OK, Rug, school me on Augustine!

[stone space]

BTW, the blame goes all the way back to Augustine.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1218&pid=227223

My brain categorizes things alphabetically for some reason, I'm afraid.

Augustine and Aquinas just end up on the same page for me.

Damn! His Wikipedia page even says "Just War"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#Just_war

[rug]

1. Lol! I'm no expert but here's a good start:

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Augustine/augustine_justwar.html

As the article points out, he talked about the right to go to war in the first place (jus ad bellum) and the moral conduct of a war, once started (jus in bello).

This might have been all well and good when the heaviest weapon of war was an elephant but, even as a philosophical exercise, it's time has long passed.

Aquinas reduced the morality of war to a syllogism, as he did everything. I'm glad his primary interest was not sex.

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Augustine/augustine_justwar.html

[stone space]

2. I'm reminded of old discussions on gay marriage over the last couple of decades.

Aquinas reduced the morality of war to a syllogism, as he did everything. I'm glad his primary interest was not sex.

This one guy would talk about how, when trying to decide on whether to marry his future spouse, talked about how he divided a single page with a column for "pros" and another for "cons".

Fortunately for their relationship, the list of "pros" were longer than the list of "cons".

I couldn't imagine myself ever doing something like that, so in my irreverence, I posted a link to a scene from an old Star Trek episode that I remembered.

The scene works better as a comment of the uses of logic in love than it does as a comment on the uses of logic in war, but here it is, anyway:

"Sit down and be quiet. My God Spock you almost died. So, for once you will lay there and be quiet. Nurse if he gets out of line you may stun him."

Spock brow rises at this.

"Emotional isn't she?" Spock says to Sarek

"She always has been so." He replies. This gets him a playful slap from his wife.

"Oh you," she says. "I am human."

Sarek seems to almost smile. "Yes, my very human wife."

"Why did you marry her?" Spock asks

"It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time."