"I think the U.S. has a just cause," said Mount Holyoke Professor of International Politics Vincent Ferraro, who detailed the tenets of the just war doctrine. "I think that the series of attacks, culminating in the attack on Sept. 11 gave us the right to respond in self defense. Sept. 11 was not an isolated event; there were wrongs suffered and they seemed to be escalating."
The just war doctrine, as posited by medieval Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and revised by modern military theorists, served as common ground from which the speakers diverged.
For a war to have a just cause, the doctrine states that it must be fought as a last resort by a legitimate authority with a reasonable chance of succeeding at redressing a wrong suffered and establishing a peace preferable to the peace that would have prevailed without war.
For the war to be conducted justly, the violence of the war must be proportional to the injuries suffered, and every effort must be made to discriminate between civilians and combatants.
"While I think the U.S. had a just cause, the conduct of the war is a different matter entirely. I don't know whether the U.S. has been following just war conduct," said Ferraro. "For instance, the death of civilians is only justified if they are unavoidable victims. However, the fact that civilian deaths occur is not sufficient to make the war unjust, so it is difficult to tell without complete and reliable information."
"I don't believe the Afghanistan conflict reaches the just war standard because there is no reason to expect that it will have its intended result: the reduction of terrorism," said Professor of Political Science Uday Mehta. "It could have quite the opposite effect."
The forum consisted of speeches by President Tom Gerety, Mehta and Ferraro. A question and answer session expanded on the speakers' comments, often by applying the theoretical concepts presented to current events. Nonetheless, some audience members were frustrated by the focus on academic discourse at the expense of the discussion of current events.
"Academics seem to need to dwell in the theoretical realm," said Laura Raybeult '02. "It was difficult for them to address the reality that the situation we are in is ugly; instead, they focused on all of these theories and metaphysical concepts of human life-not the situation at hand."
One of the most controversial topics was Gerety's introduction of a moral test, devised by French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, as an alternative wartime ethical model.
"In the very act of killing, the soldier who levels the gun should be able to imagine the person on the other end of the weapon being someone he loves and still be able to say that it is just for that person to be killed," said Gerety. "This is a rigorous, perhaps romantic, test but I think it is fair to demand that you cannot morally will death upon someone unless you are willing to will it with respect to someone you know and care about."
The wisdom of the Weil test came under question from several audience members and Ferraro. Most found it intriguing, but almost impossibly restrictive.
"I feel obliged to contest [the Simone Weil] test; I think the politics of it are absolutely impossible to implement. If peace is the only value then, fine. But if you want to include justice, equality or freedom, then that complicates things," said Ferraro. "I would never kill my brother, no matter what he did, but I don't think familial affection is a wise ethical foundation."
Mehta responded to this by asking, "Why don't you just say that you fail the test?"
Both of these systems contrasted with Mehta's variant of the pacifist viewpoint.
"I am viscerally opposed to this war and believe it to be morally unjust; I therefore part company with those that adhere to the just war doctrine," said Mehta. "I believe war today is morally unjust, but my reasons for this position are not entirely clear and what confidence I have in them rests largely on intuitive, emotional, even aesthetic, grounds."
Mehta repeatedly stressed the amenability of current day institutions and political circumstances to the possibility of pacifism. While he acknowledged that individual Ghandian pacifism based on "esoteric metaphysics of the self" are not useful, he asserted that a global pacifism was possible.
"In the world of today, the choice can be made for nonviolence because such a choice can be sustained. Multilateral, international organizations offer numerous means of assuaging situations," said Mehta. "It is foolish to think that war can give us any assurances of security. War and the very nature of modern civilization conspire to democratize violence and, far from secure, this could very well be terminal."
Gerety said that he had thought critically about the issue in the past, having filed two separate conscientious objector forms during Vietnam-one as a pacifist, the other as an objector to the cause and conduct of that war.
"It seems to me that, even in war, the position of morality and justice should have to be that all lives matter, but Americans will do almost anything to make sure that we take no casualties," said Gerety. "In Kosovo, the astonishingly voluminous bombing was only necessary ... because we were unwilling to involve soldiers in the direct fighting. Had we been willing to risk American lives, we may have saved many more Kosovar lives and brought the war to a close with many fewer casualties."
While student involvement was limited to the question and answer session and discussion afterwards, most found the forum to be useful and informative, especially in light of the dearth of other such activities on campus.
"If students would like to organize more such fora, they should not hesitate to come to members of the faculty or others in the College, many of whom would be very eager to help promote open brainstorming and discussion on contemporary events," said Professor of Philosophy Alexander George, who moderated the event. "As for this specific discussion, I hope a jolly good time was had by all."