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.
I was interested in Lisa LaPlante’s post on torture. It came hard upon my attendance at a conference on Christian Realism in which the matter of hard choices got quite the attention. My comment got so long that I’ve decided to make it a post. I offer it here in the interest of stirring up some controversy to wake us from the haze of our tryptophan coma.