Abstract
Background: War has long been a central theme in philosophy, from Aristotle’s teleological ethics to Hegel’s dialectical historicism. In today’s technological era, however, war is increasingly defined by drones, cyber conflict and algorithmic decision-making, raising urgent questions about ethics, responsibility and legitimacy.
Objectives: This article examines how classical and modern philosophical frameworks engage with the ethics of war and explores whether they can still provide conceptual clarity and moral guidance in an age where technology mediates violence.
Method: A comparative philosophical analysis is undertaken. Texts from Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger and Habermas are placed in dialogue with the Just War tradition, alongside contemporary debates on technology, law and global ethics.
Results: The analysis shows that while Aristotle and Hegel interpret war within frameworks of virtue and history, these views risk either exclusion or normalisation of conflict. Just War Theory offers normative restraint but faces new challenges from remote and automated warfare. Heidegger’s ontology exposes how technology enframes war, while Habermas provides a normative counterpoint grounded in discourse ethics and international law.
Conclusion: Traditional concepts remain indispensable but must be critically reinterpreted. The ethical grammar of war is strained by technological change, demanding both renewed normative frameworks and intercultural perspectives beyond the Western canon.
Contribution: The article advances the idea of ‘moving thought’: a dynamic philosophical disposition responsive to technological, ethical and global plurality. It contributes to debates on war and justice by reactivating classical insights in the light of contemporary technological and humanitarian challenges.
Keywords: aristotle; Hegel; Heidegger; Habermas; ethics; war; just war theory; technology; Western canon.
Introduction
In the late 1970s and early 1980s – first as a high school student, and later as a university student immersed in the political and cultural currents of the time – war for me was not an abstract philosophical problem but a tangible, formative presence. The Cold War cast its global shadow across everyday life, shaping geopolitical alignments, ideological anxieties and personal outlooks. In South Africa, its resonance was inescapable: the country was engaged in a border war in Namibia and Angola, while internally, it teetered on the brink of civil conflict just seven decades after the Anglo-Boer War. The sense of living within a militarised society was palpable, touching politics, culture and imagination alike. Films such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter did more than shock; they provoked reflection on moral collapse and human fragility. Music like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dire Straits’s ‘Brothers in Arms’ became soundtracks of existential unease. Literature, too, offered mirrors of disillusionment: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, closer to home, Alexander Strachan’s Wêreld sonder Grense illuminated the moral deformation that war engenders. These works revealed that war is not merely an event occurring elsewhere. It infiltrates conscience, unsettles conviction and shapes – or breaks – the fabric of personal and collective being. These experiences illustrate how war shapes moral perception and collective consciousness – a question that demands renewed philosophical attention in today’s technologically mediated conflicts. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seemed to inaugurate a new chapter, a moment hailed as the triumph of liberal democracy and the ‘end of history’ as strikingly proclaimed by Fukuyama (1992). Yet war did not recede. It persisted, reconfiguring itself within a rapidly changing technological order. Today, conflict unfolds less on visible battlefields than across cyber networks, drone operations and algorithmic decision systems. Machines are increasingly entrusted with actions and judgements once reserved for human deliberation. This transformation raises pressing philosophical questions: can classical or modern philosophy still provide conceptual clarity in the face of such change? Can it sustain ethical discernment, political orientation and moral responsibility amid the automation of violence? This article seeks to respond to these questions through a multi-register philosophical engagement with the ethics of war in a technological era. It unfolds in four parts. The first part engages Aristotle’s concept of kinēsis – motion and purposive action – and contrasts it with Hegel’s dialectical view of history, in which war becomes a moment in the unfolding of freedom. The second one turns to Just War Theory as a normative framework for evaluating legitimacy in both traditional and contemporary contexts. The third part brings Heidegger’s reflections on conflict and technology into dialogue with Habermas’s discourse ethics and his vision of international law and legitimacy. The final section offers concluding reflections on the challenges and possibilities of philosophical thought in an age increasingly shaped by technological mediation. Methodologically, this contribution employs a comparative philosophical and critical hermeneutic approach. Each thinker – Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger and Habermas – is interpreted both within his own conceptual horizon and in relation to the evolving ethical discourse on war. The analysis juxtaposes their frameworks along three guiding axes: (1) the moral justification of war, (2) the transformation of warfare through technology and (3) the conditions for justice and legitimacy. This dialogical method makes it possible to reconstruct ethical reasoning across historical paradigms, revealing how concepts of motion, freedom and responsibility shift from classical virtue ethics to contemporary debates on technological mediation.
Aristotle and Hegel: Two moving interpretations of war
Aristotle was a philosopher of movement – kinēsis. By this, he did not mean merely physical displacement but the more fundamental idea of change, becoming and purposive motion. For Aristotle, all things in nature are characterised by an inner tendency or orientation towards a final goal [telos] – a state of completeness or fulfilment. This teleological structure applies not only to natural processes but also to human life. The human being, as a rational and social creature, is called to pursue the highest good: the cultivation of virtue and the attainment of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘flourishing’ or ‘happiness’. Crucially, this goal is not pursued in isolation but within the communal and ethical framework of the polis, the city-state that provides the conditions for moral and political life to thrive (Aristotle 2017:1252a 1–7, 2019:1097b 22–1098a 20). In such an ethical framework, war is never regarded as an end in itself. It may be necessary, but it is always instrumental – subordinated to higher goods such as peace, justice and the common good. Aristotle (2017:1333a 13) famously states: ‘We make war in order to live in peace’. The radical implication of this formulation is that war, while sometimes unavoidable, is morally justified only insofar as it serves to secure the conditions for a just and virtuous society. It is not a source of value in its own right but a means to an ethical end. Such a society, in turn, depends on phronēsis – practical wisdom. This is the capacity to deliberate well, to make good judgements in the complexity of real-life situations, particularly when moral principles must be applied in contexts of ambiguity and conflict (Aristotle 2019:VI. 5–13). In the context of war, phronēsis requires asking critical questions: when is it just to go to war [jus ad bellum]? What does genuine courage look like, as opposed to recklessness? How can justice be preserved in the midst of destruction and suffering? Aristotle’s virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character formation and the development of moral dispositions such as courage, temperance and justice, provides a flexible but demanding moral framework – one that guides action through thoughtful engagement rather than through the application of fixed rules. Yet, Aristotle’s thought is not without significant limitations. His vision of the ethical and political community was exclusionary. In his Politics (I. 5), he maintains that some individuals – namely women and slaves – are by nature destined for subordination rather than citizenship (Aristotle 2017:1254a 21–25). This deeply problematic hierarchy demands a critical reassessment. Can Aristotle’s ethics still be of value in a pluralistic, democratic age that affirms the equality and dignity of all persons? The answer, as scholars such as Gadamer (2004), MacIntyre (2007) and Ricoeur (1992) argue, lies not in a nostalgic return to Aristotle but in a creative reactivation of his thought. Such a reactivation involves an ongoing and critical dialogical engagement with his concepts – reinterpreting them in the light of contemporary concerns, new historical realities and the moral demands of a complex global society. For Hegel too, movement [Bewegung] lies at the heart of philosophical and historical life. But unlike Aristotle’s notion of teleological development grounded in natural form, Hegel conceives of movement in dialectical terms – as a dynamic process of contradiction, negation and sublation through which reality, and especially historical consciousness, develops. Where Aristotle emphasises the actualisation of potentiality, Hegel (1977) foregrounds the unfolding of Spirit [Geist] through conflict, transformation and reconciliation. In this dialectic, war plays a controversial but philosophically central role: not merely as a tragic necessity but as a moment in the historical realisation of freedom. Hegel (1991) writes in The Philosophy of Right:
The higher significance of war is that, through its agency (as I have put it on another occasion), ‘the ethical health of nations (Völker) is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that stagnation which a lasting calm would produce – a stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace would also produce among nations’. (p. §324)
This metaphor – war as a wind that stirs the sea – suggests that war disrupts stagnation and reinvigorates ethical life [Sittlichkeit]. It is a moment of rupture that can catalyse institutional renewal and historical progression. For Hegel, the state is not a mere administrative apparatus but the highest realisation of ethical life – the concrete unity of individual freedom and the universal will. When institutions become rigid or corrupted, war may function as the crisis through which new forms of ethical life emerge. However, it is essential to note that for Hegel, war is not glorified nor pursued for its own sake. It is a moment within a larger dialectical movement – part of the historical process by which the world spirit [Weltgeist] comes to self-consciousness. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he continues this line of thought (Hegel 1975), which has also invited strong criticism. One of the most forceful responses comes from Michael Walzer, who challenges the Hegelian notion of war as a historical necessity. For Walzer (2006), warfare is not a Hegelian dialectic but a human tragedy. He insists on the moral gravity of war: it is always a borderline ethical case that must be constrained by principles of justice, including jus ad bellum and jus in bello. From this perspective, war requires regulation, not philosophical rationalisation. In addition, Hegel’s (1991:§333) scepticism towards international law – he argues that war is the final arbiter between sovereign states – appears deeply problematic in a post–World War context. The emergence of the United Nations, international human rights instruments and global norms of responsibility suggests a very different path – one that seeks to limit, not institutionalise, war as the grammar of history.
Another dimension that complicates Hegel’s account is the changing nature of warfare in a technological era. Hegel’s vision presupposes a form of war involving bodily presence, shared risk and moral agency. But with the rise of drone warfare, cyber operations and algorithmic targeting, war has become increasingly disembodied. The soldier as a moral agent recedes behind a screen, and the moral experience of combat – so central to Hegel’s conception of ethical life – is eroded or even eliminated. This technological transformation raises serious questions about the applicability of Hegel’s insights to contemporary military practice.
Yet Hegel’s philosophy retains a disquieting relevance. War, he suggests, is not merely an external rupture but often arises from the inner tensions of history – within institutions, ideas and forms of life themselves. This is a troubling but necessary insight: it demands not only moral critique but historical understanding. To think with Hegel today is not to repeat him but to confront his thought with the demands of our own time – shaped by global interdependence, ecological precarity and renewed struggles for justice. Philosophy, in this sense, becomes a task of critical inheritance: to engage the past in order to navigate a contested future.
Just war theory: A normative interlude
In Hegel’s political philosophy, war is not simply a rupture in ethical life but constitutes a moment through which freedom, right and collective identity are realised in history. It is a powerful – if unsettling – insight: that conflict, despite its destruction, may carry historical significance; that war is not always a deviation from justice but may be part of the dialectical unfolding of spirit [Geist] and freedom in history (Hegel 1991). War, in this view, is not merely regrettable but can be necessary – an expression of the contradictions embedded in institutions, sovereignty and political will. Yet the danger of such a view lies precisely in its tendency to normalise war – not because it is morally justified, but because it appears historically inevitable.
In an era where technology, propaganda and ideology can render war both routine and almost imperceptible, this stance is especially perilous. Conflict today is no longer limited to visible battlefields or formal declarations; it emerges in cyber domains, asymmetric engagements and disinformation campaigns. In this context, the invocation of war’s historical necessity may obscure its human cost and ethical complexity. It is precisely here that another strand of Western thought becomes indispensable – a tradition that resists fatalism and insists on the moral governance of warfare: the tradition of Just War Theory (Orend 2006).
This normative tradition has its roots in classical Roman jurisprudence and early Christian theology – beginning with Cicero, passing through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and continuing in the early modern legal and political philosophy of figures like Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius. In modern times, it has been further developed by thinkers such as Ramsey (1968), Elshtain (ed. 1991) and Walzer (2006). While Hegel asks what war means in history, the Just War tradition asks when war is morally permissible and how it ought to be conducted when it occurs (Johnson 2014:327 ff.). This is not a descriptive account of war but a normative framework – concerned not with what is but with what ought to be.
In contrast to Hegel’s emphasis on the clash of sovereign states in a world lacking a higher authority, the Just War tradition posits that moral and legal norms remain binding even in conditions of conflict. It rests on three foundational pillars: jus ad bellum [the justice of going to war], jus in bello [the justice in the conduct of war] and jus post bellum [the justice after war] (Orend 2006). These criteria demand rigorous moral scrutiny: is there a just cause and legitimate authority? Is the use of force a last resort? Are the aims proportionate to the anticipated harm? Is there a clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants? How is justice to be restored after the conflict ends?
This shift – from historical necessity to moral normativity – marks a significant ethical intervention. It asserts that war is not simply a continuation of politics by other means, but a moral phenomenon that must be judged from the outset. As Elshtain (ed. 1991) argues, it requires that war be subject to moral evaluation before, during and after its occurrence. The tradition thus aspires to constrain violence through moral reason, rather than excuse it through strategic calculus or historical necessity.
However, when read alongside Hegel, this tradition encounters conceptual tension. If, as Hegel claims, there is no truly universal moral or legal authority above sovereign states, then any attempt to morally regulate war risks becoming subordinate to political will or ideological bias. In the absence of a global ethical framework, can normative constraints hold? What if, as critics have asked, the justification of war is too often the narrative of the victors? What if moral discourse itself is co-opted by power, rhetoric and strategic rationalisation?
In this sense, the Just War tradition does not offer a simplistic moral remedy but an enduring challenge to all forms of power that seek to justify violence without ethical restraint. It insists that war is never a given – it is always a human decision, subject to judgement, accountability and moral scrutiny. In its most robust form, it refuses to moralise war retrospectively and instead calls for proactive ethical engagement before violence is unleashed (Orend 2006; Walzer 2006).
Yet even this venerable tradition is under new pressure in the face of technological transformation. The character of war has changed fundamentally. Traditional images of war as combat between armed individuals in physical space have been displaced by the realities of drone warfare, cyber conflict and algorithmically driven targeting. Battlefields are now often remote, virtual and asymmetrical. Violence is executed at a distance – via screens, satellites and code – by actors who face little or no personal risk (Coker 2013).
This development introduces a profound ethical rupture: what becomes of responsibility when the act of killing is mediated by machines? What happens to the moral experience of war when presence, vulnerability and judgement are removed? The disembodiment of war raises urgent questions about agency, accountability and the erosion of the moral subject. It also challenges the applicability of traditional Just War principles which presuppose human deliberation, intentionality and physical participation.
Already in Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer (2006) warned of the moral desensitisation that follows when war is dehumanised – when the enemy becomes a target rather than a person. Orend (2006) similarly insists that while technologies of war evolve, the moral responsibility for their use remains firmly with human agents and institutions. Indeed, in the context of drone strikes and autonomous weapon systems, the very concept of jus in bello must be reconsidered. What constitutes discrimination and proportionality when decisions are made by algorithms? What new ethical frameworks are needed to evaluate acts of violence that no longer involve traditional soldiers or visible lines of engagement?
Thus, the Just War tradition must not be discarded but rather revitalised. It must be critically updated to address the challenges posed by automated and virtualised violence. Far from becoming obsolete, it may be more essential than ever. In an age marked by technological acceleration, moral fragmentation and geopolitical instability, Just War Theory serves as one of the last normative anchors capable of holding warfare within the bounds of ethical reflection.
Its purpose is not to legitimise war, nor to provide a timeless formula for just conflict. Rather, it is to ensure that war remains a matter of moral judgement, legal responsibility and human accountability. In this way, it sustains the possibility of ethical critique – of saying no to unjust wars and of preserving the fragile boundary between necessary defence and unjustified aggression. In confronting new forms of warfare, this tradition challenges us to reimagine justice, not as a relic of the past but as a living commitment to human dignity amid the shifting terrain of power and technology.
Heidegger and Habermas: Ontological and (further) normative remarks
Following Aristotle’s teleological ethics, Hegel’s dialectical historicism and the normative criteria of Just War Theory, the thought of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) introduces a radically different philosophical register. Rather than approaching war through moral judgement or legal principle, Heidegger reorients the question ontologically. War, for him, is not primarily a juridical or political phenomenon but a revealing event [Ereignis] – one that discloses fundamental structures of human existence, especially our relation to Being, technology and finitude (Heidegger 2000).
In his work on Metaphysics (1935), Heidegger provocatively links war to Polemos, the primordial strife or contention through which Being itself becomes manifest. He writes: ‘Only where there is strife is there also the possibility of Being’ (Heidegger 2000:65). This is not a call to arms but a meditation on the ontological conditions of intelligibility and order. Polemos is not reducible to warfare in the empirical sense; it is an originary rupture, the constitutive tension through which truth emerges and worlds are disclosed. In this sense, war – as Polemos – is existential and world forming before it is strategic or instrumental.
However, Heidegger also recognises that in the modern technological epoch, this originary strife has been flattened and distorted. In various essays in the 1950s, he diagnoses the essence of modern technology as Gestell – a mode of revealing in which everything, including human beings, is enframed as Bestand [standing-reserve], subject to control, calculation and manipulation (Heidegger 1977:3–35). Within such a technological ordering, war becomes not an encounter with existential limits but a function of administrative logic: distanced, rationalised and increasingly devoid of embodied human meaning.
The danger, Heidegger warns, lies not only in the destructiveness of modern war, but in the fact that we no longer experience it as war. It has become abstracted from presence, dislocated from suffering and sterilised through technological mediation. What was once an event of mortal exposure – where courage, loss and decision marked the limits of human existence – is now administered by systems, interfaces and codes. This ‘de-worlding’ of war renders it impervious to authentic human encounter (Young 2002).
Heidegger does not offer moral criteria or prescriptive judgements akin to Just War Theory. He neither condemns nor legitimates war; instead, he exposes how the technological enframing of the modern world erodes our capacity for ethical experience. Especially after the devastation of the Second World War, his later works – such as the Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (1949) – take on a sombre, disoriented tone. War, he suggests, has not merely destroyed lives and institutions but has shattered our relation to Being itself (Heidegger 2002). In his much-cited Spiegel interview of 1966, he famously declares: ‘Only a god can still save us’ (Heidegger 1976). This is not a mystical escape but a poetic expression of the need for a new beginning in thought – one that relinquishes domination and re-learns receptivity.
Nonetheless, Heidegger’s legacy is deeply entangled with silence and complicity. His failure to clearly denounce the atrocities of the Nazi regime and his post-war ambiguity regarding political responsibility remain ethically troubling (Safranski 1998; Wolin 1993). His critique of technological modernity may be incisive, but it lacks a normative compass for resistance or accountability. This raises the central question: if Being is technologically enframed, what becomes of justice? Where does one locate ethical agency in a world structured by calculative reason and operational systems?
It is precisely here that the thought of Jürgen Habermas offers further normative indicators. Where Heidegger uncovers the ontological displacement of meaning, Habermas seeks to reconstruct the conditions for moral and political legitimacy. His project is not contemplative but practical: how can human beings, in a post-metaphysical age, ground their norms, laws and institutions in processes of rational communication?
Habermas rejects both the tragic necessity of war à la Hegel and the existential destiny suggested by Heidegger. He places communicative rationality at the centre of his social and political philosophy, grounding his normative vision in the human capacity for mutual understanding, argumentation and consent. In The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984), he distinguishes between strategic and communicative actions: whereas the former involves instrumental behaviour oriented towards success, the latter is oriented towards reaching understanding.
Violence, in this framework, represents a fundamental disruption of communicative reason. War, as a form of organised violence, short-circuits the processes of dialogue and mutual understanding. It marks the moment when persuasion yields to coercion, and ethical discourse is silenced by force. For Habermas, this breakdown is not merely a political failure but a deeper rupture in the moral fabric of intersubjective life. Against this backdrop, he advocates for a cosmopolitan constitutionalism: not a centralised world government, but a multilayered system of global governance grounded in legality, democratic deliberation and discourse ethics. This normative orientation stands in stark contrast to other philosophical treatments of war. Habermas explicitly rejects both the Hegelian conception of war as a tragic necessity within the unfolding of world history and the Heideggerian portrayal of war as an ontological destiny. In both cases, war is treated as something to be endured rather than judged – a stance Habermas finds ethically and politically indefensible.
Instead, he situates war within the realm of rational assessment and normative critique. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1996:110) insists that ‘legitimate law must be able to be accepted by all citizens in a discursive manner’. From this perspective, any act of war can only be justified if it conforms to international legal norms rooted in human rights, public reason and democratic legitimacy. In this way, Habermas offers a contemporary reformulation of Just War Theory, embedding it within a broader framework of legal proceduralism and global ethics.
His critique of war is not merely theoretical. Habermas has consistently opposed military interventions that lack a democratic mandate or international sanction. He condemned the United States (US)-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as illegitimate and incompatible with the norms of international law and cosmopolitan justice (Habermas 2004). He has also engaged critically with global crises such as the attacks of 9/11 (ed. Borradori 2003), the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022) and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza (2023), arguing that such events must be analysed through the lens of normative legitimacy, not geopolitical realism.
As an alternative to unilateralism and imperial hegemony, Habermas (2001) envisions the gradual emergence of a global legal order whose authority derives not from domination but from deliberative legitimacy. This vision rests on the hope that shared values, institutionalised procedures and rational discourse can form the basis of a more peaceful and just international community. War, from this vantage point, is not a fated recurrence in human affairs, but a failure of the communicative potential upon which a truly human world depends.
Still, Habermas’s vision is not without its critics. Political theorists such as Mouffe (2000) argue that his model underestimates the agonistic nature of politics – that conflict, passion and incommensurability are not accidents but constitutive features of the political. Moreover, in an era of algorithmic war, automated violence and informational asymmetry, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the conditions for the kind of deliberative legitimacy Habermas envisions.
Nevertheless, Habermas’s contribution remains indispensable. He reasserts the normative core of politics at a time when war threatens to dissolve into technological routine and geopolitical cynicism. In contrast to both Hegelian necessity and Heideggerian estrangement, Habermas insists that war must be subjected to the authority of reason, discourse and law. Violence, he reminds us, is not merely the failure of politics – it is the destruction of communication itself.
War, justice and moving thinking: Some concluding remarks
The Western philosophical tradition has long grappled with the nature of war – not merely as a clash of arms but also as a site of ethical, historical and metaphysical significance. From Aristotle’s notion of war as instrumental to peace and virtue, to Hegel’s idea of war as a moment of historical self-realisation, to Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of conflict as a revealing of Being and finally to Habermas’s insistence on discursive legitimacy and communicative reason – each thinker offers a distinct perspective for approaching the ethical question of war. Threaded through these approaches is the tradition of Just War Theory, which seeks to constrain the initiation, conduct and aftermath of war through moral principle (Orend 2006).
Aristotle grounds the ethics of war in moral teleology: conflict is justified only insofar as it restores peace and virtue. His view offers a framework for prudential judgement but remains confined to the polis and struggles with inclusivity. Hegel, in turn, situates war within history’s dialectic of freedom, recognising its tragic role in ethical development while risking the normalisation of conflict as necessary. Heidegger discloses the ontological dimension of war, showing how technological enframing [Gestell] transforms conflict into calculation yet offers no explicit ethics of resistance. Habermas restores the moral ground lost in Heidegger by insisting on communicative legitimacy and public justification, though these ideals falter in the face of algorithmic warfare and systemic opacity.
Together they form a dialectic between meaning, history, technology and legitimacy – revealing that any future ethics of war must weave these dimensions into a renewed framework for moral judgement in a technological age.
Yet in the technological age, this entire framework is under strain. As warfare becomes automated, digitalised and remote, the ethical grammar that once guided judgement risks obsolescence. What does justice mean when violence is inflicted by algorithms thousands of kilometres away, without physical risk or moral presence? As Virilio (1989) warned, the speed and abstraction of modern war threaten to outstrip ethical discernment. Moral judgement, once anchored in vulnerability and immediacy, is increasingly delegated to systems, data and code.
Heidegger’s warning about Gestell, the technological enframing, thus acquires new urgency. When everything – including conflict – is rendered calculable, war ceases to be an existential rupture and becomes an administrative function. The danger lies not only in destruction, but in the loss of our capacity to encounter, existentially and ethically, the reality of war itself (Heidegger 1977). Habermas, in turn, identifies another danger: the erosion of public discourse and democratic accountability. War must be legitimate not only in strategic terms but also through moral deliberation and public consensus (Habermas 1996, 2004). Yet as decisions migrate from parliaments to strategic think-tanks, and from human judgement to automated processes, legitimacy itself becomes opaque.
Still, this ethical crisis is not merely technological or procedural; it is also epistemological and intercultural. The Western canon, for all its depth, cannot claim universality. Its categories – jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum – emerged from specific theological and historical contexts. To address war in a truly global and just manner, our ethical imagination must widen to include other traditions.
In Confucian and Buddhist philosophies, for instance, war is not valorised but viewed as a rupture of natural and social harmony. Confucian ethics emphasises the cultivation of virtue and the restoration of order through benevolence [ren] and righteousness [yi], rather than domination or conquest. Warfare is a deviation from the moral path, justified only in the rarest of circumstances and always subordinate to the restoration of equilibrium (Ames & Hall 2001). Buddhism, particularly in its Mahayana expressions, frames violence as a failure of compassion and wisdom. While the reality of conflict is acknowledged, the path of the bodhisattva points to non-violence not as passivity but as a disciplined moral resistance grounded in the interdependence of all beings.
Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha – truth-force or soul-force – offers another alternative. Resistance to violence, for Gandhi, is not weakness but moral courage: a disciplined refusal to cooperate with injustice, grounded in truth, non-violence and the willingness to suffer rather than inflict harm (Gandhi 2001). Here, the ethic of war is displaced by the ethic of transformative resistance.
African philosophy, particularly Ubuntu, articulates an ethics of relationality. Here, war is not just a political or military event – it is a rupture in the moral fabric of the community. Justice is not retribution but restoration; peace is not the absence of war but the renewal of mutual recognition and care. As Ramose (2002) argues, Ubuntu posits that to be human is to ‘be-in-relation’ – and that ethical responsibility entails the repair of this relation when it is torn.
Finally, decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel and Achille Mbembe compel us to see war not as isolated eruptions but as structural phenomena. For Fanon (1961), colonialism is itself a form of war – waged through domination, objectification and epistemic violence. Dussel (2013) reframes ethics from the perspective of the ‘damned of the earth’ – those excluded from the Western moral community. And Mbembe (2017) shows how contemporary power operates through technologies of control, rendering certain lives disposable. In this context, the question is no longer simply is war just? – but who defines justice? and whose wars are recognised?
All these traditions offer insights that do not merely supplement the Western canon – they challenge its presumptions. They call for a global ethics that is not merely universalist in abstraction but also pluralist in engagement – an ethics rooted in listening, in complexity and in shared vulnerability.
This leads to what may be called moving thinking. Rooted in Aristotle’s conception of motion [kinesis] as the unfolding from potentiality to actuality (Aristotle 2019), moving thinking becomes a philosophical disposition that resists closure and insists on judgement as a dynamic, relational act. It is not relativism but responsiveness: an ongoing attunement to history, plurality and the shifting contours of moral life (Dahlmayr 2017). Such thinking refuses to freeze war into a static category. It asks: what conditions give rise to war, who decides, whose suffering is visible and whose is not? It seeks not only to regulate violence but to transform the structures that make it intelligible and acceptable.
Future ethical work must render this responsiveness concrete. Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapon systems should be embedded within ethical-legal frameworks consistent with Just War Theory – yet adapted to algorithmic decision-making, data accountability and the distribution of agency between humans and machines. Criteria such as jus in bello and proportionality must now include algorithmic transparency, human oversight and responsibility for unintended harm.
Equally crucial is the development of a global, intercultural ethics that draws together Western, Asian, African and indigenous traditions. Concepts such as compassion, harmony and relational care can enrich rights-based ethics by grounding them in lived solidarity. Global governance structures should institutionalise such dialogue, ensuring that moral reflection keeps pace with technological and geopolitical transformation.
Future research and philosophical dialogue must therefore explore how communicative and intercultural rationality can operate within transnational and digital domains. Scholars across philosophy, law and technology must collaborate to devise vocabularies capable of addressing moral agency in distributed systems so that ethical deliberation remains possible when decisions are partially automated.
The challenge of our time is to hold three registers together: the normative vigilance of Just War Theory; the historical-ontological insight of Hegel, Heidegger and non-Western traditions and the communicative ethics of Habermas, with its call for democratic legitimacy and public reason. Philosophy thus becomes more than reflective distance – it becomes a praxis of presence: an ongoing attentiveness to suffering and an insistence on rehumanising decision-making in a world increasingly governed by code.
In the end, the deepest question is not about war alone. It is about how we judge, how we relate and how we remain human in the face of violence – a question that moving thinking must continue to confront, critically and compassionately, in the technological age.
Acknowledgements
Competing interests
The author declares that no financial or personal relationships inappropriately influenced the writing of this article.
CRediT authorship contribution
Pieter Duvenage: Conceptualisation, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. The author confirms that this work is entirely their own, has reviewed the article, approved the final version for submission and publication, and takes full responsibility for the integrity of its findings
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This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
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