The continued need for Just War Theory

George Weigel’s recent essay titled “Why Just War Theory Always Matters” underscores the abiding importance of that principle. Just War Theory (JWT) is essential to Catholic (and other) public officials seeking to operate in an ethical, principled way in the real world.

Weigel has down yeoman work in underscoring the abiding significance of JWT at a time when many ecclesiastical circles operate out of what he calls “functional pacificism”—that is, we don’t deny JWT but we also never imagine a conflict we really think might be “just”. That lack of ecclesiastical leadership has left public officials—including many Catholics—bereft of  “accompaniment” when they face real questions of self-defense in a world that does not just sit around and “dialogue.”

I have benefitted from Weigel’s writings on JWT over the years, but I think there are two contemporary issues we need to address.

Ethical imbalance

By ethical imbalance, I mean what happens when one side plays by ethical rules in warfare and one doesn’t? In highlighting his problem, I am not just focusing on the sometimes strategic and/or tactical advantages that the ethical cheat gains in battle. I also want to focus on the advantages the ethical cheat acquires in propaganda, especially in a world populated by functional pacifists and useful idiots.

If one side decides to fight ethically against another that won’t, the first side’s combat is going to be that much harder and that much longer. If your unethical enemy puts human hostages in front of you as their shields, doing your best to abide by ethical principles has consequences. It will prolong the conflict. It will probably increase collateral victims (which redounds to the unethical enemy’s propaganda program). It will expose your forces to increased danger.

Now, the increase in unintended victims may be explainable under the Principle of Double Effect, but that introduces additional moral principles into the picture, principles with which many people are unfamiliar and no small number of revisionist “Catholic” moral theologians have been undermining for half a century. And although increased danger on the part of fighting forces is part of being a belligerent, it is still a reality: even belligerents don’t want to die unnecessarily because somebody else tries to stack the ethical deck against them.

And, in any event, the prolonged and intense nature of a military operation conducted in such ethical fashion is likely to cause a public whose attention span has been radically attenuated to lose sight of the initial justice in self-defense that animated that operation. (That public is probably also ignorant of the nuances of the norms for “ethical prosecution” of war and likely to boil them down simply to numbers which, paradoxically, was the faulty moral system Catholic revisionist moral theologians pedaled in the Church post-1968.)

In the end, fighting morally may in practice perhaps be self-defeating. That doesn’t deny the necessity of morality, but it is a reality that, too, must be reckoned with.

How does one counteract that unethical opponent, especially if it is only a quasi-state or a non-state actor (e.g., a terrorist organization)? How does an international community that professes commitment to ethical prosecution of war disadvantage the ethical cheat’s gain?

If this sounds a lot like the current conflict in Gaza, well, there’s plenty of room there for a real debate about what JWT entails.

The “functional pacifism” in vogue in some Church circles has caused these questions to be ignored rather than addressed. That’s irresponsible. A public official is responsible for his country’s right to self-defense against unjust aggression and needs ethical guidance, not pious fervorinos.

Nuclear War

When Weigel first started writing about war in the 1980s, the backdrop was the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the United States, epitomized then by Ronald Reagan’s decision to deploy Pershing missiles to western Europe. Weigel then rightly pointed out that nuclear war had a distortive impact on JWT: seeing war primarily through the prism of nuclear war led again to a kind of “functional pacifism” that declared all war banned. However, as Weigel noted, even conventional war was not going away: there has been no mass retreat to blacksmiths to beat swords into ploughshares. Pretending otherwise again had the practical effect of depriving real decisionmakers in the real world of real ethical principles to address reality.

Nuclear war poses particular ethical questions: there’s no denying that. But we should not let the shadow of nuclear war overshadow the reality that there are bad groups, even bad countries, that commit aggression against which victims have a right to defend themselves. We are losing sight of that truth.

Take Annie Jacobsen’s new best-seller, titled Nuclear War: A Scenario (Dutton, March 2024). It’s the latest installment of a genre dating back to the 1980s, which can be described as “make them weapons go away.” Back then it was the 1983 film “The Day After” or Jonathan Schell’s book Fate of the Earth (Jacobsen is also slated for a movie debut). The unifying thread in many of these works was de facto Western disarmament, with no discussion of how one would ensure concurrent Russian disarmament (or, today, disarmament by even worse actors). Presumably, a St. Jude novena would solve that.

Jacobsen’s book envisions a 100-minute nuclear war in a fit of pique set off in the late afternoon by North Korea, which then elicits U.S. response, Russian retaliation and, in her scenario, a stone-age type world until about AD 24000. Again, without concrete proposals how to eliminate nuclear threats, the book peddles fear.

It’s the same kind of fear Vladimir Putin has excelled at. Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, he does a nuclear test or changes a nuclear profile in the assumption the Western world will be so cowed as to back down and concede. It’s another example of ethical cheating that makes a bad poker hand win.

Nuclear war is a particular subcategory of JWT. But even if we could verifiably eliminate every existing nuclear weapon on the planet, there’s one truth Schell points out that I don’t think has ever gotten the attention it deserves: nuclear weapons will not go away. They will not go away because even if every extant one is dismantled, the knowledge of how to build them will be there. The genie of Alamogordo isn’t going back into that bottle. So, as in conventional war, the problem also involves stopping ethical cheats in warfare.

So, any effort to cope with the reality of even nuclear war is not going to be solved by diplomacy, negotiations, treaties, or the IAEA. Those things will help, but the solution has to be ethical: it has to be a moral conversion that recognizes not that “war is bad” but that “justice must be sustained.” Neither diplomacy nor law alone will ever replace the moral underpinnings they require: that’s why the Ten Commandments underpin any just legal-political system.

Just War Theory and the dictatorship of relativism

And that kind of ethical conversion requires people to grapple with the dictatorship of relativism, because it demands a recognition that there’s not “your truth” and “my truth,” “your choice” and “my choice,” but the truth that makes a choice good or evil. This one sentence gores a lot more sacred cows than even JWT.

It also requires us to grapple with the truth that there may be values worth dying for. Values such as freedom and liberty.

While this may sound like a throwaway line, the West’s recent experiences during the COVID lockdown should be cautionary: not once did we abandon core principles in the name of “saving lives.” Letting relatives die alone. Burying them without funerals. Abridging religious liberty. Breaking down interpersonal relations (at least those less than six feet apart). Compelling people to take experimental medicines.

Four years after COVID, we still have no small number of twenty- and thirty-somethings masked on the street in the equivalent of secular burqas. Has survival become our paramount value, posing the question: will we fight—and die–for other values? Or is that something we only nostalgically remember when we invoke the memory of the boys of Pointe-du-Hoc and the kids of the Warsaw Uprising?

Justice—not peace—must be sustained at the foundation of our international discourse because it is the underpinning of our rights, including the rights of countries and peoples to freedom, sovereignty, and self-determination. Anything less yields a “peace” that is merely the peace of the grave.

Catholic World Report