MetaCatholic

In one of the last posts on the thirty-nine articles, I referred briefly to ideas of the just war. The very concept tends to stir up all sorts of sloppy thinking, and I want to clarify my own thoughts a little bit. I’ve also been prompted a bit by this post from John Hobbins. I should start by saying that I don’t regard this as a “theory” despite most everyone’s tendency to refer to “just war theory” and more a set of pragmatic theological ways of thinking about war, justice and the conduct of nations.

At one level, there is very little in the scriptures that offers a secure footing for Christian thinking. One can, however, appeal indirectly to the prophetic witness which sees increasingly sees the wars against Israel of Assyria and Babylon as punishment for the lack of justice in the land. One can also appeal to the passing reference in Romans to the role of the state as promoting virtue and preventing vice. Taken together these suggest with a range of other scattered references, one can see a role of the governing authority as one of establishing justice. (From that point of view, it is less any particular action in Iraq that provides the basis for criticising the current Iraq war, but the blatant and manifest injustice of Guantanamo, where the US government has abrogated the basic tenets of justice.) Behind and beyond this is a constant summons to, and promise of, God’s gift of perfect peace and justice going hand in hand in the eschatological era. The human longing for both (which often seem incompatible in the present) is legitimated and undergirded by God’s promise. But this promise also challenges any perception that peace means an absence of war, achieved by conniving in the turning of a blind eye to injustice.

In many respects the just war tradition begins with Augustine:

Think, then, of this first of all, when you are arming for the battle, that even your bodily strength is a gift of God; for, considering this, you will not employ the gift of God against God. For, when faith is pledged, it is to be kept even with the enemy against whom the war is waged, how much more with the friend for whom the battle is fought! Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace. For peace is not sought in order to the kindling of war, but war is waged in order that peace may be obtained. Therefore, even in waging war, cherish the spirit of a peacemaker, that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace; for our Lord says:”Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9) If, however, peace among men be so sweet as procuring temporal safety, how much sweeter is that peace with God which procures for men the eternal felicity of the angels! Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you. As violence is used towards him who rebels and resists, so mercy is due to the vanquished or the captive, especially in the case in which future troubling of the peace is not to be feared. (Letter 189, to Boniface)

What is particularly notable is that Augustine begins this letter with a reminder of the commandment to love ones neighbour as oneself. War, as a necessity, is to be governed, strange as it may seem, by the commandment to love. That is to say, it is more Christian when it is directed to the aid of another, than when it is exercised only in self-defence. It is about righting injustice, and obtaining peace for the other, not for aggrandizing oneself and one’s cause. This must then govern not only the reason for, and goal of, any war; it must also govern the conduct of the war, and the way in which the enemy is treated.

From these roots arose a tradition of thinking about war, concerned as much with how the human tendency to violence is to be restrained in war as with the reasons for going to war in the first place. It has had various characteristics, which are unfortunately often understood as a series of boxes to be ticked, but are better seen as practical considerations arising out of this overall consideration of how one loves a neighbour, both in rescuing the oppressed neighbour, and in putting right the unjust one. I propose briefly to enumerate and reflect on some of the most important of these practical considerations.

War must be declared by a legitimate authority. This has traditionally been understood to mean a government of some shape or form, since it is to governments that the task of establishing and maintaining justice is given. (One can see that in terms of the kind of divine  ordering Paul talks about in Romans 13, or in less theological terms as the moral purpose and legitimation of government generally.) Then war is the temporary and extraordinary extension into the international arena of that permanent and ordinary role of establishing justice within the national one. In the mediaeval period the papacy in theory could sometimes play the role of a supranational authority and judge, and in the modern world the United Nations has by treaty a somewhat similar role. Unfortunately, in practice both the mediaeval papacy and the modern UN have been hamstrung by the political realities and disputes which often made and make them appear ineffectual, biased and unable to exercise such a role. It might well be desirable to work for, and then with, a more effective UN, but the lessons of history are not entirely encouraging.

The legitimate authority must have a just cause and a good intention. That is, the waging of war must be seen, ultimately as provoked by a particular injustice (the genocide of a whole ethnic group, for example) and the desire to save the victims from that injustice. It has to be seen, even if extraordinary, as a proper extension of the ordinary work of government in promoting justice, and passing judgement on the wrong-doer for the sake of the common good. It is quite easy to see how, in theory at least, just causes can provide excuses for imperialistic and economic intentions. It is less easy to see in practice, how the self-interests of nations can be entirely disengaged from the moral calculus.

It should be a last resort, and have a good chance of success. I bracket these together, because they are where the moral and the practical, the theological and political, judgements become hopelessly entangled. What does a last resort actually mean? Does it mean when there is no other option, which is what many have taken it to mean, or when other reasonable options seem unlikely to meet with success? Those who take the former route make much of “sanctions” but year upon year of sanctions are in fact a war of attrition against a civilian population, carried out by non-military means. “Sanctions” often seem to me to have become a moral vacuum, punishing the innocent citizen to avoid attacking the guilty leader, a substitute for war rather than a last warning before it. Again, when do negotiations become a fruitless option, used by the “enemy” as a means of delaying things until they have placed their forces or their material logistics in a more favourable position to engage in combat? “Last resort” is a hard-headed military and political judgement, and not simply the moral declaration of an armchair theologian.

It might be said that almost the reverse is true of a “good chance of success”. It sounds like a purely pragmatic judgement, but in fact is again rooted in the theological perception of war as love of neighbour, and the establishment of justice. If the drastic means of war, which is always be known to have a serious moral downside in death and destruction is to be in any way seen as promoting justice and righting wrong, government has to be able to be reasonably certain that the result of going to war will in the end be better than that of not going to war. The moral and the pragmatic are inseparable here, which is why the ideas of “just war” can’t be seen as a theory legitimating war, but only as a way of thinking about it that brings some ethical considerations to bear on hard-headed pragmatic judgements.

Finally, there are reflections on the means of waging war, that they should be proportionate and discriminate. The latter of these takes its shape from the act of judgement that is the calling of government. If the purpose of war is fundamentally to prosecute the guilty and liberate the innocent, then it must be carried out in a way that serves that end, as far as lies within the power of the government to do so. The former follows from reflecting on the need to serve justice. A disproportionate response will never be a just one. In both these aims we find ourselves in the odd situation that it is both theoretically possible to be more disproportionate than ever before (the moral problem with any weapon of mass destruction) and pragmatically possible to be more discriminate than ever before (with laser-targeted and satellite-guided weaponry). One of the lesser noted facts of the last two Gulf Wars (whatever their other rights and wrongs) has been the way in which judgements about discrimination and targeting have become part of the ordinary public discourse and strategic prosecution of war.

The just war tradition is far from offering a perfect solution, or even comprehensive guidance to those who have to consider the options of war. It does, however, offer some ways of thinking morally about what governments do that are rooted in the moral and theological discourse about justice, and the human obligation to love the neighbour. As such, I still think it is the best we’ve got, for all its imperfections, if we want to live in the real world.