War is its Own Justification

The authors deal with the morality of war in American culture. They argue that a war ethics that was characteristic of the Cold War has given way to a warrior ethics as it has developed in post-Vietnam America, in print media, popular sentiment, and film. According to this warrior ethics, the citizenry's support for soldiers, regardless of the justice of war, is understood to create social solidarity. Wars are easily justified because, at bottom, war is understood to be its own justification. It unites a country. This popular conception of war both props up more high-minded, political rationales for war and undermines traditional just war ethics. The article uses the war in Iraq as a case study. It analyzes the Bush administration's defense of the war alongside similar accounts of the just war theory given by Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel."As a moral problem, war is ultimately a problem of policy, and therefore a problem of social morality." John Courtney Murray

Economic Justice · Just war theory · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Spanish Civil War · Vietnam War · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Violence and the Sacred

  Open Access•René Girard, Aisha Karim et al.•On Violence•1979

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• The Great War and Modern Memory

  Paul Fussell•The SHAFR Guide Online•2017

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• Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film

  Open Access•John Hellmann•American Quarterly•1982

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