The Danger of Perpetual War
This essay reflects on the divergent arguments about limited force made by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Samuel Moyn in their respective monographs. The post But Is It Good Enough? Jus ad Vim and the Danger of Perpetual War appeared first on Ethics & International Affairs.
Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force: A Moral Argument with Contemporary Illustrations, Daniel R. Brunstetter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 304 pp., cloth $100, eBook $99.99.
The war in Ukraine has shocked the world community. Putin’s war of aggression has returned large-scale warfare to Europe, a type of armed conflict that many hoped had become a relic of days past. Despite the return of large-scale war, however, the post-1945 empirical record shows that limited force has been the predominant face of armed conflict. Until relatively recently, just war thinking, the ethical framework that seeks to grapple with the rights and wrongs of armed conflict, hesitated to embrace limited force as a distinct ethical category.
