.17-18 Century Transformation Of The Western Just War Theory And Its Plight

People never quite debate about justifiability, legality and righteousness of Wars in theory and in practice. As we all see, however in the history of human thoughts, in particular of Western political and juridical thoughts, there exist still the traditional critics of Wars, in order to make the concepts of justifiability, legality and righteousness clearly, which produce the Western Just War Theory. It studies what war is and what should be done in the war from three perspectives: of political reason, of juridical system and of ethical principles. The academics in the field of International Relation reduce the problems about the relationship between war and ethics to this theoretical paradigm. To some extent it offers an important evidence for the justifiability and righteousness of wars.The just war theory develops from the ancient time. We can trace it back to the ancient Greek, It exists for more than 2000 years. It has changed a lot with the dramatically change of the western social structure in 17 and 18 centuries. With its temporalization a new question has been arisen, that is the justice of wars.However, at the same time the ideas of national sovereignty, the belief of nationalism and the formation of national democratic states lead to the declination of this theory. It did not reconstruct until the Second World War.In spite of these difficulties, the Western just war theory still plays an important role in the practically political activities.In this Paper, we examine the Western just war theory to find a good way to limit the war. We also inquiry the ethical ideas of wars from western traditional perspectives for the pragmatically aims.