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den 17 mars 2014


  Ett försvar av kriget

George Weigel recenserade häromdagen en bok som direkt hamnade på önskelistan: In Defense of War av Nigel Biggar. Några citat för att locka till läsning:

This is the dilemma: on the one hand going to war causes terrible evils, but on the other hand not going to war permits them. Whichever horn one chooses to sit on, the sitting should not be comfortable. Allowing evils to happen is not necessarily innocent, any more than causing them is necessarily culpable. Omission and commission are equally obliged to give an account of themselves. Both stand in need of moral justification.

Weigel summerar:

That wishful thinking is the result of several bad ideas that Nigel Biggar confronts with Christian intellectual vigor: the bad idea that radical pacifism is implicit in the Gospel and was normative in the early Church; the bad idea that moral authority to wage war today is held by the United Nations alone; the bad idea that contemporary international law adequately reflects the moral reasoning of the just war tradition; the bad idea that the prudential norms within the just war tradition (like “last resort”) trump other considerations.

Här uttrycks väldigt många sanningar i ett enda kort stycke.