Asking the Right Questions About Justifying War

If you think of “just war” theory as something associated with pacifism or as a path for justifying not using military tactics in many world situations, you’re looking at the subject from the wrong perspective, Catholic commentator George Weigel said Tuesday in a talk at Marquette Law School.

You’re looking at it the way President Barack Obama does – which is “almost entirely inside out and upside down,” Weigel said in a lecture sponsored by the student chapters of the Federalist Society and St. Thomas More Society.

Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is author of a widely read biography of Pope John Paul II and other books and a commentator on NBC on Catholic news.

He gave Obama credit for using Nobel Peace Prize speech recently to discuss the need to go to war against evil that exists in the world, but he said the underpinning of Obama’s justification of war was built too heavily on factors that were of lower priority than the main pillars of the subject in thought going back to St. Augustine. 

Those factors include regarding military action as a last resort or something that should only be used to respond to aggression.

As Weigel put it, Obama and others view the concept of just war as a way of setting up hurdles before a war can be launched. He said traditional thinking views the concept of just war as a theory of governance under which a legitimate authority has an obligation to build and defend a society based on justice, freedom, security, civil unity, and peace.

Weigel said the first question to be considered in determining whether a war is just is whether the government involved has the moral authority to use force. For example, he said, the president of the United States has such authority while Osama bin Laden does not.

The second question is whether such an authority is pursuing a just cause.

And the third question is whether the war is being pursued with the right intentions, including the furtherance of a moral, secure peace.

Weigel urged his audience to “ramp up our thinking about those three questions” in deciding whether military action is just. Other factors, such as using war as a last resort, are also part of the picture, but should play a lesser role, he said. He said this approach might serve well in making decisions about what to do about nuclear threats from Iran or North Korea.

Did Obama’s Nobel Price speech revive moral reasoning about just wars or harm the development of such thinking? Weigel said, “The answer tilts toward the second possibility.” He gave Obama credit for startling “appeasement-minded elites” in Europe with the notion that there is evil that needs to be fought, but the president’s concept of just wars was not anchored in the key questions Weigel listed.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Peter Heyne

    Thank you for reporting on this lecture, which is now available via a
    webcast for those who could not attend.

  2. Martin Tanz

    Maybe I need to read up on this, but as someone trained in the realist paradigm of international affairs this whole just war theory strikes me as nebulous. At the very least, it is not a very useful tool in understanding why nations and non-state actors sometimes go to war and what can be done minimize the outbreak of war with all the suffering, destruction, and disorder that always follow. As Professor Hylton used to say in first-year property, let’s unpack this just war theory.

    1. Does a government have the moral authority to use force? In other words, only governments possess moral authority? So how does that play out in insurgencies? Do insurgency campaigns against immoral or evil states lack legitimacy? If so, why? And where does this moral authority come from? The people? The legislature? The charismatic authority of the great leader? Depending on the system of government, it could come from any of these. And what do we make of the fact that in the United States, Congress has not declared war since December 1941. Does that mean that none of the wars the United States has waged have been legitimate?

    2. Is the cause just? Again, who gets to decide this? Take, for example, the never-ending Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel sees itself as embattled and using the absolute minimal force to achieve its security objectives. Arabs view Israeli military action and occupation as oppressive, if not criminal, and certainly not just. Now maybe there is more to this theory of justice, maybe something incorporating the work of John Rawls and his theory of justice. If one adopts Rawls’s justice as fairness approach, we might be getting somewhere, though we also might find few, if any examples of just wars with the possible exception of World War II.

    3. Is the war being pursued with the right intentions? This one strikes me as among the least useful concepts in the study of war and peace. In the end, it is no solace to the victims of war, whether they be innocent civilians or fallen soldiers, the population of the losing side in a war that has to endure harsh occupation, that their death and suffering was the result of good intentions. Nobody, whether individual, polis, or leader, thinks of themselves as being bad individuals or having bad intentions.

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