3
Introduction
Is it ethical for the US military to kill an avowed terrorist? What if the likely
“collateral damage” included his wife and children? The events of September 11 and the
resulting War on Terror happened suddenly, shattering old presuppositions and giving us
little time to thoughtfully erect new paradigms in their place. Thus, many feel that the
United States presently lacks a framework for the ethical and practical resort to force.
This may be in part because the scholarly and religious communities, for partisan or
ideological reasons, tend to presume against the use of state power and military force.
Thus, discussion within those quarters is predictable and often lacks creativity. On the
other hand, the policy-making community has had to react to a rapidly changing world
since the early 1990s and therefore tends to rely on ethical categories developed in the
periods of de-colonization and atomic energy that immediately followed the second
World War.
Some scholars have turned to traditional Just War doctrine for guidance. For a
thousand years Just War theory has been used to limit and critique the decision to go to
war and the methods employed upon the battlefield. Unfortunately, however, at the
beginning of the twenty-first century most writing on Just War and the contemporary War
on Terror is flawed for at least two reasons. First, those who take Just War seriously,
such as scholars operating from a religious worldview, forget the eminent practicality of
Just War tenets. Second, proponents of Just War usually fail to reflect on how modern
warfare has changed since the time of Augustine.
This paper calls for a general rethinking of the balance between ethics and
pragmatics in modern warfare and considers how twenty-first century wars differ from the
Convention