People who start wars may claim that they are starting wars because of principle when they are really starting them because of expediency.
The author of the submitted blog post is an economist, and as his example points out, if people are FRANK that what they are arguing about is personal expediency, they can usually be persuaded to make reasonable trade-offs that reach a mutual, peaceful agreement. But if people think "justice" (who defines that?) must always be defended to the utmost, they are unlikely to reach agreement with other people who have different ideas of what justice is.
A readily apparent example: is there some basis in "justice" to say which national government should control the territory of east Jerusalem?
> People who start wars may claim that they are starting wars because of principle when they are really starting them because of expediency.
This makes it very hard to evaluate whether "if you want war, work for justice" is a true statement. (The counterargument runs something like "appeasement never works, etc. etc." Of course, the proponents of this position find lots of examples where appeasement fails, but that's obviously only half the story.)
Yes and no. Yes insofar as a majority of the Western (United States and EU to a lesser degree) military actions post-Cold War have been for humanitarian reasons; Kosovo, Somalia, original Iraq war, etc. We (the West) sent troops into the situation not because our national interests were threatened, but because some brutal dictator / warlord / whatever was committing genocide / murdering all his people / etc. And we (again, the West) thought this was wrong. So there is a moral component here.
However, these military actions represent a small fraction of the wars going on around the world, most of which are internal civil conflict; Chad, Nigeria, ethnic conflict and insurgency in India, etc. Not really much of a moral component in these conflicts.
