Looking Inward Together: Just War Thinking and Our Shared Moral Emotions

Ethics and International Affairs 31 (4):441-451 (2017)
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Abstract

Just war thinking serves a social and psychological role that international law cannot fill. Law is dispassionate and objective, while just war thinking accounts for emotions and the situatedness of individuals. While law works on us externally, making us accountable to certain people and institutions, just war thinking affects us internally, making us accountable to ourselves. Psychologically, an external focus leads to feelings of shame, while an inward focus generates feelings of guilt. Philosophers have long recognized the importance of these two moral emotions. Recently, psychologists have found that feelings of guilt are linked to positive social outcomes, such as the desire for reconciliation and reparation, while shame generates anger and hostility. Just war thinking, as an inward-looking tradition, has a special relationship with guilt. By focusing on moral emotions, just war thinking can move beyond the law in four ways, by developing an ethic of accountability, by providing a foundation for addressing moral injury, by providing a common language for discussing the costs of war, and for identifying ethical problems in radically new contexts.

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Valerie Ona Morkevicius
Colgate University

Citations of this work

Methodology for studying the problem of war and peace in personal religious beliefs.Z. V. Shwed - 2018 - Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research 13:87-99.
Over ‘caritas’ en de belofte van de ‘juiste intentie’.Désirée Verweij - 2019 - Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 111 (1):29-44.
What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war.Daniel R. Brunstetter - 2022 - Journal of International Political Theory 18 (3):355-374.

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