Musings on Post-Manichean Justifications of War

 

Once you ditch manicheanism with its us good them evil binary you certainly reflect reality with greater accuracy. We humans and the institutions and organisations we have made, as history shows, have the potential to do both good and evil. At the same time, however, you also make going to war, and the social ethics of war, a much muddier enterprise and mush more complicated than previously when comic book manicheanism with its clear differentiation between good and evil dominated and created a delusional mental world grounded in melodrama and emotion, including nationalist emotion. 

A number of issues come front and centre once the religion infused manicheanism that has dominated Western thought is jettisoned. For example, if virtually no one is fully good or fully evil how good do you have to be before you can justifiably go to war? How evil does some nation-state have to be before you can justifiably go to war against them? 

How does one determine degree of goodness and evilness in the first place? Can one develop a quantitive measure of degree of goodness and degree of evilness? Can one develop an objective measure which establishes benchmarks of goodness and evilness that allows one to justifiably go to war? Does one know good and evil when they see it, taste it, smell it, or touch it? Or is any such attempt at determining good and evil an ideological pipedream that is inherently subjective and intersubjective, impacted by culture and ideology which are relative? Do determinations of good and evil lie somewhere between the objective and subjective poles? 

If war, all war, particularly in the era of total war, violates human rights in some way, shape or form, how can you justify going to war if you claim to be fighting to protect human rights? And how can the violation of human rights be a form of human rights?