Geoffrey Claussen, “A Jewish Perspective on War, Scripture, and Moral Accounting,” The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, vol. 14, no. 1 (2015).
In this piece, I explore how biblical texts, musar traditions, and Jewish traditions more broadly might inform decision-making about the initiation of war. I focus on the sort of moral accounting (
cheshbon ha-nefesh) practices advocated by Menachem Mendel Lefin and on the virtues of equanimity and justice, giving particular attention to the need to be wary of the temptations that Biblical texts may offer.
The complete article is available online (
here or
here), and it has also been reprinted in
Virtue Ethics, ed. Tom Angier (Routledge, 2018), vol. 2, pp. 169-185.
