Grotius War Ethics Research

From the survival rule, War means do anything to destroy the opponent and save oneself. And the introduction of ethics into the war means to develop an ethical regulation to avoid the bloody killings.With his profound legal background and genius-like imagination, Grotius integrated war and ethics, and proposed a humanitarian war ethics thought. Grotius praised rational natural law; he believed that all things, even God, must adhere to rational natural law. By extension, the human war must also follow the laws of reason. Although Grotius did not create the notion of "war ethics", his book "The Rights of War and Peace" outlines a series of ethics thoughts, such as:war is waged for peace; even with legitimate reasons, war must not be waged hastily; draw the non-violent solutions for international disputes in order to avoid the outbreak of war.Follow the logic of rational law, Grotius proposed five fundamental ethical principles of rational natural law, including, principle of observance, of neutral state, pacifism, humanism, and freedom of the seas. With these principles, Grotius conceived a practical and universal valuable war ethics ideology.Grotius is known as "Father of International Law"; the people nowadays sing high praise for his ideas of international law but neglect his thoughts about war ethics. This article will extract the thoughts of war ethics from his master books, analyze the thoughts and discuss their practical significance from an ethical angle and theoretical enlightenment to contemporary globalization and the international security order. This new perspective would help people to further study on Grotius and his books; he was not only a "Father of International Law", but also a humanitarian ethicist.