ABSTRACT
The majesty and legacy of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars 1 is its distillation of just war principles through immersion in the gritty scenes of war. At play is a dialectic – “a practical casuistry” 2 that moves from case to principle and back again, with cases that both refine the normative principles of just war (“the war convention,” as Walzer calls it 3 ), and test their limits. Though Aristotle is not explicitly enlisted, |Walzer’s method is deeply Aristotelian – to survey the practices and opinions of the many and wise, with the aim of systematizing principles that can guide, though never in any algorithmic way. Walzer’s persistent theme in working through military history, literature, and memoir is that war is not just a scourge with tragic victims of its hell. War must be understood in the terms of moral practice and discourse, with its agents and their activities morally assessed.
