ABSTRACT
Two different agendas characterize Paul Ramsey’s work. The first is the employment of casuistry as a pastoral activity to discriminate between faithful and faithless responses to complex moral predicaments. The second is the preservation of “metaphysics of democracy” for a politically “responsible” social order. Ramsey uses tradition to critique present responses which appear more “relevant” than the just war tradition because they jettison any principles based on past Christian teaching. Ramsey suggests that the way to change practices, which he rightly critiques, is to offer government officials a better criterion for understanding the ethos of the western civilized tradition. “Transformation,” as well as “tradition” and “tragedy,” functioned both as critique and as a constructive position for Ramsey. Transformed political existence, for Ramsey, is too limited because of “tragedy.” If tragedy is made a general ontological structure undergirding political existence, then a general theory of war is warranted.
