea of just war. My emphasis on the classic form of the conception of just war, the form given it by the medieval canonist Gratian and his successors and stated pithily in Aquinas's Summa Theologica II/II, Q. 40, has developed as a quite conscious response to what I see as a grievously wrong conception of just war, its purpose and its use put forward by the United States Catholic bishops in their 1983 pastoral letter (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983) and since advanced by spokespeople of the bishops and taken over as the normative statement on just war by others. I have elsewhere given my reasons for this negative judgment on the Catholic bishops’ version of just war (most fully in Johnson 2005), but my point here is simply to note that I began to stress the classic form of the just war idea as a way of reminding the bishops and their supporters that the deep tradition of just war shows us a conception fundamentally different from theirs. I have also made much the same point in arguing against the unhistorical conception of just war put forward in recent Anglo-American philosophy. This is not a ‘golden age’ conception but a way to insist that just war tradition provides both a content and a form, so that if one wants to describe one's position by use of the term ‘just war’ one should pay attention to what this term actually was understood to be and to be about when it was first coherently pulled together.

In this connection I should acknowledge that Zehr is accurate to observe that my own listing of the just war categories has shifted as I have given more emphasis to the classic idea of just war. In my early work I wasn't particularly interested in describing just war in terms of categories; this was because ethical reasoning from categories, as practiced then, was very different from the historically based method I wished to emphasize. When I did decide to describe just war in terms of categories, I simply adopted what was at the time a widespread consensus as to what these were. I used this listing for some time and continue to refer to it from time to time, in various contexts. It has real advantages for linking just war thinking to international law, a major running concern of mine. But reflecting on the elements of the classic idea of just war has led me to see matters somewhat differently, especially in two particular ways: to recognize the systematic links between Aquinas's formulation of the three necessities for just war (sovereign authority, just cause, and right intention including the end of peace) and the three goals of politics assumed in the Augustinian tradition (order, justice, and peace), and to acknowledge more forthrightly a lesson I had learned from Ramsey: that the decision whether to resort to use of armed force is properly the responsibility and right of those in positions of supreme political authority in a society, not that of moralists – or even bishops! In Chapters 1 and 2 of Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Johnson 1999) I employ both ways of describing the content of the just war idea and develop each way to its particular purposes; those interested in more on the subject should look there.

Let me now turn to John Kelsay's paper, which I have postponed because of the common issues raised by O'Driscoll and Zehr. Kelsay and I have been friends and sometime collaborators for almost 30 years, and I owe to him my introduction to the tradition of Islamic thought on war. This essay of his, though, treats a different matter. I like the way he begins, by outlining the difference between my way of thinking and the different versions of ethical reasoning as proceeding from principles exemplified in the thought of James Childress and Paul Ramsey. As Kelsay makes very clear, I was engaged in thinking about the meaning of history for ethical reflection from the first. But I especially like his placing my approach over against Childress's method because it applies so well to my ongoing argument with the official position of the US Catholic bishops and their supporters in the academic debates over the use of armed force. For the bishops’ foundational statement, their 1983 pastoral letter, directly employs Childress's mode of describing just war and adopts it as the bishops’ position, asserting that this is what Catholic just war thinking is and has been. My argument with this position has sought to identify the real and substantial differences between the bishops’ idea of just war and that of the actual tradition as found in what I call ‘benchmark’ thinkers – especially people like Gratian in the twelfth century, Aquinas in the thirteenth, and the Spanish Neo-Scholastics in the sixteenth and early seventeenth. Here is where we find what I call the ‘classic’ concept of just war, and that is very different from the ‘presumption against war’ doctrine of the US bishops, which is a barely disguised version of Childress's argument that the just war idea proceeds from the principle of non-maleficence (see further Childress 1982: Chapter 3).

I think it is fair to say that my efforts at defining ethical reflection about war through definition and engagement with historical tradition have largely failed in my own home field of religious ethics (Kelsay and a few others notable, and much appreciated, exceptions). This field is and has long been dominated by people who because of their own inclinations or because of the influence of their teachers seek to reduce it to reasoning from principles, whether the principle of love of neighbor (as in Ramsey) or versions of philosophical principles (as in Childress and his teacher James Gustafson).

I know from my publishers that more political scientists have bought my books than people from other academic fields. For political scientists, and especially perhaps those in international relations, the matter is different: here historical patterns and modes of thinking matter, and the ability to draw practical results either for the purpose of analysis or for that of policy is valued. Similarly, for military professionals reflection on history as well as consideration of how it matters for practical decision-making lies at the core of how they think about who they are and what they do. Increasingly I have come to feel a kinship with both.

Much of my argumentation aimed at showing that just war tradition is not narrowly Christian, especially not narrowly a strand in Christian theology, has been quite explicitly aimed at showing its relevance for policy-making and specific decisions in secular contexts, including the exercise of government and military service. I like to describe just war tradition as a stream that moves through history like a river, remaining the same yet putting down some elements and picking up others as it flows, from time to time dividing into different channels and then, perhaps, recombining. As I have conceived my task, it is to describe this flow and try to make sense of it, while trying to keep the various sub-streams in contact with one another and with the mother stream.

I think Kelsay is absolutely on target to find resonance between how I have thought about just war tradition and its implications both for uses of force and also, more broadly, for responsible exercise of governance, and the model of practical reasoning found in Islamic jurisprudence or reasoning about shari‘a. Both aim at a continuing dialogue with the community's historical experience and reflection, and both aim to, in Kelsay's (2009: 186) words, ‘articulate a “fit” between precedent and current circumstance’. But there are also important differences: most notably, shari‘a considers itself based in an inherently immutable law handed down directly from God, while just war tradition, even insofar as it relies on the idea of an underlying natural law, depends on human experience, on discovering the right as one goes along. My model of moral reasoning conceives moral reflection as a continuing dialogue with historical experience and prior moral reflection. The tradition of shari‘a reasoning proceeds differently.

Yet some of the same practical problems arise both in contemporary shari‘a reasoning and in contemporary just war reasoning, notably the tendencies to reductionism found in both. For radical Islamists this takes the form of a narrow and doctrinaire reading of the shari‘a tradition often termed ‘fundamentalist’, after the model of a biblical fundamentalist. One of its results is to use the idea of the jihad of individual duty to argue for a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all, except that it is the war of every Muslim against everyone else. In contemporary just war tradition, by contrast, the reductionism has moved the opposite way: to define the use of force as inherently morally wrong, as in the Catholic bishops’ notion of a ‘presumption against war’ and arguments drawn from this. The remedy I have offered for these different forms of reductionism is fundamentally the same: to show what the historical tradition actually says and to draw out what it implies. Just as one gets a very different picture of the just war idea from reading Aquinas, say, than from reading The Challenge of Peace (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983), one gets a very different picture of the idea of the jihad of individual duty when one moves beyond the radicals’ own statements and those of their favorite authority, Ibn Taymiyya, to people like the twelfth-century Syrian author Al-Sulami, treated by Kelsay (2006) in his book Arguing the Just War in Islam, or earlier authorities including Ibn Rushd (Averroes) or the thinkers who originally defined the juristic idea of jihad, al-Shaybani and al-Shafi‘i. It is important for people who want to be faithful to their moral traditions to know what those traditions actually contain, in fullness and complexity.

As I read Lang's paper I had the sense that to an important extent he describes a conflict that isn't there, or at least one I don't want to be there. His distinction between someone who is ‘in authority’ and someone who is ‘an authority’ is useful, and I agree with him that I belong in the latter category, not the former. But I reject Lang's categorizing my work as describing just war tradition only in its political role. I think rather that I have worked out of all the roles he identifies at various times, in various contexts. The criticism that appears in Bellamy's paper above is, after all, aimed at aspects of my work that are ‘prophetic’ according to Lang's categories, and I would argue that my argument with the position enunciated in The Challenge of Peace (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1983) is also an example of such ‘prophetic’ use of just war tradition. As for what he calls the ‘pastoral’ role, as he notes himself, I have had a significant amount of interaction, both personal and through things I have written, with professional military people. Perhaps my interaction with people in the civilian policy community fits this category as well, though perhaps it also bleeds into the category of the ‘political’; I'll leave it to others to sort that out. As for the ‘philosophical’ role of my approach to just war tradition, I think John Kelsay's paper answers for me. As I read through Lang's paper, I found myself writing in the margin comments like ‘this is my view’ and ‘right’ and ‘good’. So I'm not sure he and I have much of an argument in the end.

This extends in principle to what seems to be Lang's major concern: that those ‘in authority’ in various Christian churches have the right to define their own understanding of the ethics of war. So far so good, though I think we have considerable differences over the actual scope of this authority and the way it is employed in particular Christian bodies. It is not just, as Lang suggests, that my background is in a ‘free church’, one without hierarchy. Clearly even in churches in which there are bishops, their ecclesiological role differs from church to church; not all are understood as having the teaching authority claimed for its bishops by the Roman Catholic Church. And there are more issues persons interested in ecclesiology would need to debate; Ramsey's book cited by Lang offers a good place to begin identifying the relevant questions.

But we do have a real difference over what bishops exercising their teaching authority owe to the tradition out of which that authority comes. Lang would give them far more latitude in defining their own position of just war than I would. Thus he writes, ‘Rather than seeing them as leaving the stream of just war, the Christian churches as a whole have turned the tradition in a new direction’ (Lang 2009: 209). I'm not at all sure about the category of ‘the Christian churches as a whole.’ In the United States the churches of the old Protestant mainline in recent years have turned to language other than that of just war to advance their arguments about ethics and warfare, speaking of the need to ‘move beyond just war tradition’ or to substitute a ‘just peace’ theology for one of ‘just war’. The case of Catholicism is more varied, but the real issue is the position of the US Catholic bishops. They have clearly turned the idea of just war in a ‘new direction’, but Lang and I differ as to whether this legitimate or not, or a good thing or not.

I think that anyone – church hierarch or not, one ‘in authority’ or only ‘an authority’ – who sets out to use the idea of just war has a debt to the tradition and a responsibility to understand what that tradition actually is and how it came to be what it is, and to use the tradition in ways that fit with this. Specifically, since the tradition of just war is quite broad and includes diverse elements, this implies an engagement with those elements of the tradition closest to what one does oneself, as well as seeking to understand the relation between those particular elements of the tradition and the larger body of tradition of which it is a part. I have understood my work as an effort to provide both examples of doing this and raw material for others to do it. In carrying this through, ideally people taking up this task will refine the method and add to the raw material. If the obligation to engage the tradition in such a way is denied, either by defining and using the just war idea in a way fundamentally inconsistent with the tradition or by explicitly walling that tradition off as not mattering, then I question whether what is going on ought to be called just war reasoning at all. I consider it my obligation to try to talk across such divides, but in the end that effort may be rejected.

Two final points. First, toward the end of his paper Lang characterizes the role of the US Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter in and around the year it was adopted, 1983, as ‘much more of a prophetic one than a policy advocacy one’ (Lang 2009: 212). I know from experience, though, that this was not at all how the process of producing the letter, or the letter itself, was understood in military and public policy circles in the United States. Rather, it was viewed as having clear and immediate policy implications. That the second draft of the letter was published in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, with front-page lead stories in both, testifies to its being understood as bearing seriously on policy. The letter also frequently takes the tone of a policy document. Lang is correct to insist that those with teaching authority in a church have the right to state that church's views; yet when they enter the field of debate over public policy, then that authority gives them no particular precedence over those who are ‘an authority’ but not ‘in authority’. Second, I confess I think Lang oversteps when he accuses me of ‘contesting the authority of scripture’ by ‘claiming that [Jesus] did not understand how his teaching related to a wider political context’, an idea that he traces to Augustine (2009). This wasn't at all Augustine's point in developing the idea that love of neighbor may require violence; nor was it Ramsey's, whose whole idea of just war is based on the idea of love of neighbor; nor was it mine in taking note of this.

I turn now to Serena Sharma's paper, which is exactly on target in finding ‘echoes of pacifism in contemporary just war thought’ and drawing attention to my efforts to combat this. In fact one of the reasons I am so unhappy with much that has been placed under the rubric of ‘just war’ in recent years is that it really is a functional pacifism. Sharma makes use of a term that has appeared in the literature for this pacifist presence under the guise of just war thinking: jus contra bellum. She traces it to the conception of just war advanced by Paul Ramsey, particularly his overwhelming stress on the jus in bello and his comparative neglect of the questions of jus ad bellum. A result not intended by Ramsey was to open the door for opponents of any use of armed force at all to argue that in the age of total war and of nuclear weapons, no war can ever be just because the jus in bello standards cannot be met. Elements of this argument appear in the United States Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral and subsequent statements, as Sharma shows. As for my own argument, I have numerous times pointed out that the ‘presumption against war’ idea on which the Catholic bishops founded their idea of just war is not only at odds with classic just war thinking, but it in fact smuggles a pacifist prescription into just war thinking: for just war tradition, the evil is injustice and the use of force is a possible remedy, whereas for the US Catholic bishops, the evil is the use of military force itself. But more radical versions of the pacifist takeover of just war thinking can be found than the example of the US Catholic bishops. And indeed, Ramsey himself, rather early on, wrote decidedly strong refutations of this reading of the implications of his thought, perhaps the strongest of which he entitled ‘Can a Pacifist Tell a Just War?’ (Ramsey 1968: Chapter 12). His answer was, in present-day language, NO WAY!

Sharma doesn't think I have gone far enough in opposing this creeping takeover of the just war idea by pacifism. Maybe she is right; I don't know. After all, just as contemporary functional pacifists insist that the just war criterion of last resort means that resort to force cannot be justified because there is always something else that could be done instead, perhaps there is in fact something more I might do. But I think my opposition to making just war over into a form of pacifism has been consistent and clear. I never accepted Ramsey's understanding of the primacy of the jus in bello; indeed (and this is perhaps a rejection of Sharma's argument about my own use of the jus ad bellum/jus in bello distinction near the end of her paper), I know that the jus ad bellum (though not the term) came first, and I definitely regard it as addressing the issues that are morally prior. The fact that pacifists who want to use the jus in bello to undermine it is also wrong, though, because they have dirty hands: there are no conditions ever under which they could accept the justified use of force, and what they want is to find whatever language is convenient to advance their own opposition to the use of armed force for whatever reason. In any case, the creeping influence of pacifism in contemporary just war thinking is a real problem, and Sharma's essay casts important light on it.

Finally I turn to Alex Bellamy's paper. When I began to read it I was almost immediately reminded of the problem of having a scholarly career that extends over several decades: what you say early on may come back to haunt you many years later. Bellamy is deeply unhappy with an argument I first laid out in the Epilogue to my 1975 book and which I briefly repeated in my 1981 book, where I criticized the ‘aggressor-defender’ conception of the right to resort to force in international law, argued for its modification so as to restore justice to the jus ad bellum, and also criticized the United Nations for its role in enforcing the aggressor-defender model. These were early themes in my work, but as stated there they were not major ones; in the 1975 book the pages in question amount to no more than about 5% of the whole book, and the discussion in the 1981 book is an even briefer segment of a longer work. After this I did not discuss the issues involved until almost two decades later, in my 1999 book, and subsequently in some other places, including my 2005 book and several articles. One of these articles (Johnson 2006) appeared in a special issue of JME on humanitarian intervention. That Bellamy doesn't take note of it is a bit odd, since he served as guest editor of that issue and solicited the piece from me. But in any case, the discussions in 1981 and before reflect a different context from the more recent one, and context matters.

The reason I focused so heavily in my earlier work on the aggressor-defender concept as defining the right of resort to military force in international law is that this was central to the international discussion of right to use force in that period. I make this plain in the 1975 book, showing how the aggressor-defender trope was used in United Nations debates regarding the definition of aggression and the international arguments over the legality of Israel's preemptive use of force at the start of the 1967 war. So I reject Bellamy's claim that this is not what the international law jus ad bellum is about. In the context in which I was writing, it most certainly was, as any review of the debates I have mentioned will show. I stand by my position that this takes justice out of the jus ad bellum, because it made everything hinge on first vs. second resort to force, allowing broad latitude in the use of means other than cross-border military force for subversion of a state, but denying effective response if the only such response needed to be cross-border projection of force.

By the time I wrote my 1999 book the context had decisively changed. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and with it the model of conflict that nourished the attention given to outlawing any cross-border uses of armed force. In the mid-1990s this made possible a serious debate over humanitarian intervention to respond to gross violations of fundamental human rights – cross-border uses of force not justified by the aggressor-defender model, and in fact directly opposed to its assumptions. This shift in thinking was nourished by the vigorous growth of international human rights law. In 2001 The Responsibility To Protect (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001) appeared, using (without identifying it) a just war framework to justify actions that override state sovereignty in the name of fundamental justice. In this context, as I saw the matter, the question had shifted: justice was again on the agenda in thinking about resort to armed force, and the pressing questions had to do with who might act in cases of gross violations of fundamental rights, what means might be allowed, and what degree of international approval would be needed. By this time too the United Nations had amassed a woeful history of management of armed force in peacekeeping operations (including the debacle of the ‘sanctuary’ cities in Bosnia and the abdication of the peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time of the genocide), and still (contrary to Bellamy) the Security Council was hamstrung in applying Chapter VII rules by the politics of member states.

Bellamy and I see the world, and the United Nations, very differently. But I think I have been right to raise the question of the responsibility and rights of individual states as opposed to those represented by the United Nations. The reasons are in my books and articles, and I will not rehearse them here, but readers are invited to look at them and reflect on the reasoning I offer there – and the view of international affairs I offer there – by contrast to the one Bellamy sets out in his paper.

Incidentally, I would observe that in the effort to show the UN is not as bad as he thinks I make it, at one point Bellamy provides a list of Security Council authorizations of force that, he argues, didn't simply police the aggressor-defender distinction: Korea, Iraq–Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and on down to East Timor and Afghanistan. Historically minded people may observe that only the case of Korea antedates my 1975 and 1981 books and that the Security Council authorization of the use of force there was possible only because of the temporary absence of the Soviet Union; and as I have pointed out above, the ground had shifted significantly by the time of the other cas es mentioned. My problem with the UN as a vehicle for protection of international justice is that it has not proven able to do what its most enthusiastically positive supporters (and Bellamy seems to be one of these) want to reserve to it alone. The presence of the UN does not negate that the responsibility of individual states is still another matter in its own right, one deserving serious consideration.

A final point: I am genuinely concerned at the ‘mutual antipathy’ Bellamy argues to exist between moral thinkers using just war arguments and international lawyers. Perhaps it is the circles I have moved in, including conferences involving both ethicists and international lawyers from various countries, but I have not found anything like a pervasive ‘mutual antipathy’ in our discussions and relations. Moreover, in my own work I have throughout my professional life sought to emphasize the commonalities and connections between these two modes of discourse, which are both historical and thematic. There are clearly sharp differences between my position and that of those (not only international lawyers) who understand international law as a form of universally binding positive law. Thinking of this, I recalled the Hart–Fuller debates of not many decades ago. My own thinking on the relation of moral valuations and law has been influenced by Lon Fuller and, in the specific arena of international law, Michael Reisman. This leads me to emphasize a conception of international law based in a common-law conception of customary international law. Legal positivists and political realists, each for their own reasons, want there to be a wall between what they do and what those of us engaged in moral discourse do. But I believe I have consistently worked to show that this wall ought not to exist. Happily, I have found that there are many in both law and ethics who agree.

Again, my thanks to all who have given their energy, time, and intellectual efforts to this special issue. I hope this discussion continues and spreads.