There has been a recent revival of interest in the just‐war tradition. But can a medieval theory help us answer twenty‐first‐century security concerns? The book explores how just‐war thinking needs to be developed to provide such guidance. Part One examines challenges to just‐war thinking, including those posed by moral scepticism and relativism. It explores the nature and grounds of moral reasoning; the relation between public and private morality; and how just‐war teaching needs to be refashioned to provide practical guidance not just to politicians and generals but to ordinary service peopl ... More

There has been a recent revival of interest in the just‐war tradition. But can a medieval theory help us answer twenty‐first‐century security concerns? The book explores how just‐war thinking needs to be developed to provide such guidance. Part One examines challenges to just‐war thinking, including those posed by moral scepticism and relativism. It explores the nature and grounds of moral reasoning; the relation between public and private morality; and how just‐war teaching needs to be refashioned to provide practical guidance not just to politicians and generals but to ordinary service people. The complexity and difficulty of moral decision‐making require a new ethical approach—characterized as virtuous consequentialism—that recognizes the importance of both the internal quality and the external effects of agency; and of the moral principles and virtues needed to enact them. Virtuous consequentialism restores to the virtues an importance lost in recent just‐war thinking. Just‐war teaching, so reinforced, is applied in Part Two to address key contemporary security challenges, including the changing nature of war, military pre‐emption and torture, the morality of the Iraq War, and humanitarian intervention. The book concludes that, with the ending of the strategic certainties of the cold war, the need for moral clarity over when, where, and how to start, conduct, and conclude war has never been greater. The just‐war tradition provides not only a robust but also an indispensable guide for addressing the security challenges of the twenty‐first century.