A Framework With Parallels Elsewhere

Just war theory has become the dominant framework in Western secular international law and military ethics as well as Christian moral theology, its criteria echoed, though not always directly derived from Aquinas, in modern laws of armed conflict requiring proportionality and the protection of civilians. Other religious traditions developed structurally comparable, though independently formulated, frameworks for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate warfare: classical Jewish law distinguishes an obligatory war, milchemet mitzvah, commanded or sanctioned by scripture, from a discretionary war, milchemet reshut, undertaken by a king for other reasons and subject to additional procedural constraints including, in some readings, the Sanhedrin's approval, while classical Islamic jurisprudence developed its own detailed rules of legitimate authority, cause and conduct within the separate doctrine of jihad. These frameworks are best understood comparatively, as independent traditions of moral and legal reasoning about the same underlying human problem, when and how warfare can be justified, rather than any one tradition's answer serving as the standard against which the others are measured. None of them settles the justice of any specific present day conflict.