POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Two kinds of just cause are recognized by Suarez If one’s country is attacked, one has the right to defend it in arms But it can also be legitimate to wage an oVensive war: a sovereign may order an attack on another state if that is the only way to remedy a grave injustice to oneself or one’s allies But hostilities may be initiated only if there is good hope of victory; otherwise the recourse to arms will fail to remedy the injustice which provided the initial ground for war The third condition has three elements Before beginning war, a sovereign must oVer the potential enemy the opportunity to remedy the evil complained of Only if he fails to so may he be attacked In the course of the war, only such violence must be used as is necessary to achieve victory After the war, compensation and just punishment may be exacted, and wartime wrongdoers may be executed The second of these elements, Suarez says, rules out deliberate attacks on innocent people But who are the innocent? Suarez gives a deWnition that is narrower than that of some of his successors Children, women, and those unable to bear arms are declared innocent by the natural law, and positive law rules out attacks on ambassadors and clerics But all others, Suarez maintains, are legitimate targets ‘All other persons are considered guilty, for human judgement looks upon those able to take up arms as having actually done so’ (13.7.10) Suarez accepts too that in war it is likely that some innocent people will be killed as part of the collateral damage inXicted in the course of an attack What is ruled out is the deliberate targeting of the innocent Suarez sees his rules as primarily binding on sovereigns: it is they who have the duty to satisfy themselves that, on the balance of probabilities, the war they are contemplating is a just one A regular soldier, ordered to Wght, can assume that the war is just unless it is manifestly unjust; and even a mercenary volunteer can put the burden of the inquiry on to the commander of his brigade Suarez’s teaching on the morality of warfare was taken over without acknowledgement and given much wider circulation by Hugo Grotius, a polymath Dutch lawyer and diplomat who published in 1625 a celebrated treatise, De Iure Belli et Pacis (‘On the rights and wrongs of war and peace’) This set the doctrine of the just war in the context of a moral theory which was deliberately designed to be detachable from the notion of divine law This did not at all mean that Grotius was an unbeliever, but his experience 282