Criticisms

A number of criticisms could be made of Aquinas’ three criteria:

a. Just because an authority is legitimate it does not mean it is moral. Many struggles around the world have been against cruel and unjust, but legal, regimes. Such wars of liberation take a much more fundamental view of justice, namely, that a ruler may lose his legitimacy if he oppresses his own people.

b. Just war theory does not help us explain what is happening in the Middle East. Here a non-sovereign people (the Palestinians) have been engaged in armed struggle since the foundation of Israel and their territorial displacement in 1949 into refugee camps. According to just war theory, their struggle is illegitimate, first because they are not a sovereign people and second because they are pursuing it by means, such as suicide bombings, which could never be condoned by just war theorists.

Yet to a Palestinian there are ample moral grounds for their struggle, and the failure by the west adequately to acknowledge this may well have condemned the Middle East to decades of violence.

c. Aquinas’ conditions are only briefly explained and are not sufficient. This is why a more complete list, building on Cicero’s insights, has been compiled since, including the idea of last resort, of war being waged with the likelihood of victory, and using legitimate methods and proportional force (see Vardy and Grosch).