Can Wars Be Just?

Practical Stoicism

Tanner Campbell

Self-improvement, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 723 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Join Prokoptôn, a private community of dedicated practicing Stoics working together to improve. Learn more at https://skool.com/prokopton

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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

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, America is at war again, this time with Iran again. And that's a heck of a headline to wake up to on a Monday morning. And so here I am, of course, doing an episode on war in general and whether or not it can be just. Now, I don't mean justified. I mean just, as in virtuous, as in right. Before that, though, I'd like to announce something. I've
0:22.2	launched Prokaptan, a private community of practicing and dedicated Stoics who are seeking other
0:27.9	like-minded individuals to practice practicing with. Within this community, I provide group and
0:33.4	private Stoicism coaching. This is not a public group, and that is intentional. There are plenty of
0:38.5	public spaces to discuss the philosophy of Stoicism, and the problem with many of them is that they
0:43.1	lack scholarship, expertise, and importantly, membership standards. Anyone can post anything on
0:50.3	Reddit or in a Facebook group, and anyone can join. This means that those groups tend to get
0:55.0	really noisy, really quickly, and are in general of extremely low quality, lower and lower
1:00.5	quality as they grow. Procopton is not like that. So if you're looking for a place to practice,
1:06.0	connect with me, hear from academics, other experts, and discuss stoicism and your thoughts and ideas in a private
1:12.3	welcoming and, frankly, enjoyable place to be. You're going to want to learn more about Procopton,
1:18.0	and you can do that by clicking the first link in the show notes of this episode. You go and do
1:22.3	that, and while you're doing so, I'll go ahead and start the episode.
1:40.6	Thank you. while you're doing so, I'll go ahead and start the episode. Just wars. Are they possible in stoicism? In plain language, yes. Yes, they absolutely are, but how and what are the details?
1:49.6	Well, first, we have to do away with the utilitarian and deontological approaches to justifying war, which are kind of the ways we're used to.
1:59.4	The utilitarian approach says it's all about the outcomes or the
2:03.0	consequences, while the deontological approach says that some actions are simply always right
2:08.5	or wrong, regardless of the circumstances. A historical example of utilitarian reasoning might be
2:14.8	the firebombing of Dresden. That bombing killed tens of thousands of German civilians. A utilitarian reasoning might be the firebombing of Dresden. That bombing killed tens of thousands of
2:19.2	Germans. A utilitarian defense of this would argue that the destruction of a major German logistics
2:25.2	and industrial hub, combined with the devastating blow to German civilian morale, shorten the war
2:31.6	and thereby prevented an even greater total loss of life. The suffering
	...

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