Can Wars Be Just?

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I pull heavily from Leonidas Konstantakos' "Stoicism and Just War Theory" doctoral dissertation in this episode. I encourage you to download it and read it yourself: ⁠https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/record/13724⁠

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In this episode, I take up a difficult question: can war ever be just in Stoicism? Not justified. Not strategically useful. Not legal. But truly just — meaning virtuous and right.

I begin by setting aside the two dominant modern frameworks for thinking about war: utilitarianism and deontology. Utilitarianism evaluates war based on consequences. If enough good results from it, the war can be defended. Deontology evaluates war based on rules. Some actions are always wrong, regardless of outcomes. Stoicism does neither.

Using the firebombing of Dresden and the ticking time bomb scenario, I explain how the Stoic approach shifts the focus away from body counts and legal rules and onto character. For the Stoic, external outcomes — even death and destruction — are morally indifferent. What matters is the internal condition of the agents making decisions. Are they acting from justice, courage, and wisdom? Or from fear, ambition, pride, or the desire to dominate?

Drawing on Cicero’s On Duties and later Stoic interpretation, I outline the core criteria: right intention, proper authority, discrimination, and war as a last resort aimed at peace. A war undertaken from a corrupted value structure — where victory is treated as a good in itself — reflects vice. A war undertaken from rational concern for preserving the cosmopolis, after all other paths have been exhausted, may be just.

I also address torture and why the Stoic rejects it, not because of rule-following or cost-benefit calculations, but because it corrupts the agent. It reflects disordered judgment and a failure of oikeiôsis — a failure to recognize another rational being as part of the same moral community. Stoicism is not rule-based. It is character-based.

I then turn to the present. We cannot fully know the internal motives of national leaders. We can only infer. War may be just or unjust depending on the reasoning behind it. That reasoning is ultimately visible only to the agent and their daimon — their inner rational faculty.

Finally, I bring the question home. Most of us are not heads of state. But the Stoic framework for just war is simply Stoic ethics scaled up. The same question applies in everyday conflict: am I acting from virtue, or from ego and fear? The work of the prokoptôn is constant self-examination, especially when stakes are high.

War can be just in Stoicism. But only if it is conducted by people whose souls are ordered toward peace, whose intentions are clean, and whose reason has honestly left them no alternative.

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