Comments Elsewhere

Patrick,

The primary claim above is not that all wars of aggression are unjust (although I do, as it happens, think that that’s analytically true). It’s that “aggressive” and “defensive” are contrary terms, whether the object of the defense is yourself or others, so that if your justifications for a war all appeal to the defense of others, then you are presenting evidence that the war wasn’t aggressive, not that it is both aggressive and just.

As for whether wars in defense of others could in principle be just under some set of circumstances or another, I suspect that very few people would disagree with you. But it does seem to me that there are pretty good reasons for saying that when a war is not justified by self-defense, there’s a correspondingly higher standard that needs to be met in order to justify military action (for a lot of reasons, moral, epistemic, and practical). And all that the anti-war movement needs to make a general case against these kinds of interventions is to show that the standard that needs to be met is high enough that governments intending to go to war generally don’t meet it. (And if that is their point, I think they are quite right.)