Just War Moralities

This essay discusses four recent books on the Western, and one book on the classical Chinese, traditions of just war. It concentrates on the jus ad bellum moral criteria (legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention), giving attention to the centrality of the state in just war morality, to some challenges in reconceptualizing the jus ad bellum in the context of non‐state agents, and to controversies over a “presumption against war.”     

Jihad and Just War Theory: Dissonance and Truth

Abstract :  The Christian tradition of just war does not have a New Testament foundation but is a tradition that developed after the conversion of Constantine and Christianity's emergence as the state religion of the empire. In Islam, however, just war has been an issue since its foundational period, because while Christianity did not get involved in statecraft until Constantine, Islam dates its calendar literally from the establishment of the first statecraft in Medina. However, distortion of this tradition has occurred in both religions: we have a distorted justification of just war tradition in Christianity, and a distorted understanding of jihad as simply a holy war in Islam. This paper tries to deconstruct both these traditions and create a new hermeneutics for contemporary times.     

Deliberating Just War

This essay responds to James Turner Johnson's critiques of my argument in “‘Never Again War’: Recent Shifts in the Roman Catholic Just War Tradition and the Question of ‘Functional Pacifism.’” (2014). It attends specifically to three of Johnson's objections and offers accounts of the meaning and use of the term “functional pacifism,” an understanding of classic just war thought as a tradition, and the concepts of peace and authority within just war and pacifist thought. It argues that my analysis of the Catholic Church's movement toward pacifism but ultimate theological inability to embrace a functional pacifism still stands in spite of Johnson's critiques. In addition, it suggests that Johnson offers a thin pacifistic conception of peace and promotes a restricted notion of ecclesial authority and democratic government.     

Impure Agency and the Just War

Feminist critiques of intention challenge some aspects of traditional just war reasoning, including the criteria of right intention and discrimination (particularly as interpreted using the doctrine of double effect). I take note of these challenges and propose some directions just war reasoners might take in response. First, right intention can be evaluated more accurately by judging what actors in war actually do than by attempting to uncover inward dispositions. Assessing whether agents in war have taken due care to minimize foreseeable collateral damage, avoided intentional targeting of noncombatants, corrected previous mistakes in their later actions, and taken responsibility to repair unintended damage they cause are examples of ways in which just war reasoners can evaluate intention by looking at actions.     

Preventive Wars, Just War Principles, and the United Nations

This paper explores the question of whether the United Nations should engage in preventive military actions. Correlatively, it asks whether UN preventive military actions could satisfy just war principles. Rather than from the standpoint of the individual nation state, the ethics of preventive war is discussed from the standpoint of the UN. For the sake of brevity, only the legitimate authority, just cause, last resort, and proportionality principles are considered. Since there has been disagreement about the specific content of these principles, a third question also is explored: How should they be formulated? Moreover, these questions are addressed in the context of a particular issue: the goals of the non-proliferation and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction.     

Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez on Religious Authority and Cause for Justified War: The Centrality of Religious War in the Christian Just War Tradition

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.     

The Metaethical Paradox of Just War Theory

The traditional requirements upon the waging of a just war are ostensibly independent, but in actual practice each tenet is subject ultimately to the interpretation of a legitimate authority, whose declaration becomes the necessary and sufficient condition. While just war theory presupposes that some acts are absolutely wrong, it also implies that the killing of innocents can be rendered permissible through human decree. Nations are conventionally delimited, and leaders are conventionally appointed. Any group of people could band together to form a nation, and any person could, in principle, be appointed the leader of any nation. Because the just war approach assumes absolutism while implying relativism, the stance is paradoxical and hence rationally untenable.     

Truce thinking and just war theory

In his book, A Theory of Truces, Nir Eisikovits offers a perceptive and timely ethics of truces based on the claim that we need to reject the ‘false dichotomy between the ideas of war and peace’ underpinning much current thought about conflict and conflict resolution. In this article, I concur that truces and ‘truce thinking’ should be a focus of concern for any political theory wishing to address the realities of war. However, Eisikovits’s account, to be convincing, requires engagement with a tradition of thought figuring only marginally in his reflections on truces, that is, just war theory. I argue this for three reasons. Without incorporation of the just war principles that should inform the decisions to enter conflict, to maintain conflict, and to cease conflict, any theory of truces will be, first, normatively inadequate, failing to provide us with requisite direction, and, second, open to the charge of permitting intolerable injustices, a charge Eisikovits wishes to avoid. Third, engagement with just war theory is important for arriving at a nuanced understanding of peacemaking, one which grants truces their place in our deliberations and spurns simplistic ‘war versus peace’ binaries whilst keeping more ambitious ideals of peace firmly in sight.     

Reframing the Catholic Understanding of Just War: Two Contrasting Approaches in the Interwar Period

During the inter war period, European Catholic authors exhibited two different approaches to the question of just war. One approach was articulated at the “Fribourg Conventus,” a 1931 meeting of French, Swiss, and German theologians, whose subsequent declaration (Conventus de bello, published in 1932) called for a reformulation of Catholic teaching based on the premise that the traditional just‐war doctrine had been superseded by developments in international law. A competing approach was articulated by the Dutch Jesuit Robert Regout, who maintained that the just‐war doctrine could contribute to the formation of international law by providing a much‐needed normative foundation for the use of armed force by individual states in redress of their violated rights. After presenting these two approaches and explaining how they differ, this essay shows how the outlook of the Conventus de bello is reflected in subsequent papal statements on armed force—to the detriment of the traditional terminology of just war.     

战争伦理:一种世界观念

战争伦理主要论及战争如何受到道德强制,或者说,它涉及道德的进步如何影响到战争。同时,与人类其他活动相比,战争行为更具国际性,因此,战争伦理作为抑制战争的一种道义力量,也更易成为一种世界观念。可以将战争伦理分为军事伦理、军备伦理、军人伦理三个层面,分别代表基于人、武器以及人与武器相结合而采取的行动———作战之上的伦理规范,它们都是随着时代的发展而发展的。     

Probing the Will of God: Bonhoeffer and Discernment

Like the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the spiritual discernment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer seeks to bring one's life into conformity (Gleichgestaltung) with Christ. Such conformation makes discipleship costly, but it also overflows with the fullness of life.     

Probing the Will of God: Bonhoeffer and Discernment

Like the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the spiritual discernment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer seeks to bring one’s life into conformity (Gleichgestaltung) with Christ. Such conformation makes discipleship costly, but it also overflows with the fullness of life.     

Engineering the just war: Examination of an approach to teaching engineering ethics

The efficiency of engineering applied to civilian projects sometimes threatens to run away with the social agenda, but in military applications, engineering often adds a devastating sleekness to the inevitable destruction of life. The relative crudeness of terrorism (e.g., 9/11) leaves a stark after-image, which belies the comparative insignificance of random (as opposed to orchestrated) belligerence. Just as engineering dwarfs the bricolage of vernacular design—moving us past the appreciation of brush-strokes, so to speak—the scale of engineered destruction makes it difficult to focus on the charred remains of individual lives. Engineers need to guard against the inappropriate military subsumption of their effort. Fortunately, the ethics of warfare has been an ongoing topic of discussion for millennia. This paper will examine the university core class I’ve developed (The Moral Dimensions of Technology) to meet accreditation requirements in engineering ethics, and the discussion with engineering and non-engineering students focused by the life of electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, with selected readings in moral philosophy from the Dao de Jing, Lao Tze, Cicero, Aurelius Augustinus, Kant, Annette Baier, Peter Singer, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Judith Thomson. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9–10 June 2005.     

Reimagining Just War as Anchored in,Tethered to,and Tempered by Mercy

This essay considers whether the just war tradition is compatible with Christian theologically grounded conceptions of mercy. After considering and rejecting positions that pit mercy and war against each other, the essay mines the work of Walter Kasper and James Keenan on Christian mercy to develop a position that reimagines mercy as compatible with traditional just war criteria. In particular, this analysis leads to the conclusion that Christians may endorse just war in the form of humanitarian intervention. By doing so, they allow mercy to temper the aspects of warfare that diminish the humanity of others.     

Dialogue in Dialog: Christology

David R. Mason, A Christology of Universal Redemptive Love , p.149
Carol Jacobson, Universality and Uniqueness: A Response to David Mason , p.160
Lois Malcolm, Generative Christology: A Response to David Mason , p.162
Paul Sponheim, Probing and Protesting: A Response to David Mason , p.164
David R. Mason, Response to Jacobson, Malcolm, and Sponheim , p.166     

Bonhoeffer on Modernity: Sic et Non

Though Bonhoeffer is usually thought to have been one of the architects of modern theology, he was also one of modernity's most penetrating critics. The author lays out Bonhoeffer's challenges to certain cherished modern assumptions by examining (1) his linkage of totalitarianism to the political utopianism that arose out of the French Revolution, (2) his fear of the nihilistic implications of the rationalists' notion of the sovereign self and of the modern tendency to view life as an end in itself, and (3) his suspicion of all forms of moral absolutism, including the Kantian absolutizing of the duty to tell the truth. What emerges is a picture of Bonhoeffer as a theologian who coupled a keen sense of our creatureliness and limitation with a resolute belief in the activity of God in history, and of Bonhoeffer as an ethicist who generated a Christian relational ethics that offers an alternative to both the ethics of abstract principle and the ethics of intuitive situational response.     

Social Ethics between Universality and Specificity: Outline of a Chalcedonian Social Ethic1

Abstract : In Lutheran ethics the Chalcedonian notion of the communication of properties (communicatio idiomatum) plays an important role in understanding the paradoxical relation between the reality of God and the reality of the world. This motif also plays an important role for Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In a contemporary context the Chalcedonian understanding substantiates a differentiated unity between universality and specificity with regard to the foundation of a Lutheran social ethic.     

A Feminist Lutheran Substantive Christology: Method and Methodology

Abstract : From a Euro‐American feminist perspective, not only the methods of North American ‘mainstream’ Christology but also of much feminist Christology needs refinement. The former must take into account the context of feminist consciousness, with particular attention to experience. The latter must reclaim kerygma and dogma. Drawn from history, kerygma, dogma, and experience, feminist Lutheran Christology is substantive, meaning that Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine and sufficient for salvation.     

LETTING REALITY BECOME REAL: On Mystery and Reality in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics the notion of reality plays a central role. The present article focuses on the ethical implications of the Chalcedonian Christology underlying this concept. This approach is tied to the debate on the relationship between the universal and specific identity of Christian social ethics in public discourse. In the opening section the article outlines the pertinence of this debate with regard to Bonhoeffer's Christological ethic. In the following section the article analyzes Bonhoeffer's concept of reality and the implied Chalcedonian traits. With this foundation established the article raises the question about its social ethical implications. The final part of the article argues that Bonhoeffer's ethics and ecclesiology cannot be separated from each other, explaining why Bonhoeffer's notion of reality leads to an assertion of the church's role in letting reality become real. In the light of Bonhoeffer's notion of reality the last section argues for the reconciliation of Christian witness and participation in public discourse.