Justice with humanity Hugo Grotius and the ethics of international conflict

In this dissertation, I offer a reexamination of the thought of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a founding theorist of international law and justice. While Grotius has been widely recognized for contributing a framework of rights for conceiving the relations among states, there has been little scholarly attention to the norms beyond justice that his work brings to bear on the questions of diplomacy and war. A recurring form of argument in Grotius' major work, The Rights of War and Peace, is that the possession of a right to resort to war does not entail that it ought to be exercised for humanitarian considerations, we ought in some circumstances to forgo the enforcement of a right and abstain from entering into even a justified war.I begin by defending a particular reading of Grotius according to which justice requires only that we respect the rights of others, not that we fully exercise our own rights, particularly those which permit us to use force against others. I examine, in particular, how this conception applies to Grotius' treatment of the right to punish international offenses. The exercise of such rights is not, I argue, an obligation of justice but rather is properly guided by consideration of the humanitarian consequences. I then give an account of how this principle of humanitarian concern relates to the dictates of justice in the overall framework of Grotius' thought, arguing that he does not---as some have suggested---associate it with a particular religious (i.e., Christian) point of view but rather seeks to make it relevant, like justice, to the broader human community.Finally, I consider how Grotius' approach helps to frame the moral considerations relevant to recent international conflicts. I examine both the grounds for humanitarian concern in modern warfare and the difficulties involved in establishing rights to use force. On the basis of an updated 'Grotian' approach to such conflicts, I propose that the commonly defended requirement that war be a 'last resort' entails that both parties---even ones who consider themselves firmly in the right---must be willing to give up some advantages in order to reach a peaceful resolution.