Just War Tradition Essay

Majority of the American people don’t know much about The War of 1812. The War of 1812 is often referred as the second war of independence from Britain. The battle of Lundy’s Lane was one of the harshest battles in Canada. (The Battle of Lundy’s Lane) The war of 1812 started from Britain and France attempting to cut off trade to and from America as well impressing their Navy.

War. Is it a necessary injustice? Does it leave us in triumph or with shattered dreams? War can bring brutality and death to many innocent people, but it can also create unity and result in freedom. The repercussions of war rely on war itself.

With all of the problems in our society, war is the most talked about dilemma in our messed up world. War could be both good and bad depending on a person’s view about it. War has some good objectives like erasing injustice and ending tyranny. If you think about it, there are also negative objectives, like how brutal war can be, or all of the innocent lives that are lost. In the book, My Brother Sam is Dead it explains how it may be like during the Revolutionary War, threw the eyes of a boy named Tim.

War is a conflict that has been seen by every human civilization to some extent, and is sure to be seen by those in the future. These hostile situations can be caused by a variety of situations, including land, resources, philosophy, and religion. Though the exact cause and result of each war is different, there are ways to gauge the effectiveness and permissibility of the actions of governments and armed forces during war. This is the premise of Just War Theory. Just War is philosophy of rating a war as ethically just or not, which has three basic requirements along with a scale for comparison.

When talking about war, there are many books with few answers to what war truly is. Barbara Ehrenreich brings forth not only the possibilities towards understanding war but also the passion people from history have had towards it. One key issue she brings to light is humanities love for war, so much so that people would use excuses like holy wars to justify their need to fight in a war. She declares that war is as muddled as the issue of diseases and where diseases came from around 200 years ago. More so than that she even goes further on to state that these rituals that date back to prehistoric times are the cause of human nature during times of war rather than human instinct.

Can an antiquated lens provide an adequate examination and understanding of modern warfare? The theories of Carl von Clausewitz retain remarkable contemporary merit and relevance in explaining the critical elements affecting warfare in the modern era. Carl von Clausewitz’s theories of war endeavor to be comprehendible, comprehensive, and strategic. Clausewitz contends that the conduct of war itself is without doubt very difficult. But the difficulty is not that erudition and great genius are necessary to understand the basic principles of warfare.1 Clausewitz 's 1812 essay, the Principles of War, offers military commanders, with little campaign experience, a comprehendible, comprehensive, and strategic model for attaining victory in battle.

In the essay “A New Moral Compact,” David W. Barno formally uses effective rhetorical techniques to successfully argue that a draft lottery system is essential for the United States’ involvement in armed foreign conflict to subside. The first way Barno creates an effective argument is by his technique of consistently using the literary device of comparison to identify the similar, yet different, nature of the participation in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts to the Vietnam War. Within the first sentence of the essay, Barno informs the reader of the United States entering “its second decade of armed conflict,” which translates into eleven years of continuous strife that the nation has endured throughout Afghanistan and Iraq (15). This specific information is significant as the author later uses it for an effective comparison with the ten-year Vietnam War.

The War of 1812, a conflict that was handles between the United States and Great Britain from 1812-1815. This tragedy event led to around 15,000 American deaths and over 8,000 British and Canadian soldiers. The dispute between America taking on Britain would have a massive impact on all the young live’s in America, which causes the future to change for the country. It is said that the British were the reasons for America to be upset with them. The British were attempting to restrict U.S. trade, the Royal Navy’s impressment of American seamen and Americas’s desire to expand its territory (War of 1812, 2023b).

In the UNSC’s article 51, individual and collective self-defense can be authorized by the UNSC under the framework of collective security. However, genocide is never justifiable in the eyes of the UN. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature between war and genocide is the disproportionally ability of those involved to fight back. Within war there is a certain level of understanding that those engaging in the conflict will have an ability to engage in battle. However, historically in genocides the effected groups have had little to no ability to proportionately fight against their attackers.

Present security environment and conditions for geopolitical relations and conflicts, shows that old postulates of traditional and conventional warfare, are not in function any more. New type of threats brings changes and different opinions in legal, ethical and moral domains of war. In some situations, when war methods are not conventional, under internationally acceptable conditions, key legal documents, such as Chapter of the United Nations, can become insufficient or irrelevanct. This unconventional sphere requires radical changes in existing legislations or completely new world wide acceptable definition of combatant, adversary and war. Framework of war conditions, which we usually call conventional, becomes more blurred and different.

In My Brother Sam is Dead the authors prove that war is futile. War is futile means that war is pointless or, not producing any useful product. One of the points that proves war is futile is it confuses reality with principle. Secondly war creates the youth against the elders, a clash of generations. Lastly the most devastating point that proves war is futile is it tears families apart.

Just War theorists accurately criticize this view on the grounds that evil aggressors exist who seek to kill and dominate the innocent, and that force is often the only effective way to stop them. War is sometimes morally necessary (Brook & Epstein). In the book Faith and Force, we see the co-authors have a debate about many issues and one of them is about Just War Theory. After reading this debate I would have to say that I agree and say that had the better of this debate is Brian Stiltner.

In the excerpt from 1984, George Orwell, a British writer, explains the world in which Winston, guy who hates his government, lives. Orwell explains how anything Winston does can be seen or heard by the government. Orwell uses oxymoron, allusion and suspense to describe what it's like to live in a place with no freedom. Orwell relates the book with history and human nature to make it intriguing and exciting for readers. Orwell uses oxymoron to describe the philosophy and beliefs of the government in 1984.

Just War Tradition in The Gatekeepers Commonly accepted truths about morality and ethics have changed drastically in recent modern history. The explosive rise of moral relativism, hand in hand with post-modernism, has pushed out ideas of absolute Truth, objective morality, virtue ethics, and God-ordained natural order from the vocabulary of academia, education, and society. Under relativism, who is another to tell another what to do? This seems, however, to be a wishful and disastrous task – like urging one to be on time to a party without giving them directions or the time of the party. The task of morality and ethics is to teach people how to do good things individually and in a community.

“If the doctrine of pacifism is justified, then it is justified for everyone-- and those who do not abide by it are morally wrong.” -Unknown As war technology advances and the threat of weapons of mass destruction intensifies, the potential for national pacifism becomes an increasingly relevant and morally imperative inquiry. The dire human consequences of weaponry such as drones and nuclear missiles raises serious ethical concerns about the nature of modern warfare. As the majority of the world’s peoples, religions, and governments hold firm the belief in a universal human right to life, the need to reduce, or even eliminate, warfare and terrorism on a global scale grows more urgent.