A Thomistic Reading of Small-Scale Uses of Force

Abstract

This thesis makes both a substantive and methodological contribution to knowledge. Firstly, it assesses the moral issue of a worrisome increase in the use of small-scale force post-9/11 from a Thomistic just war perspective. Concentrating on one such use of force, namely the practice of targeted killing, it engages in a “renegotiation” of the inherited Thomistic jus ad bellum in order to address the moral questions raised by this recent development in military conduct. Secondly, the thesis seeks to recover the method of traditional casuistry built around the ethics of Aquinas. Employing “Thomistic casuistry” can, it will be argued, approximate the analytical rigour of the revisionist just war while it does not have to disregard the use of history for moral reflection. In addition, “Thomistic casuistry,” as a distinct “third-way” approach to just war, is capable of triggering an exchange between Walzerians and revisionists, the two dominating contemporary approaches which have faced each other in a “war of ethics within the ethics of war.”