War as Embodiment of Evil: Debunking the Heroic Myth

Abstract

This paper examines the moral transformation in the perception of war, tracing how acts once regarded as heroic and noble have come to be viewed as evil. It develops a victim-centred, embodied account of evil, adopting Claudia Card’s atrocity paradigm, and then applies this framework to the phenomenon of war to expose how the ‘heroic myth’ and ‘jus ad bellum’ rhetoric routinely masks atrocities and amplify the harm caused by war. The paper also tests the Just War Theory against twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflicts, emphasising three flaws of the theory that the applied framework reveals: (1) the possibility of a truly just war is fatally undermined by the propensity of leaders to twist just war criteria to serve unjust ends; (2) the abstract principles of just war crumble against on-ground, reality of war; and (3) even defensive wars fought for survival inevitably generate evils and thus cannot satisfy the absolute moral structures that Just War Theory demands.