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October 24, 2001
Getting `just war' straight
St. Augustine: Leaders have moral duty to pursue justice
By George Weigel
Catholic commentary on the grave moral issues involved in responding to the attack on the United States on Sept. 11, and in taking effective measures to rid the world of terrorism and its capacity for mass violence, has been burdened by a shift in just-war thinking. The shift began decades ago, but its full import is only now coming into clear focus.
It's important, at the outset, to understand what the just war tradition is, and isn't. The just-war tradition is not an algebra that provides custom-made, clear-cut answers under all circumstances. Rather, it is a kind of ethical calculus, in which moral reasoning and rigorous empirical analysis are meant to work together, in order to provide guidance to public authorities on whom the responsibilities of decision-making fall.
From its beginnings in St. Augustine, just-war thinking has been based on the presumption — better, the classic moral judgment — that rightly-constituted public authorities have the moral duty to pursue justice, even at risk to themselves and those for whom they are responsible. That is why, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas discussed just war under the broader subject of the meaning of "charity," and why the eminent Protestant theologian Paul Ramsey argued that the just war tradition is an attempt to think through the public meaning of the commandment of love-of-neighbor.
In today's international context, "justice" includes the defense of freedom (especially religious freedom), and the defense of a minimum of order in international affairs. For these are the crucial components of the peace that is possible in a fallen world.
This presumption — that the pursuit of justice is a moral obligation of statecraft — shapes the first set of moral criteria in the just war tradition, which scholars call the "ius ad bellum" or "war-decision law":
l Is the cause a just one?
lWill the war be conducted by a responsible public authority?
l Is there a "right intention" (which, among other things, precludes acts of vengeance or reprisal)?
l Is the contemplated action "proportionate": Is it appropriate to the goal (or just cause)?
l Is the good to be accomplished likely to be greater than the evil that would be suffered if nothing were done, or if the use of armed force were avoided for the sake of other types of measures?
l Have other remedies been tried and found wanting or are other remedies prima facie, unlikely to be effective?
lIs there a reasonable chance of success?
It is only when these prior moral questions have been answered that the second set of just-war criteria — what scholars call the "ius in bello" or "war-conduct law" — come into play, logically. The positive answers to the first set of questions, the "war-decision" questions, create the moral framework for addressing the two great "war-conduct" issues: "proportionality," which requires the use of no more force than necessary to vindicate the just cause; and "discrimination," or what we today call "non-combatant immunity."
Under the moral pressures created by the threat of nuclear war, Catholic attention focused almost exclusively on "war-conduct" questions in the decades after World War II. This, in turn, led to what can only be described as an inversion of the just war tradition: the claim, frequently encountered in both official and scholarly Catholic commentary today, that the just war tradition "begins with a presumption against violence."
It does not. It did not begin with such a presumption historically, and it cannot begin with such a presumption theologically. For as one of America's most distinguished just-war theorists, James Turner Johnson has put it, to do this — to effectively reduce the tradition to "war-conduct" questions — is to put virtually the entire weight of the tradition on what are inevitably contingent judgments. This error, in turn, distorts our moral and political vision, as it did when it led many Catholic thinkers to conclude, in the 1980s, that nuclear weapons, not communist regimes, were the primary threat to peace — a conclusion falsified by history in 1989.
That just-war fighting must observe the moral principle of non-combatant immunity goes without saying. That this is the place to begin the moral analysis is theologically muddled and unlikely to lead to wise statecraft. If "war-conduct" judgments drive the analysis, the moral foundations are knocked out from under the entire edifice.
George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
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