Just War Theory Is Immoral

Review of Robert Emmet Meagher, Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (Cascade Books, 2014), xxi + 161 pgs, paperback.

Much has been written about just war theory in recent years—some of it to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of it to condemn them. Robert Meagher does neither. He weighs just war theory in the balances and finds it wanting.

Meagher is Professor of Humanities at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has “directed and participated in a range of events and programs concerned with healing the spiritual wounds of war in veterans, their families, and their communities.” He also served as an invited commissioner for the National Truth Commission on Conscience in War. He writes extensively, not only on the physical and mental traumas of war but also on what he calls the “moral injuries” of war.

The word “just” has no place in front of the word “war.” There is nothing just about killing for the state. The purpose of just war theory has always been to legitimize war rather than limit it. Meagher has succeeded in taking down and discrediting just war theory and revealing it for the lie that it is. In Killing from the Inside Out, he has laid bare the just war tradition’s deadly legacy.

I have written a great many articles on the moral evils of war, specific wars, and the military. Most of them are collected in my books War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism and War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy. But if you want to read only one book on the morality of World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and just war theory, then don’t read any of my articles or books.

If you read only one book on World War I, read Jack Beatty’s The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began. If you read only one book on World War II, read Ted Grimsrud’s The Good War That Wasn’t — And Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy. If you read only one book on the Vietnam War, read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. And now I can say that if you read only one book on the morality of just war theory, read Robert Meagher’s Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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