Just War Theory Today: Experience Required?

Abstract

Contemporary just war theory is increasingly remote from the grounded realities of warfare. This is problematic because it diminishes the utility of just war theory as an action-guiding framework. This article asks how just war theorists can better incorporate the lived experience of war into their analysis. The argument it develops places war writing front and center. Drawing inspiration from Martha Nussbaum’s argument that moral philosophers should use the literary works of writers such as Henry James to fill out and work through their own positions, it proposes that just war theorists should engage war memoirs in a similar manner. This argument is substantiated via a close reading of Frank Richards’s World War I memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die. By incorporating experience into their ethical frame, this article concludes, just war theorists will be better able to account for the ambiguity and messiness of combat—ambiguity and messiness that simply fall out of the frame when the ethical questions that war generates are examined from a detached perspective.