After the dust settles: Reflections on postwar justice

Traditionally, just-war ethics tries to offer an answer to two distinct moral questions: when (if ever) is it morally permissible to start a war, and how should it be fought? For this specific purpose, just-war reasoning is divided into two parts. The jus ad bellum guides our moral thinking in initiating war; the jus in bello informs us on proper moral conduct during the hostilities. More recently, however, a number of authors have felt the need to add a third element to the just-war theory, that of the jus post bellum. A war, so it is argued, has a beginning, middle and end. There is no reason then why the termination and the longer term aftermath of the war should deserve less attention from a moral point of view. A lot more needs to be said and done before the jus post bellum will reach a comparable degree of substance and sophistication to the two other just-war parts. However, this is exactly what two recently published books on the subject - Eric Patterson's Ethics beyond War's End and Larry May's After War Ends: A Philosophical Perspective - aim to do.