Just Causes [Will Brehm, Week 9, Substantive]

In assessing an unjust cause, Holliday proposes three markers: 1) use only the information available at the time of the decision (to go to war) to determine unjustness (no hindsight!); 2) ask whether the action solved the problem; 3) use many factors, not just body count, to determine the end result. Holliday’s markers have great logical sense that cut across deep ideological and political lines for evaluating solutions to unjust causes.

In American media today evaluating the Iraq War as a just cause repeatedly produces attack from politicians, lobbyists, and individual citizens. These debates hinder our Nations ability to make future just decisions.

I suggest taking Holliday’s markers a step further. Using the three markers eliminates any attempt to lampoon decision makers because it limits the evaluation to a few factors. However, we can, and should learn from past decisions to help tweak and redefine our decision making process in the future. We should be able to reveal sources of crucial information that may have been unnoticed in the lead up to the decision to solve an unjust action. The next time a decision is upon Washington, it will undoubtedly broaden its scope of information. Strategies for solving the problem (war plans, economic sanctions, etc.) can be retrospectively assessed to alter future plans. What worked and what didn’t work shouldn’t be left to historians. Current policy and decision makers need to understand past decisions to learn from them. The factors to determine the end result, which go unnamed in Holliday’s essay, could be expanded and explained as more decisions are made. Learning from our past decisions—creating stricter criteria for assessing future unjust causes—will create a more just world. Without our ability to learn, we will continue making unjust decisions to what we perceived as an unjust cause.