There is a long tradition in philosophy of arguing over the idea of a “just war,” i.e. a war which is rationally defensible for at least one of the participants. In the West, we usually trace this back to the Greeks, but apparently, it goes back as far as Ancient Egypt, and the Chinese and Indians have their own Just War traditions. I don’t want to litigate the history of just war philosophy, rather I want to suggest that the very idea of a “just war” is problematic at best and, moreover, anti-human, certainly from the perspective of the people who are going to die in that war, a war that isn’t about justice for the vast majority of them