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the just-war position commits itself to restoring justice to people and contexts in which evil and injustice would otherwise prevail. It thereby aims to achieve a greater good than otherwise would exist. Concomitantly, it refuses to acquiesce to the counsels of skepticism and cynicism that would have us believe that measured and guided coercive force cannot proceed under a moral imperative. While it shares with pacifism the ultimate objective of peace, unlike pacifism it understands, as does Aquinas, that "peace is not a virtue, but the fruit of virtue."93 Therefore, peace must be highly qualified and justly ordered. The Mafia and tyrannical dictators, after all, know and impose a peace that is illicit.War, Peace and Christianity
If force in fact cannot be morally qualified, as the ideological pacifist will argue, then one will have to acknowledge that the entire criminal justice system is wrongheaded and that "criminal justice" as we understand it, whether in the domestic or an international context, is bound for failure and should be eliminated immediately as an utter waste of time and resources.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 1057-1058). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler's heart would have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a faith which no historic reality justifies.
In its classical expression within the Western moral tradition, the use of force finds justification on four principal grounds: to protect the innocent, to recover what has been wrongfully taken, to defend against a wrongful attack, and to punish evil.76 The just warrior, then, takes up arms and enters conflict only reluctantly for the express purpose of protecting innocent human beings and preventing greater evil. The just-war position is made necessary by the fact that we live in the period of the "already but not yet," that is, in the temporal order that is characterized by human fallenness and penultimate peace. Like the pacifist, the just-warrior is committed to "putting violence on trial," in the words of one theorist; and like the pacifist, he will also evaluate life from the perspective of those who suffer and those who are potential victims.77 At the same time, unlike the pacifist, he will highly qualify peace and find deficient the world's definition of peace, fully aware that some forms of "peace" are oppressive, totalitarian, and therefore unjust.War, Peace, and Christianity: Questions and Answers from a Just-War Perspective (Kindle Locations 917-926). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
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