Search results
Aug 15, 2017 · A cursory review of the history of warfare and its effects is enough to demonstrate that war is a great evil, even if at times a necessary one. We should work to end war, and knowing its...
- What is evil?
- Who is evil?
- Comparing evils
- Choosing between evils
- The evils of war
- The special evil of war
- The just war myth
Evil is opposed to good. So too is bad. Evil connotes the extreme in bad-ness. In many religions, evil is associated with the devil or demons, who are supernatural beings that are in conflict with God and angels. In the course of history, human beings have experienced all kinds of hard-ships and misfortunes, such as earthquakes, droughts, floods, f...
Given that there is agency involved in evil, are the agents thereby evil? A distinction must be made between evildoers and evil persons. Not all evildoers are evil persons. This can be seen by distinguishing between motives and intentions. To be an evildoer is to be culpable for doing evil, which means that he succeeds in acting from an intention t...
Card rightly points out that comparing evils is a morally sensitive issue and “an atrocity is already so evil that in some contexts it seems disres-pectful of victims to point out that another was even worse.”9 I agree that sensitivity is needed to avoid trivializing or justifying the evil. There should be no implication in making the comparison th...
As I have already said, we want to be able to make moral choices, even if there are no good options. The possibility of comparing evils pro-vides a way to choose between evils. The utilitarian would compare the harms involved in each option and choose that which produces the least amount of harm. This option is not only permissible but is the right...
It would be redundant for me to rehearse the details of wars in history to illustrate the evils of war. The reader can simply open a history book and read about any of the numerous wars to find ample evidence of evil. It should be obvious that the deliberate killing and maiming of large numbers of human beings constitute intolerable harms, and the ...
shall now list a number of reasons for thinking that as an evil, war should rank above almost all others. To claim this is not to diminish the need to confront other evils, nor to deny the seriousness of the harms and the culpability of the evildoers outside of war. As I will explain at the end of the chapter, it is necessary to fully understand ho...
Andrew Fiala points out that the just war theory has in fact been used to shelter war from moral criticism and to make war a moral possibility. The concept of just war is a dangerous myth because it allows those who wage war to provide rationalizations of what they do.21 Fiala, who is a pacifist, thinks that in reality there may be no such thing as...
- David K. Chan
- 2012
The danger, in short, of assuming that Homo sapiens has a natural instinct for war is that it can become a highly destructive self-fulfilling prophecy, not only closing off possible avenues of peaceful conflict resolution, but actually making war more likely.
In this essay, Robin May Schott criticizes leading proponents of just war theory and introduces the notion of justifiable but illegitimate violence. Instead of legitimating some wars as just, it is better to acknowledge that both the situation of war and moral judgments about war are ambiguous.
Oct 31, 2013 · From Christian teachings arose what Neorealist, Kenneth Waltz, refers to as the “pessimistic” view of human nature, its advocates attesting to a fixed and flawed humanity, man’s [1] inherent evil (Waltz, 2001, p. 26).
Sep 1, 2018 · People fight and kill for personal reasons, but homicide is not war. War is social, with groups organized to kill people from other groups. Today controversy over the historical roots of...
People also ask
Is War intrinsically evil?
Is War a moral evil?
Can just war theory respond to evil?
Can evil flow from the best of intentions?
Is War a great evil?
Is just war illegitimate violence?
If war is recognized as intrinsically evil, then the deliberate choice of war could not be justified in the way that just war theory attempts to do. Take for comparison how torture of human beings is intrinsically evil.
