Rights, goods, and proportionate war

Abstract

One of the most difficult holdings of the Just War Tradition is the claim that a polity can have a fully sufficient just cause to wage war and yet be morally forbidden to do so. The Just War Tradition's ad bellum proportionality requirement is supposed to capture that fundamental, difficult truth. According to that proportionality requirement, a community may wage war in response to a violation that satisfies the just cause requirement only if the relevant goods achieved by so responding are proportionate to the relevant evils caused thereby. My main aim in this paper is to engage recent work by Thomas Hurka regarding what makes certain goods and evils relevant to a proportionality assessment. A secondary aim is to specify the place of ad bellum proportionality assessments in the Just War Tradition's overall justificatory architecture. As it turns out, an adequate understanding of the justificatory role of ad bellum proportionality assessments helps to delimit what makes certain goods and evils relevant to such assessments.