ABSTRACT
The major focus is upon several arguments concerning the morality of war, chiefly the argument that any war is immoral if it involves the intentional killing of innocent persons, and the argument that any war is immoral because it involves the use of deadly force. If Nazi Germany constitutes a kind of paradigm case, the behavior of all of the countries involved in the Second World War appears to have come very close to embracing this concept of war. The Nazi leaders expressly repudiated the notion of “chivalrous warfare,” and, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal, embraced in full that “conception of ‘total war’ with which aggressive wars were waged”. From a backward-looking point of view, the claim that a warring response to aggressive war is always justified is even more perplexing. The strongest argument against war is that which rests upon the connection between the morality of war and the death of innocent persons.
