Just War and International Law: A Response to Mary Ellen O’Connell

The following remarks were prepared as a response to Mary Ellen O’Connell’s plenary address, “The Just War Tradition and International Law against War: The Myth of Discordant Doctrines,” at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics. O’Connell’s essay appears in this issue of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (vol. 35, no. 2). After noting some points of agreement, the response discusses five main issues: the moral complexity of “peace,” the consonance of a peremptory norm against aggression with just war thinking, the formative role of controversial political convictions in the interpretation of international law, the political defects of the current international legal system, and the efficacy of military intervention.