Michael Walzer on Just War Theory

No government will send young men into battle to kill and be killed without offering some justification for what they are doing, Walzer says.

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• bigthink
• Big Think

[ApocAlypse6275]

"War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."

[iamorganfreeman]

@answerOfstupids "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"

[Treblaine]

@DomeSwag Well the problem with that is treating THE ENTIRE of the Second World War as a single iteration isn't accurate as different states join iteratively.

The Prisoner's dilemma is not so rigid, especially using probability over pure cost.

You could just as easily say there is no real prisoner's dilemma by looking at the way suspects are actually treated by the legal system such as additional evidence and not depending entirely on stool-pigeons.

The lesson of trust remains.

[DomeSwag]

@Treblaine That was my initial thought, but then I thought about the real world. Nazi'd blitz Europe - Nazi's get brutally stalwarted and much of the planet turns against them. Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, Japanese get beaten nearly to non-existence in four years. There is simply more to war than striking first. Perhaps in ideal, economic circumstances where both bodies are precisely equal, and both with the capability to wipe the other out rapidly, then yeah, it's a plausible analogy.

[Treblaine]

@DomeSwag I'd say there is: the reward is Peace the risk is WAR!

Say Freedonia and Freeland dispute over something like resources:

1-they trust and cooperate, do OK sharing finite resources.

2--Freedonia betrays Freeland in a sudden attack, an easy victory for Freedonia with spoils of war and the WORST fate for Freeland

3--Both Freedonia and Freeland suspect each other and go to war, long war of attrition, both suffer worse than cooperating but neither as badly as Freeland in option 2.

[DomeSwag]

@Treblaine Not exactly, no. There is no simple risk/reward paradigm to war, as there is in a prisoner's dilemma.

[Treblaine]

War is a prisoner's dilemma.

[PeterD2S]

So men aren't civilians?

[ILGAR93]

In eastern traditions, there is more of an objective concept of war that many people from those regions seems to have made peace and even embraced without the promise of eased conscience or dignified manner. There's an idea that there are two kinds of war, war for surviving and war for thriving. And sometimes one's war for thriving is another's war for surviving

[pastandpresent4evR]

I'm not sure I like the logic of a just or unjust war. It is not that wars may be just or unjust (some are/aren't) but that the idea of war is logical. Logic: a>>>>b>>>>c. Under other examples this makes sense but under war if A is the idea of war and C is the justification for war, B is the mechanism of war, which to the individual is always a stopping point, an end, a broken logic.

[JamesMorrisModeling]

War is a tool that those in power use to achieve whatever it is they set out to achieve..propaganda is used to recruit willing participants..

[TheZairae]

He looks like Howard Zinn with a big nose.