JUAN GINÉS DE SEPÚLVEDA (1490–1573)

This chapter examines the just war thinking of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a sixteenth-century humanist philosopher and theologian who is best known as the antagonist of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. At Valladolid in 1550-51, Sepúlveda and Las Casas famously debated whether Spain had just reasons for its wars in the Americas. Sepúlveda is sometimes presented as an absurd figure whose defenses of Spain’s wars can be easily dismissed as focus is given instead to the passionate defenses of Amerindian rights advanced by Las Casas. But Sepúlveda’s just war arguments are nuanced and carefully made. And they are all the more disturbing for this fact. He developed a sophisticated account of just war to justify the brutal subjugation of Indigenous peoples. It is an account that is especially disquieting since we can still feel its reverberations in some of the ways that we theorize just war today.