The Just War
 | A Seminar with Professor Thomas Patrick Burke September 3, 2008 For much of human history war has been regarded as
something totally outside the realm of morality, a brutal
fact of life that just had to be accepted as necessary and
inevitable. The idea that war could be drawn into the
sphere of morality and subjected to moral conditions
has been essentially a Christian one. While it
was discussed by Cicero, it was mainly developed by two
Christian saints, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. They
were not warmongers. Their aim was the opposite of that,
to reduce and civilize war by placing moral limits on it
that reasonable people could agree to. They argued that
moral limits apply both to the commencement of war and to
the way it is conducted. Their arguments form part
of the idea that there is a universal natural moral law to
which human laws should conform. The well-known
Geneva Conventions are one example of the effectiveness of
their arguments; there are many others. At the
present time the West must deal with peoples that have
never heard of the universal natural moral law. And even
in its own ranks there are now many who reject that
belief. But it is a powerful idea and we need to
regain our confidence in it. The seminar will include a discussion of the current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Georgia. Thomas Patrick Burke, born in Australia, was professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia for twenty-nine years and has taught at other universities in the United States, Europe and Australia. He took early retirement in order to run as a candidate in the Congressional elections of 1996 and 1998 (Pennsylvania, 13th Congressional District). In 2004 as a response to the events of September 11, 2001, he founded the Wynnewood Institute in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, an academic educational and research organization devoted to the defense and explanation of Western civilization, the free society and free markets. His book No Harm (Paragon House, 1996) offers a sustained Lockean-type argument for the ethical foundations of the free market. He has also published The Major Religions (Blackwell, 1996), which offers a scholarly introduction to the principal world religions. The Website of the Institute contains many of his lectures, courses and essays. He is currently at work on a book on the philosophy of justice. Read the paper War and Justice |