Just War Tradition In The Gatekeepers Essay

Just War Tradition in The Gatekeepers

Commonly accepted truths about morality and ethics have changed drastically in recent modern history. The explosive rise of moral relativism, hand in hand with post-modernism, has pushed out ideas of absolute Truth, objective morality, virtue ethics, and God-ordained natural order from the vocabulary of academia, education, and society. Under relativism, who is another to tell another what to do? This seems, however, to be a wishful and disastrous task – like urging one to be on time to a party without giving them directions or the time of the party. The task of morality and ethics is to teach people how to do good things individually and in a community. How can we expect people to do good things if they are never taught what good is? If we never teach a child addition how can we expect them to understand algebra? The relativist definition of good with current cultural norms seems lacking because one would have to admit the Nazi Regime was good because the Nazis thought so. There must be an absolute Truth by which we can evaluate and judge the actions of others. There must be an ultimate judgment if actions are Good or Bad. The Good is worth pursuing for its own sake and the happiness it brings. In war

First, to show a moral framework does exist. The Just War Tradition stretches back a couple thousand years and there is voluminous literature on it. Second, I want to answer Aquinas’ criteria based on what I saw in the movie and show an application of Justice thinking to the conflict.

For the question of sovereignty, we know Israel is a state so they have authority to initiate wars. Palestine is fighting to be a state, so it’s ambiguous if it is a state but it seems to be organized sufficiently to have directed will and authority. This can be seen, for example, in Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization. So, for the sake of simplicity, I will consider Palestine to be like a