War Essays in Political Philosophy by Larry May, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 325 pages.)

Abstract

There is a long-standing set of criteria thoughtful leaders have used to help
determine when engaging in war is the right thing to do. The criteria have
also been long debated, and Larry May’s collection of fifteen original essays
makes an excellent contribution to the discourse. Historical background is
provided by Gregory Reichberg’s “Jus ad Bellum” and Nicholas Rengger’s
“The Jus in Bello in Historical and Philosophical Perspective,” both of
which are astutely concise descriptions of just war philosophical development
from the western perspective. Most just war literature readily available
to western analysts has produced by western thinkers, and international legal
standards on war have been promulgated primarily through western interactions.
But the rich Islamic tradition of just war jurisprudence and philosophy could have been included. The ninth-century scholar al-Shaybani, for
instance, wrote about the rules of war and has been called “the Hugo Grotius
of Islam.”
Al-Farabi, the father of Islamic political philosophy, directly addresses
the justice of war (although significantly the best he will say of any war is
that it is not unjust), and many of his tenth-century principles are consistent
with western thinking; the lack of discrimination between military targets
and civilians is unjust in both traditions, for example. In his Selected
Aphorisms, al-Farabi identifies innocents as illegitimate targets and even
hints that forcibly drafted soldiers might be considered “innocents” when the
war’s cause is unjust, thereby intertwining the ad bellum principle of just
cause with the in bello principle of discrimination (Political Writings:
“Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles Butterworth [Cornell
University Press: 2002]). Thomas Hurka shares al-Farabi’s idea of interdependence.
His superb essay, “Proportionality and Necessity,” poses questions
such as: “How many enemy soldiers can be sacrificed to save one of
our own soldiers’ lives?” According to him, the right number differs according
to the necessity and who is doing the calculating; in other words, jus ad
bellum and jus in bello influence each other ...