Abstract

As a reaction to lingering and seemingly irreconcilable moral and political differences over war, this dissertation is an attempt to further the effort envisioned in the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg: "To conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity." ;Much of the problem has been due not only to confusion as to the nature of war and morality but to diverse, conflicting moralities. Seeing these matters in perspective has called for delving into a rather wide range of background subjects such as the bases, types, and decision-methods of morality, the nature of the state, the causes and proposed cures of war, the Just War Theory, and the Laws of War. ;There are essentially two broad forms of morality: public, deriving largely from the evolutionary struggle to foster the survival and preeminence of a society, and private, deriving mainly from a desire to make life and the world more as one wants. Both pertain to war and are often in conflict--even in the same individual. Of the various moralities--such as international and religious--that most applicable to war and reconcilable with morality is what is here called national-state morality. This is a combination of nationalism, patriotism, and good citizenship. ;There will always be conflicting groups, because fellow-feeling has limits. There will also be war between large groups at least beyond our lifetimes, primarily because there are vital goods that cannot adequately be shared or negotiated, such as power. ;Some evil inheres in virtually every decision of war, so that what is moral is usually merely a lesser evil. In making a moral decision, one primarily balances the principles of discrimination and proportionality against that of military necessity. What is militarily necessary largely if not ultimately depends on the political objective. Thus does national-state morality overshadow both what must be done from a military standpoint and what should be done from a moral one. The two are sometimes but not always irreconcilable. The moral citizen cannot avoid war nor have an easy conscience about it. War is a tragic evil