Ep. 373: Michael Walzer on Just Wars (Part One)

Enrollment is now open for my fall political philosophy online course. Spots are limited, so go to partiallyexaminelife.com/class now to read about it and follow the link to enroll. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 373 is when, if ever, is war justified? We read chapters four through six of Michael Walzer's book, Just and Unjust Wars, originally published in 1977. This is Mark Lintonmeyer whose international intervention is always welcome in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Haskin, always the aggressor in Nantasket, Massachusetts. This is Wes Olloyne, Justly Afraid in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey intervening to support self determination in Madison, Wisconsin. Right. Are you close together in Massachusetts? I don't understand the geography. So Skye is gonna go to an overnight camp. It's near Springfield, which is in the center of the state. So we flew into Boston, but we don't drop her off for a couple days. And so we decided to spend a couple days here on the coast around Boston. This is a little beach town about thirty minutes, I guess, south. And then from here tomorrow, we're gonna drive to Central Massachusetts. And as listeners can tell, your good mic did not go on vacation with you. Yes. My good Mike. Because after we drop her off, we are flying to Portugal. Well, we've been wanting to do something contemporary for a while. There are wars going on. Did you know? Just war theory is the historical thing, and there's lots of good historical stuff. Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, many many, Hugo Grotius, many people in history. But, apparently, this fairly recent book, it was, again written not too long, sort of in light of the Vietnam War, but then updated. We read the, fourth edition 2006. I'm not sure if he updated the content. Do you guys know? There's a new intro. He said that in his intro that it had not needed to get updated much less than he had hoped. Yes. I've also listened to some interviews with him. I know there was a 2002 article on where he talked specifically about Israel so we could see, you know, what he thought, in general of that conflict that we looked at. It's the four wars of Israel and Palestine from 2002. Did you guys get to that? I didn't read all of it, but the first few pages, which are kind of illustrative of, you know, his overall arguments. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just another example, you know, of course, one that we would be very keen to talk about. I think as far as a we we need to do an episode to do a contemporary moral problem, the fact that we only read half the book on the excuses, the morality of going to war, what constitutes just war. The other …