 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Good afternoon and welcome to our 12th INS lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. Rural chat field is on travel and can't join us today, but I'm pleased to welcome you on her behalf. We've enjoyed bringing you this series as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been expanded to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family, including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and participants from around the nation. Looking ahead, I invite you to join us on April 5th when I will have the opportunity to speak about robots that fly swim and crawl. Some folks around here call me the Duke of drones and we will take a quick look at the number of robotic and unmanned systems being used both in the military and in civilian applications. Okay, on with the main event. During the presentation that follows, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom, and we'll get to as many of them as we can at the conclusion of the presentation. The topic of war is very much in the news in recent weeks, and warfare has been part of human existence for thousands of years. The aim of our discussions this afternoon is to explore how philosophers and other scholars, thinkers, have thought about the moral dimensions of political violence and our responsibilities and obligations as human beings. Our speaker will discuss some historical examples of just and unjust wars and will reference current events. Professor Pauline Shanks Coran holds a PhD in philosophy from Temple University, specializing in military ethics, just war theory and applied ethics. She also holds a BA in philosophy and international relations from Concordia College and an MA in philosophy from the University of Manitoba. She currently serves as the Stockdale Chair and Professor of Professor of Military Ethics here in Newport on the faculty of the College of Leadership and Ethics. She is a globally recognized expert in the field and has authored numerous books including On Obedience, Contrasting Philosophies for Military, Citizenry and Community, published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in 2020. She was featured contributor for the Strategy Bridge and has published in Clear Defense, The Wave Room, Newsweek, War on the Rocks, Grounded Curiosity, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Just Security and a Welfare of Other Academic Journals. I know of no other scholar better qualified to discuss the issues of just war. Pauline, the podium is yours. Are we on? There we go. Okay. Thank you, John, for that lovely welcome, and thank you all, those of you who are in person and out there in Zoomland, for coming to join us to talk about what I call just war thinking, which is, some people refer to it as just war theory. Some people refer to it as the just war tradition. I use just war thinking because it's not one theory and it's not one tradition. And so what we want to do today is just give you an overview about how philosophers and other scholars have looked at these questions. But I also want to root what we're about to do in a little humility and a little sensitivity to what is going on in the world, what is always going on in the world. But our television sets and our screens have been inundated with the pictures of the reality, including the moral reality of war. And so I want to be sensitive to that. And that's part of what got me into this area of study in the first place. This is something that I've thought about and taught about for over 25 years. And so it's something I take very seriously. And I think like all of you, those pictures that we are seeing on the TV are just heart-rending. So this is part of my response as an academic, as a professor, to think about these kinds of questions. So here you see a rendition of Picasso's famous painting, Guernica, which depicts non-combatant civilian suffering and harm. You also notice there's animals in there, which is one reason that I like this. If you come to my office, I have a poster of this in my office and have had since I started teaching a long time ago. So in just war thinking, and I'm talking predominantly today about what we might term the Western perspective on this, virtually any society that has warriors that has military that engages in warfare, has some kind of discourse about when war is morally justified and how one may act in war. So you're only getting a small slice today. So the core question here is, under what conditions is war morally permissible or justified? So the argument here is not that war is just in an intrinsic sense, that it's an intrinsically good thing that one ought to do. That's not the argument. There have been a few people who have made that argument, but that is not this argument. The question is, under what conditions would we say it is morally permissible or justified, we're saying we are going to allow you to do it, meaning that you are not doing something immoral if you engage in warfare. So the flip side of that is that if war is not morally justified, it's murder. So this question is a very, very serious one. Under what conditions is war morally justified or permissible? Okay, so let's see if I can get this to work. So in thinking about current events, this is some fog on a pathway. I think when we're looking at current events, we're literally and figuratively in the fog of war. So whatever comments I make about current events are provisional, and I'll probably change my mind tomorrow as more evidence comes in. But this is also true about historical events. So I will talk about a few historical events. I'm not a historian. I don't play one on TV. I'm a philosopher, but history and current events can be helpful to illustrate some of my points. Okay, so there are three grand narratives about how one might respond to war. The first is pacifism, which is the view that resort to violence in war or otherwise is never morally justified. Second, just war thinking, which is the one we're going to talk about today. And third is different versions of realism, which depending on the version, generally focus on that we should consider war from the standpoint of state interests, and that perhaps moral categories are either not helpful, irrelevant, or superfluous in thinking about war. So my illustration of that is if you have seen Pirates of the Caribbean, you're familiar with Jack Sparrow, who's the main character, Johnny Depp's character. And at one point, he's having a conversation with another would-be pirate, and he says to this young man, he says, you have to decide what you can do and what you can't do. And Jack Sparrow's character says, I can't bring this ship in to port without help. And so he's using this to say, this is not about what's right or what's wrong. This is about what's possible, what I can do and what I can't do and those limitations. I actually think this is a really good illustration of realism, but my political science colleagues make this agree with me. So I await the rebuttal. Michael Walzer wrote a book called Just and Unjust Wars in 1977 in the aftermath of Vietnam. And he's generally recognized as the dean of just war thinking in the 20th century. And he wants to know, he starts his first chapter by rebutting realism. And his question is, what's the moral world or experience that war creates? So for Walzer, it creates a new moral world, which requires new moral categories. And also, we experience that whether we are involved as combatants or noncombatants as a moral activity, right? So strategy like morality is a language of justification, of giving reasons. And then the second quote is, but the truth is that one of the things most of us want, even in war, is to act or to seem to act morally. And we want that most simply because we know what morality means. So Walzer thinks that there's a moral reality to war and that that's how we experience war, right? And his book has predicated on that. Okay, so we're going to do a little meta moment here. I'm not referring to our friends at what used to be Facebook. But what is just war thinking good for? So there's different views of this. First is, one view might be that it's a deliberative discourse, that it helps us talk about our deliberation process. When we're thinking about war, it helps us deliberate. Another argument is that it's a decision making model, much like our aviators checklist that you go through to decide if you are ready, particularly to resort to force. Another view popularized by my colleague in Britain, Dr. David Wetham, is that it's an account of exceptions. So there are certain times, even though in our society there's a presumption against violence, there are certain times when we say violence is permissible, perhaps used by police force, perhaps in the case of capital punishment, and here in the case of war, right? So normally we say you can engage in violence, but we also give an account of under what conditions we will make exceptions to that rule. Another view is that especially after a war, just war thinking helps to tell us what we should be morally shocked at, and then perhaps what we ought to ask for accountability for or punishment for. Now I'm not going to tell you which of these is correct because there's a lot of debate in the literature about which of these makes most sense if you want to talk about in the Q&A. We can certainly talk about that, but here's, so those are some different views. What I will say is that just war thinking is a kind of discourse that is concerned with the question of when is war a murder and when is it not murder, right? And that's a very, very serious theological and philosophical question. Secondly, the intent of just war thinking is to limit the scope and number of wars that one fights. The idea is that this is going to sanction fewer wars than would be sanctioned otherwise, right? So it's to limit the number and scope of the wars that we do fight. Generally, just war thinking seeks to prevent a greater moral harm. So the reason we can resort to violence is to prevent some other greater moral harm, let's say genocide from occurring, right? So this is a balance of different kinds of harms. It's also, I do think, a common language for engagement and discussion with others, right? So it gives us moral language is often a common language. It gives us concepts that we can engage with others. And so we'll see that as we go through here. And then the last one, and this is really important for what we do at the Naval War College, ethical leadership is not just about your own moral perspectives, but it's about being able to articulate, justify and have conversations with other people, and also to articulate your vision of ethics to the people, especially that you lead. Just war thinking is a mode of ethical reflection and articulation. It asks us to think about when war is justified and to be able to give reasons and justify that to others. So this is what I take to be the point of the discourse, although there's a lot of debate about that. Okay, so there's some conceptual divisions within just war thinking. The first three are traditional ones, usad bellum, which is the resort to force, justice of the war itself, use in bellow, the rules within which you may fight, in other words, how you ought to behave in war, use postbellum is the justice of after the war. So if we are in JMO, we might think of that as war termination questions, right? These are historically three important categories. In about 2006, Michael Walzer, who was mentioned before coined the term usead vim to refer to the justice of actions that fell below the threshold of what we think of as war, which could include drone strikes, cyber activities, information warfare, things like that. And then use antebellum is the justice of preparation or training or education for war, which is a category I won't talk a lot about, but this is something that is of interest at this part of what we do at the war college, right? How do you prepare people in the military and other places to fight wars? Okay, so we're going to do a little historical track, not too much. Usually start around here, although there's just more ideas in Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, and Roman thought, but we're going to start with Augustine, who's one of the church fathers, who's asking the question as Rome is disintegrating, and the church is rising as a political power, not just a theological power. Can members of the church wage war? Can they participate in war? Right? And this is a very serious theological question. And so he formulates the beginning of what we think of as this tradition. And the first question that he asks is what is the end, the telos, the purpose of war, the aim of war? And his argument is it's to restore the peace, which might seem counterintuitive that you're fighting war to restore peace, but he understands peace as justice. So something has happened to break justice. So there's been some kind of violation of justice. The aim of the war is to restore the peace. One has to have proper authority. We can't have anyone waging war. And in Augustine's day, lots of people were waging war. There were all kinds of private armies, popes had their armies, various bishops, and private individuals had their armies. And so he wants to say that you have to have a legitimate authority, which generally means either being the pope or some other kind of political ruler. He argues you need to have just cause, which had to do with justice. So to restore some rights, to protect the innocent, to defend your allies was typically a just cause. And then in Augustine's day, to spread the gospel was a just cause. That one will fall out over time. And then the last piece is that you have to have just intentions. Augustine's the father of the doctrine of original sin. He thinks that human beings are fallen and flawed. And so it's not enough to have a just cause or proper authority. You have to have just intentions in engaging in the war. And you have to fight with just intentions. And so this is the beginning of some use in bellow requirements about how to treat your enemy. Okay, after Augustine and the medieval period, we start to get some conversations about who can fight. So this is a use in bellow piece, right? Who's allowed to fight and who can be targeted in the medieval period. The institution of chivalry is really important. And so a lot of this is is rooted in honor and class issues. But we have early use in bellow restrictions about who can fight and who can be targeted. Typically women, children, elderly males and the infirm are excluded from being targeted and also excluded from fighting. Around the millennium, we have the truce of God and peace of God movements, which take up the issue of what should the role of the church be in waging war. So it was fairly common practice early in the medieval period for members of the church for clergy to be combatants to be engaging in war. But one of the things that happens is then churches and monasteries are getting looted and their clergy are being attacked. And so eventually we evolve this idea that, well, the members of the church especially clergy should not be participants in war and they should have a protected status as should churches. And if you've read my favorite Shakespeare play, Henry V, you know that Henry executes several of his soldiers for pelagina church, right? So after this, that that will be considered a war crime. The question about who the rules apply to is a bit complicated because during this time period, both in church, lingerie, the idea was that this applied to other members of your class or other Christians. It did not apply if you were fighting in conflicts against non Christians, which will change eventually. The other end of the medieval period, we have another church father St. Thomas Aquinas, who basically says, yeah, when Augustine said, that sounds good. Except that he argues that the crusades don't count can't count as a just cause. So that starts to fall out. And then he's also known for the doctrine of double effect, which raises the question, are you responsible for those things that happen as a foreseeable side effect of what you do or only for those things that you intend, right? So you are targeting munitions dump. It's next door to high school, or some residential school where there are children. And you can foresee that children will probably be harmed. Are you responsible or really responsible for those deaths or that harm or only for what you intend, which is blowing up the munitions dump, right? Augustine or Aquinas says you're responsible for those things you you intend, not for the foreseeable side effects provided that you fulfill four criteria, which I won't go into here. We can talk about that. But basically you have to it can't be a bad end in itself, and you have to take provisions to mitigate the harm, right? And a lot of our discussions about collateral damage assessments and how we make those judgments are descended from this discussion. Okay, in the modern period, so 15th, 16th century, up to this point, philosophy and theology have sort of been intertwined with the the Reformation and the Enlightenment, they come to be pulled apart. And we start to see just worth thinking split into a religious tradition or religious traditions and now secular traditions. And these four gentlemen here represent some figures from the the modern secular tradition. So Grosius, the father of international laws, Suarez, he started to argue that just war principles should apply to native peoples, especially as Spain and Portugal are engaging in conflicts with native peoples, indigenous peoples in in North and South America. And that does not make Suarez a popular dude. Vittoria, who asked the question, should you be disobedient to your political authority? If you think the war you're being asked to fight is unjust. And also articulates what we now call the moral equality of combatants, which is the idea that combatants on a variety of sides fight for their governments in good faith. And on the battlefield are to be considered moral equals in the sense that they're equally liable to be targeted and entitled to equal POW protections and things like that. The moral equality of combatants in the late 20th century, early 21st century comes under a lot of fire from a group of people called the revisionists. Right, so that that one becomes controversial. And then Vitell, who's interested in preventative and civil war. Right, so these are sort of this little sampling of what's going on in the modern period. Okay, so just briefly, and we are going fast. You said, Bellum, the resort to force here are the criteria. There are some people who argue that just intention should still be a criteria and other people who say that just intention has been sorted out in other ways. But just cause, proper authority, proportionality of ends, which is the good to be achieved has to outweigh the carnage you have to inflict in order to achieve that end. Last resort, you have to do other stuff first. Reasonable chance of success can't be a suicide mission. You have to have some reasonable sense that you can succeed. And then public declaration because war is a public act. And for some people, public declaration also means you have to put people on notice with why you're going to war. So these are the typical criteria. Proper authority has been uncontroversial really until the 1990s when there's a discussion about whether or not states in wars that are not wars of self-defense have the right to decide to go to war. And then, of course, just cause typically is defensive, right? Typically has to be defensive or defensive allies. But in the 20th century, scholars raised the question about whether genocide or ethnic cleansing, humanitarian interventions to stop those could count as a just cause. Lots of controversy about that. So these are the resort to force issues. So you could take your favorite conflict, including the one that we're talking about in our classes in the coffee shops and run it through and think about each of these criteria and ask yourself, do we think that Vladimir Putin has fulfilled these criteria? Do we think that George W. Bush in launching the 2003 Iraq intervention fulfilled these or not? Right? One question is how many of them my undergraduates always asked, how many of them do you have to have? And are they in any kind of rank order? They are in rank order, just cause is considered the most important. But there's a debate about how many of them you have to have. Do you have to have all of them? Okay. So that's you said, Belem. You said Bello is the conduct within the war. There's generally two major principles, proportionality of means. So you have to use proportional force. You cannot use any weapons or tactics that inflict suffering that is unnecessary to achieve the military at because just war thinking justifies only that force necessary to achieve the military objective. Any force above and beyond that is unnecessary suffering and will also inhibit the restoration of the peace at the end of the conflict. So proportionality of means rules out certain kinds of weapons, typically biological, chemical and nuclear, but other kinds of things have been ruled out as well. The second principle is principle of discrimination in legal theory. This is called the principle of distinction. And this is the idea that you have to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. And you notice I use those terms in that military and civilian because not all members of the military are combatants, not all civilians are noncombatants. But you have to discriminate between the two and you are entitled only to target combatants and noncombatants are immune from being targeted, not just immune from being killed, they're immune from being targeted or being treated as Michael Walser says as an object of war. So if you target noncombatants with nonlethal weapons, that is still a violation of the principle of discrimination. Okay, and then here is this idea of the moral equality of soldiers that the combatants on both sides are considered moral equals in the sense that they can be targeted and they are entitled to certain basic treatment. These two principles become the moral logic for the development of the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law in really in the 20th century, although the Lieber Code is in the 19th century. But these are the two principles. USADVIM, which I mentioned is a more recent sort of innovation since 2006, has two principles. And USADVIM could include kinetic and nonkinetic actions, but anything below the threshold of what we would think of as conventional or war at all. The first criteria is last resort. And then the second criteria is risk of escalation. And so there's a question in the literature about shouldn't the USADVIM criteria be more permissive? Because you're not actually resorting to war, we still need some limitations, but this should be more permissive than USADVIM and USINVIM. Okay, so when we get to the 20th century, as I said, Michael Walzer sort of, at least on the secular side of the house, reinvigorates discussion about just war, thinking there'd always been a robust discussion of especially within the Roman Catholic Church. But I've sorted the different views sort of into first, second, and then revisionist generations. Although revisionist generations were really on the second generation of revisionists at this point. But Walzer, Paul Ramsey, who's a Protestant theologian, James Turner Johnson, who is a religious studies person, council of bishops, they're all first generation, trying to come to terms with the legacy of Vietnam. The second generation, Michael Arendt, who's Canadian, Michael Gross is an Israeli scholar, and then John Elstain are sort of they agree, largely with the first generation, they're expanding the work and deepening it in some ways. And then the revisionists, who were centered at Oxford, largely, are critical of especially the first generation. So they don't they don't like Walzer. They take issue with the moral quality of combatants. They also take issue with the idea that war is a collective enterprise. They argue that we should understand war as different cases of individual self defense. Right. They also deny the separation of use add Belem and use in Bellow. So typically, the idea and this shows up in Henry the fifth of use add Belem the resort to force, that's the responsibility of the political leaders to decide when and whether to go to war, use in Bellow is the responsibility of the soldiers. Right. So the soldiers ought not to be held responsible if their political authorities are waging an unjust war if they are fighting in good faith and following orders and following the rules of war. Right. The revisionists take issue with this and reject that separation and say each individual soldier, each individual citizen is responsible to think about whether or not their nation is fighting a just war. In other words, whether or not that use add Belem list has been fulfilled or not. Okay. Okay. So these are just a couple of things to highlight about what's going on right now. So you just gotten a fast, fast overview. I teach an entire elective on this. And that's also too fast. So if you need a moment to catch your breath, that's fine. But these are some of the contemporary issues that we're talking about right now. Number one on the list is moral injury. What is the effect of warfare on those who have to fight it and those who experience it? So both for combatants and noncombatants, moral injury is not the same as PTSD has some overlaps. And moral injury is not just sort of feeling bad about something you did in war. It is actually an injury to your moral capacity. Right. Jonathan Shea wrote a book called Achilles in Vietnam where he coins the term he wrote that book in 1991. So the moral injury is said by some to be the signature wound of the forever wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. So there's a lot of discussion about just war thinking and how we could use just war thinking. First of all, to ensure that we're not engaged in unjust wars and also potentially to protect people from moral injury or help them figure out how to process it by engaging the moral realities of war. There's also a debate I just referenced between Walzer and the revisionist about whether war is an individual activity or a collective activity and whether the whether the responsibility in war is an individual responsibility, a collective responsibility or some of both. Right. So there's this argument about agency. The revisionist would argue that collectives cannot have responsibility. Only individuals have responsibility. Right. So if you want to think about this in another domain, let's think about my favorite business ethics example, Enron. Enron did some naughty things. Is it Enron the company that's responsible for those or is it the individuals who make up the company like the CEO Ken Lay and so on? Right. That's the issue here when it comes to both moral and legal responsibility in war. Lots of issues about accountability. We've seen moves by various international tribunals to move to legal actions against Putin for war crimes. I'll be really interested to see what happens as a result of that and whether that is something that would deter other people from waging an unjust war. So we have an accountability issue. What happens if a state decides to wage an unjust war? What can you do about it? Right. Both morally and legally speaking. And then the last piece here is really a question about war is one of those human enterprises where we try to make meaning. So if you think about war literature, whether it's Siegfried Sassoon's poems or The Iliad or Henry V or blogs that were written during Iraq and Afghanistan, there's a whole tradition obviously of war literature. Most of that war literature is an attempt to come to terms with war, but especially the moral aspects of war. The ways in which morality really does enter into how people see war and how people experience war. And so part of just war thinking is this question about can just war thinking help us understand and make meaning in that regard? Can it help us sort those things out? One side of that is can it help us make meaning when there's been an unjust war? Right? Can it help us sort through why a war is unjust? Now we'd rather do that I think before we wage the war and not wage the war in the first place, but is there also a meaning making process that could happen if an unjust war is waged? And now people are experiencing moral injury. We have to come to terms with the legacy of that war. I would submit that Walzer's book, which he writes in the aftermath of Vietnam, is an attempt to come to terms with the moral reality of that war and figure out morally what happened. And how at least for the United States, Australia, and some other parties who were involved in Vietnam, how did we get here and what should we make of this? How should we feel about this? How should we think about this? And I think this is something that we're seeing with Iraq and Afghanistan, both through the literature of people who have fought there, but also in thinking about the discourse about whether those wars were just in the first place where they fought justly. Did we think about use post-bellum? So one of the issues with the 2003 Iraq intervention, some scholars argue like Brian Aranda argues that the Bush administration did not pay enough attention to use post-bellum because they thought they wouldn't have to sort it out. They thought the regime would fall, be greeted as liberators, and the Iraqis would sort things out. So these are all ways in which we might use just more thinking to help us sort out the moral meaning of war. Now, I will just say before I open it up to questions that that meaning-making of war has become particularly poignant in the last few weeks. So when the invasion was launched, I was in a hotel room in Cincinnati at a conference and turned on CNN and did some cursing, which I'm not proud of, but I asked forgiveness about what was going on. The invasion had been launched and I was also transported back many, many years to the first Gulf War when I was a college student working the night shift watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN as that invasion was, as that war was beginning. So I think even as a scholar who studies these things, watching things on TV every day, seeing just horrible, horrible footage, trying to explain this to my teenagers. In fact, when I got to the hotel room, I only turned on CNN because my oldest son who lives in Washington had called me and said, are you watching this? Can you explain it to me, mom? And I was like, no, actually I can't. Right. So I think this is also as scholars, we're trying to make sense of this. We're trying to figure out what does this mean in moral terms. Okay. I think I will stop there so that we can have time for hopefully lots of questions and discussion. Invite some discussion and questions. Hey, are there questions here? Hi, Jason Leto, United States Navy. I got a softball for you. Thank you, Jason. So earlier in your talk, you talked about the point of just war theories to prevent greater moral and other harms. Since the onset of Russia's war with Ukraine, the Ukrainian government has repeatedly asked for a no fly zone, or as her people call it, close the skies. The US response has been a definite refusal for enacting a no fly zone. The reason is the risk of pulling the US and its allies into a larger conflict. So recognizing that your position does not necessarily reflect the views of the Naval War College. In reference to just war theory, is the refusal of establishing a no fly zone a justified response considering the potential for greater number of lives loss, which would be a greater harm or unjustified considering the reality today of indiscriminate and unjust killings of civilians in Ukraine. Okay, so the question would be, do we think that the no fly zone in fact would stop the indiscriminate killing, right? Because first of all, if it won't, then it is certainly is in no way going to be worth the risk, right? So the first question we have to ask is, how likely is it to stop the indiscriminate killing? And then we have to weigh that against the risk of escalation of a wider war, since we would almost certainly be putting NATO pilots in a position where they're going to have to attack Russian positions or be in conflict with Russia, which changes the nature of the conflict, right? So based on the evidence that I have seen, I'm not convinced that the no fly zone in fact would do what its proponents say that it would do. And it also seems that there are alternatives, perhaps other sorts of kinetic options that don't carry the same risk of escalation, but might have a better outcome in terms of, I don't think we can eliminate the indiscriminate killing, but the question is, could you reduce it, right? So that's my sense. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I'm skeptical that a no fly zone would actually have the effect that its proponents think it would have. And I think that is in part because of the way in which some of the indiscriminate killings are our shells, right, of different kinds of munitions and weapons, but some of it is just like boots on the ground going through a town and rounding up people like food school style, and a no fly zone is not going to stop that, right? So and I take that question seriously as someone who did their dissertation on the lie and atrocities, right? But I don't think that's the answer. Are there answers? Sure. But I do think that question about the risk of escalation back to the USADVM piece is an important question, right? But in all of these criteria, we have to think about how would we assess each of these criteria, right? These are, especially in the case of USADVM, you are speculating about what you think the future is going to be like. And human beings are notoriously bad at making those kinds of judgments. So I think just war theory also, just war thinking also requires a lot of humility about how are we making these judgments, right? And what are we counting as evidence? Because we tend to be really optimistic at the beginning of war. Of course, there's a reasonable chance of success. The American revolutionists would say, of course, no problem. We got it, right? But is that a really the correct judgment? So great question. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions? Other questions in the house, as they say. Bill, you go first and then we'll go through rank. So there's a number of questions that popped to mind. First one is something that I don't know much about. So moral injury, the tradition, is it you heal from that? Or is it moral injury permanent? The one I'm more interested in, it has to do with accountability and the impact of accountability on ending wars. So I've been involved in a number of wars and a couple of times there's been war crimes accused of the opponent that potentially could hinder the ending of the war. So actually, the process itself could incur more injuries. So what's the thought in terms of the timing of accountability? Okay. I think of karate and melodic impact that I had in Bosnia, but I know there's other examples. And finally, a third question, and you can pick which ones you want to answer, is the role of practitioners in the development of just war theory? Has there been? Yeah, that's a great question. On the first, I would commend you to Jonathan Shae's work. It's complicated, I will say, whether you can heal from moral injury. In my scholarship, I'm more interested in can you prevent it or mitigate it, right? Because I think it's better to do so at the other end. The second question about accountability, I think is an interesting one. And the question becomes at what point should you engage in those processes? And should you have trials? Should you have something like a truth and reconciliation kind of commission? Like what kinds of processes should you have that will? And that's all part of the use postbellum discussion about what is going to facilitate the restoration of the piece. I don't have any good answers to that. But I think that that's something that someone like Brian Arendt, who does a lot of work on use postbellum is really interested in. He's done some work with regard to Iraq. And so I think though, but those are very difficult questions about how do you end the war? What kind of accountability, if any, is necessary? And there is this sort of question about whether any of those war crimes trials or any accountability mechanisms would prevent other people from waging unjust wars, right? So the question about keeping people from waging unjust wars is a difficult one. So I really want to address your last one about the practitioner thing. Historically, just war thinking has been the province of theologians and philosophers and scholars. But one of the points that Michael Walzer makes, he uses historical case studies in his book is that he wanted to take seriously the experience of those who had fought, the moral experience of those who had fought and didn't want this to be a thought experiment. The revisionists are very fond of these abstract thought experiments, like taking time on and stuff like that. And that just makes Walzer crazy. And I'm sympathetic to that position. So I actually think there is an important role. And we do have people in the tradition, especially the contemporary tradition, who are veterans, who are people who have fought. In fact, that second generation of revisionists and others, we have a whole generation coming up behind McMahon and Fro, who are vets who then went back to school, got philosophy or theology degrees and now are writing about this stuff out of their experiences, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. And some of them are writing wonderful books. One example in Fishback, a really wonderful guy, but he was also suffering from moral injury and died recently. So I think it's a sort of a mixed process. But I think there is a really, really important role for practitioners, because I haven't been to war. I can read about it, but there is something for the philosophical conversation in talking to people. I try to talk to people who've been there. I try to take in those experiences, but I can only go far, only go so far. And I think that has been an issue with just war thinking and sort of applied ethics more generally. Are you talking to the people who've been there, done that? And can you have a common language? So this then Ian was a whistleblower in Iraq around detainee abuse. But because he was trained in just war theory, we could communicate about the issues that he saw in a common language. So I think there's value to having a theoretical apparatus, but I think I agree with Walzer that it always has to be informed by the real lived experience. That's also why when I teach this stuff, I'm very fond of using war literature, because I think that brings different voices in as well. So great questions, Tim. Okay. Thank you, Pauline for this great talk. My name is Tim Schultz. I'm the Associate Dean of academics. This concept of you said VIM or looking at something that's not quite war brings up this question of what is war? How do we define it, particularly in the modern era? And also, it raises the issue of things like economic sanctions and cyber attack, things that in a sense, some of them might be very discriminant, very tightly targeted. But typically, an economic sanction or cyber attack has, it's a broader weapon. It is indiscriminate. So I was wondering if you could comment on that, those types of efforts to compel or coerce just beneath the threshold of war. Yeah. So the question is, should you use that VIM actions be subject to a more permissive moral criteria? So normally, use and bellow for economic sanctions, we would say they have to be proportional and they have to be discriminant. They have to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants or political leaders and other people. And they have to be proportional, right? But the proponents of the use add VIM framework say, well, since this is not war, and of course, we could have a good conversation about what is war. We still want to have restrictions, but they need to be permissive, more permissive, because the harms involved are of a lower threshold, right? Because they're less likely to inflict less harm than war. We can be more permissive, which is why they go after last resort and then the risk of escalation. I think risk of escalation is particularly important in the case of cyber questions, right? I think that's probably less so in the discussion of sanctions. It was a long-standing discussion since the 1970s about whether or not sanctions ought to be consonant with just war thinking, right? Generally, they're not. Generally, they're not proportionate and not discriminant, right? Now, some of the sanctions maybe we're seeing now, or they're sort of more what we call targeted sanctions, you know, are better in that way. But yeah, absolutely. So there's a debate about that. And some people think, no, we don't even need a new framework, right? We should just stick with the use and bellow criteria from just war theory or just war thinking. But other people say, well, no, we have these activities, whether it's drone strikes, economic sanctions, cyber activities, information war, they should be subject to something, but it should be more permissive. Here, do you have any questions from Zoom? We do. Are there major differences between the Western and other intellectual traditions when it comes to justification for war, conduct of war, and other considerations in just war thinking? There's less, there's less difference on the use in bellow and many societies who have some kind of warrior class have pretty similar kinds of rules about things, especially around the protection of non-combatants, right? But also this equality of combatants, especially in warrior societies is taken really seriously. So where you're going to find more differences are in the use add bellow, right? Especially about what counts as just cause. So, you know, and even if they use the language of justice or something like a language of justice, for example, that the Chinese are very focused in their just war discourse about the idea of harmony, right? And that that is an important notion for them, right? And that that's part of, that's how we have to think about just cause, right? Other communities, especially Indigenous communities might think of the preservation of the community as an important just cause, even if the community isn't directly threatened, right? So you're going to see some differences on the use add bellow side less on the use in bellow. There's actually quite a bit of overlap. Now, whether a particular government, so whether Putin is following what we might think of as just more thinking from a Russian perspective is an entirely different question, right? So just because a particular leader does something or justifies something, doesn't follow that's necessarily consonant with their philosophical tradition or religious traditions around thinking about things. But there's a lot less differences than one might think. I think that tends to be overblown. That said, the devil's in the details, right? Other questions as we have, we have like four minutes. Well, another question came in. How do you think that the UN is viewing this war and viewing it from the calculus of just war theory? How is the UN viewing it? Yeah, if just war theory is a calculus of a morally right or wrong war, would you know how this perspective is used at global level organizations like the UN? Yeah, so I think there's an interesting question about to what degree global organizations or international law line up with just war thinking. So when it comes to things like the Geneva and Haig convention, the law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, we have, like I said, it's the moral logic for the development of those institutions. I'm not convinced that we have the same thing say with the UN, right? There are certain just war principles that the UN holds to like the idea that the only just cause that an individual state can go to war for is defensive. Any other reason has it supposed to be approved by the UN? The commitment to intervention in the case of genocide, right, is arguably rooted in just war thinking. So I think there are certain elements, especially of the, you know, the declarations of human rights and those kinds of things of the documents, the philosophical underpinnings of the UN that reflect just war thinking. I'm not sure that the structural aspects of the UN, the way in which the UN functions is necessarily consonant, although the just war thinking tended to assume states, some kind of state structure intended to assume some kind of state sovereignty. That's under some revision now, but I think many, you know, many just war perspectives start with the assumption that we're dealing with nation states, right? And so there is a, there is somewhat of a tension between that and say the UN having a more robust ability to say deal with what Vladimir Putin is doing or what was happening in Bosnia or what was happening and we saw the case of Rwanda where there were calls for intervention that were resisted, right? So I think, I think it's sort of a mixed, I think it's a mixed bag there, which does raise, and I'll just say in closing, I think there's a fair question about the legacy of just war thinking. My realist friends who are many would say, listen, this is all really sweet, Aline, and you're a really nice person, but this is not the way things work, right? War is about violence and state interest and Putin is providing us a really good example of real politic right now. So isn't just war thinking sort of out of date? And I would say with all due respect to my realist friends, no. And I think that part of the shock of the invasion and now of the pictures that were seen, it speaks to something, right? There is a response, there is some kind of sense that something is horribly wrong, is morally wrong, right? And we have to sort of sort through that, right? That said, there are books that, including realist ethics by a good friend of mine that argue that there's more overlap between realism and just war thinking than we might think. So I'll just sort of leave you with that conundrum. But thank you for your questions. Thank you for coming and dialing in. Thank you very much, Pauline. Well, that concludes tonight's event. Again, we invite you back on April 5th when I'll talk about what our future robot overlords may have in mind for us. So come back and see us on the 5th. Thank you. Good night.