3
Secrest and Tamashiro, who looked for correlations between individuals’ beliefs about justice
relating to war and various schools of thought, including just war,
1
provided useful
methodological help for my project, but since they focus on the United States, they do not
address the role potentially played by non-Christian traditions of thinking about war. Although
Christian just war theory has dominated discussion in the West, prominent philosophers of the
Islamic and Hindu traditions have developed parallel (but not identical) systems for defining the
legitimate causes and conducts of war; by including these normative systems in my project I
hope to be able to address the problem of justice in warfare cross-culturally.
Hypotheses
I have three working hypotheses as to how elite attitudes toward war (and the frameworks used
to support those attitudes) vary cross-nationally. There are two sets of dependent variables here:
the various possible frameworks, and their final judgments on the justness of a given war.
Hypothesis 1: Religion and Culture Matter
My first hypothesis is that elites are influenced by just war thinking, therefore their attitudes
toward the just causes and conduct of war will reflect the dominant strains of just war philosophy
in their society.
2
This theory suggests that the just war traditions of various societies are
predictors of differences in attitudes toward war. Presumably, the biggest differences would be
between communities in different cultures, and not between individual elites within a single
culture. Here, the independent variables are knowledge of just war principles, individual
religious background, and the dominant religion of the state. Inspired by the work of Michael
Walzer, Alan Donagan, and others who argue that ordinary people do share a common language
of morality and a set of common moral value regarding war and conflict, the core of this
hypothesis is that just war concepts can be intuitively derived from basic moral tenets. To test
this hypothesis, I looked for various types of religious arguments in the editorials I examined.
Hypothesis 2: History Matters
1
Gregory G. Brunk, Donald Secrest and Howard Tamashiro. Understanding Attitudes About War: Modeling Moral
Judgments. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
2
This hypothesis is strongly dependent on one assumption: that individual adherence to a particular religion or
philosophy is not a requirement; that instead the beliefs of the dominant religious tradition are circulated (sometimes
in secular form) within society.
Convention