2 The Consequences of War

Abstract Several conditions in the traditional theory of the just war — the just cause, hope of success, last resort, and proportionality conditions — assess war morally in light of its consequences, but do so differently than the consequentialist view Jonathan Glover has shown sympathy for. Unlike consequentialism, just war theory does not count all a war's good effects as morally relevant, sometimes discounts good or bad effects because of how they came about, and instead of weighing good and bad effects equally against each other sometimes gives more weight to the one and sometimes more to the other. This chapter examines these complexities in the just war assessment of consequences and shows how the resulting theory is sometimes more permissive about the resort to war than consequentialism and sometimes less permissive.