Hoag, Robert2019-09-252019-09-252009-01-06200619389485http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/171745Ideas, principles, and theories about justified wars take seriously morality's applicability to a perennial and ancient social practice oft extraordinary in magnitude among human endeavors. In war a society organizes its resources and engages myriad, complex activities to resolve conflicts through armed combat, with all the attending death and destruction for people, property, cultures, and the environment. Thinking about justifying wars takes seriously the notion of morally regulating such complex and violent human endeavors. Though the ideas vary over time and place, the notion of moral constraints on war is ancient and global, from ancient Hindu and Chinese texts, to pagan, Christian, and Jewish texts of the ancient West. Ideas about justifying wars all discriminate between morally acceptable and unacceptable wars. Such ideas, then, implicitly deny the pacifists' claims that no war, is, has been, or can be morally justifiable; such ideas reject the political realists' perspective that all wars are amoral, subject either to no norms at all or only to non-moral norms such as states' self-interest; and such ideas disregard the romantic cult of the warrior and many facets of militarism as moral ideal. Ideas about justifying war, then, assume a moral point of view as regulative of a complex, organized, and violent social practice for settling disputes and differences among human beingsengWith permission of the license/copyright holderbusiness ethicsmoralityMethods of ethicsPhilosophical ethicsArticle