Cruelty and the Imperative to Wage Virtuous War

This paper considers the newly imperative force of the jus ad bellum, when it acts as a guarantee of the moral. An emotive sense of cruelty now mobilizes as legitimate some forms of virtuous killing, whether in the 'war on crime' waged upon a country's own citizens, or in the conduct of war upon other nations. The recoil against cruelty authorizes virtuous wars against 'brutal' regimes, and underwrites the imposition of maximal penalties for atrocious crimes. Cruelty obliges military force, that naked arm of sovereign power, to be placed at the service of an ailing humanity. This turn towards a pitiful virtuous war suggests a jurisprudence critical of those intimations of cruelty that tend to secure compassion as an authorizing stamp, or guarantor, of the moral.