In this talk, I question how war moved from a “noble” image, backed by the “heroic myth” of Just War Theory, to “evil” in modern moral perception. Drawing on Claudia Card’s atrocity paradigm, I talk about the embodied account of evil and apply this framework to the phenomenon of war to expose how the ‘heroic myth’ and ‘jus ad bellum’ rhetoric routinely mask atrocities and amplify the harm caused by war. I then test the Just War Theory against twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflicts, emphasising three flaws of the theory that the applied framework reveals:
(1) jus ad bellum criteria are systematically manipulated by leaders to launder aggression as defence or liberation;
(2) jus in bello norms abstract away from war’s embodied harms and predictably fail amid the on-ground reality of war;
(3) even defensive wars fought for survival inevitably generate evils and thus cannot satisfy the absolute moral structures that Just War Theory demands.
In conclusion, I sketch the ethical and political implications of treating war as an embodiment of evil, including a turn from just-war casuistry toward peace-centred reforms that prioritise alleviating human suffering.
Invited talk