ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to specify what it is about the Just War Tradition (JWT), and what it is about human beings, that makes this temptation so alluring. It begins the author's explication of the JWT by discussing what he take to be one of the main temptations elicited in ordinary human beings by their participation in violent communal conflict, namely, that people tend to foreshorten the scope of moral concern so that it extends only to communal insiders. The chapter reflects on what appears to be one troubling manifestation of the JWTs tendency to amplify the destructiveness of war. The core logic of the JWT provides its adherents with a justificatory procedure that can legitimate carnage even on the scope that occurred during the American Civil War. The JWT is only one among many competing conceptions of the morality of war from which people might choose. There are many others large variety of militarisms, positivisms, pacifisms, realisms, and so on.
