IN MOLIÈRE’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose all his life without knowing it. Similarly, unless a person is an absolute pacifist, they will be using traditional criteria for a “just war” in deciding whether or not a particular military action is morally justified. Just-war thinking has had a bad press because people think that its sole purpose is to put forward reasons for justifying war. In fact, what it does is to provide a set of criteria for judging one way or the other.
Just-war thinking gives us a set of tools to think by. The only other alternative is holy war, thought of as justified by a direct command from God (as sometimes in the Old Testament), but that receives no credence in the modern world.
Emerging first with St Augustine, and developed by Aquinas and the 17th-century Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, just-war criteria have been incorporated into international law and the military law of many countries. Leaving aside twisted Islamic concepts of jihad, there is some similarity to just-war thinking in all the main religions of the world.
THE just-war criteria that have to be met fall into two main categories. First of all, there are the considerations that have to be taken into account if the war is to be morally justified in the first place (jus ad bellum). Second, there are the criteria to be used in assessing the moral legitimacy of a particular action within the war (jus in bello). These are two separate sets of considerations. For example, a state might be justified in going to war, but the means that it uses in doing so be judged immoral.
In relation to jus ad bellum six conditions must be met. There must be:
- Legitimate authority Ideally, there would be some international body with enough legitimacy and strength to be the sole authority who could authorise military action. But, in a world of competing nation states, this does not yet exist, and the only authority left is the nation state itself. The only interesting exception is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) adopted by the UN in 2005. This empowers the UN to intervene if a nation state is failing to protect is own people from atrocities. Since 2005, however, although the principle remains in place, its use has fallen out of favour — not least because of the NATO intervention, which failed to achieve its objective, in the Libyan civil war in 2011.
- Just cause In the modern world, the only just cause is self-defence, which is authorised by Article 51 of the UN Charter. By that article, the UK was justified in defending the Falkland Islands from the Argentinian dictators who invaded it, as is Israel in its defence against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi, and Iran.
- All other means of solving the issue must have been tried and failed In the modern world, the UN exists to resolve disputes by peaceful means. The question, of course, is when it is that all peaceful means have been exhausted. Did President Trump act prematurely in authorising the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities? Did Chamberlain wait too long to declare war on Hitler?
- Right intention St Augustine was quite clear that the only just reason for going to war was to create peace. This, of course, means a just peace — not peace at any price.
- Proportion That is, a belief that more good than evil will result from the action. A country might have just cause to defend itself, but the price might be too high, resulting in its own annihilation. So, there has to be a careful weighing of consequences. This is obviously linked to the next criterion, about there being a reasonable chance of success.
- A reasonable chance of success In considering success, however, it is important to ask what would count as “success”. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a quick military success, but, in terms of winning the support of the Iraqi people as a whole for a democratic form of government, it was clearly a failure, at least in the short term.
WHEN it comes to jus in bello — the means of fighting the war — two criteria apply: discrimination and proportion. The first says that there must be no direct attacks on people who pose no military threat, which, in practice, means unarmed civilians. The second says that (as in 5 above) there must be a weighing of consequences. An attack on a military target — say, a command and control centre — might be legitimate, but what if it resulted in several hundred civilian deaths in the surrounding area? Such an attack might be disproportionate.
The continual bombardment of Gaza, and especially the use of 2000 bombs in the early stages, certainly appears to be either indiscriminate or disproportionate or both. The Israeli case is that Hamas are hiding in tunnels that run under civilian areas, and so are, in fact, using civilians as shields. Until the war is over, and the tunnels can be fully investigated, it will not be possible finally to decide the truth of this claim.
WITH the advent of nuclear weapons, the principles of discrimination and proportion achieved new prominence. How could the use of such weapons ever meet these criteria? In addition to our nuclear submarines, Britain has just purchased 12 F-35 stealth jets able to carry nuclear warheads, each capable of doing a great deal more damage than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the other hand, the presence of nuclear weapons has undoubtedly been a steadying force in the modern world, because, for the first time in history, it could not conceivably be in the interest of any power to use such weapons against another nuclear power, since it would itself be decimated. This nuclear threat, however, allows lower -level conflicts to continue under its umbrella — as we saw recently with Pakistan and India, both of which are nuclear states. It also allowed President Putin to invade Ukraine with non-nuclear forces, while keeping in the background the nuclear threat to limit American and European support for Ukraine.
Nuclear weapons are not like other weapons, and they must never be used. The paradox is that their existence, and potential for use, acts as a deterrent to their actual use.
WAR is a very terrible thing, and it is right that we are still haunted by the suffering, waste, and futility of the First World War, for example. At the same time, most people would claim that it was morally right to fight Nazism rather than submit our country and culture to its twisted ideology — even though the cost was enormous: 27 million Russians were killed, in addition to the nearly half a million British.
It may be right to go to war in a just cause, but this should never lead either to a crusade mentality or to a sense of moral righteousness. Reinhold Niebuhr, as so often, got it right in the prayers that he composed during the Second World War: “We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.
“We pray for ourselves who live in peace and quietness, that we may not regard our good fortune as proof of our virtue, or rest content to have our ease at the price of other men’s sorrow and tribulation.” Amen.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries, a former Bishop of Oxford, is the author of Christianity and War in a Nuclear Age (Mowbray).
