Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello: Neo-Orthodoxy in the Morality of War
Abstract
The difference between jus ad bellum and jus in bello has been a central point of the evaluation of the morality and the legality of war in international law. Over the past few decades, though, revisionist just war theorists have challenged this conservative paradigm, arguing that there is a lack of distinction between the justice of the recourse to war and the justice of the actions in war. The present paper focuses on the neo-orthodox approach to these issues by critically reviewing two works by Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman on the War by Agreement and by Arthur Ripstein on Kant and the Law of War. The work aims to evaluate the way in which these works justify the traditional convention of war and the legitimacy of laws of war to be morally independent. The paper will examine their contractarian and Kantian foundations through the qualitative doctrinal and comparative methodology, addressing the problem of national defense, the moral equality of combatants, and the Issue of the connection between morality and positive law. The results indicate that these two authors manage to reestablish the unique morality of war and present varied theoretical defenses, which increase the traditional just war template against the revisionist arguments.
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