ABSTRACT
Once an initial judgment has been made that a war is just, there is a tendency to stop thinking, to assume then that everything done on behalf of victory is morally acceptable. The beneficent nature of a government is assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages. It remains to be seen how many people in our time will make that journey from war to nonviolent action against war. It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war. It becomes difficult to sustain the claim that a war is just when both sides commit atrocities, unless one wants to argue that their atrocities are worse than ours. In the 400 years following the era of Machiavelli and More, making war more humane became the preoccupation of certain liberal realists. Hugo Grotius, writing a century after More, proposed laws to govern the waging of war.
