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Many recent defenders of just war theory have denied that punishment is a just cause for war. Against this consensus, I argue that punishment is a just cause for war. To defend this claim, I appeal to recent work in social ontology and social epistemology (especially the work of Christian List and Philip Pettit) that shows that groups and not just individuals can be responsible for their actions. For this paper, I defend the thesis that an international treaty organization may initiate a war against one of its member-states for the purposes of punishing that member-state. Many critics of punitive wars have taken the war itself to be the punishment, but I consider the war to be merely the means by which one brings an offending state to accept punitive terms. I show that punitive terms can achieve the three aims of punishment: retribution, deterrence, and reform. Finally, I respond to two objections: that no punitive war could be just because victims of aggression are never impartial in judging their aggressors and that widespread acceptance of the justice of punitive wars would return us to a more warlike and barbaric stage of human history.

Keywords: just war theory; war; punishment; punitive war; collective intentionality; ethics of war; retribution; deterrence