ABSTRACT
Throughout history, people have gone to wars and sacrificed themselves at the altar of religion, empire, nation or class. Religious and secular leaders know well the importance of adding a veneer of high principle to low ends and murderous campaigns. This is equally evident in Homer’s Iliad, in Thucidides’ chilling description of the Athenian atrocities at Melos and Mytilene, in the chronicles of the Crusades and in the films about the Gulf Wars and Somalia. The ability of kings and generals to present their side’s war as morally justified and their opponents’ as evil, combined with the lack of a moral arbiter who could sift through conflicting rationalisations has made just war doctrine one of the hardest moral mazes. For the warring parties, there is nothing more certain than the morality of their respective causes. For observers, there is nothing more uncertain than the rightness of the combatants’ conflicting moral claims. As Wyndam Lewis put it ‘but what war that was ever fought, was an unjust war, except of course that waged by the enemy’. The wars, tortures, forced migrations and other calculated brutalities that make up so much of history have, for the most part, been carried out by men who earnestly believed that their actions were justified, indeed, demanded by divine will or human righteousness.
