Just war theory remains vital because — naïve thinking aside — war is not going away as long as men are sinners. As long as men are sinners, some will try to do injustice to others by force. As long as some are victims of injustice, they have a right to defend themselves against it. As long as Catholics and other persons of moral good serve in positions of national leadership and responsibility, they will need an ethical lens through which to guide what can and cannot be done in prelude to and during war. The Church grossly fails in its duty of teaching and its call to accompany if, in the midst of injustice wrought by force, her best advice is “wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’” that the injustice and force go away.

Yet I think that happens when ecclesiastical leadership, reverting to times when the Church was more a diplomatic player than moral leader, hedges about addressing the moral dimensions of particular conflicts, resorting instead to some false equivalence of hoping “all parties realize that dialogue and not violence are the ways of peace.” Nice fervorino, padre, but clearly some of those parties don’t. So, what do we do?

I recently wrote an essay, “The Continued Need for Just War Theory” (in Catholic World Report, linked here). Its immediate impetus was George Weigel’s essay on the same theme, but underlying it are concerns that just war theory is being undermined in various quarters. My article specifically focused on areas where the realities of modern warfare grate against the dictates of moral theory. Rather than turn eyes upwards in prayer (important as that is), I want to stimulate ecclesiastical response to these questions.

Part of my concern about just war theory today is driven by what I call the “moral imbalance” question. What happens when one side plays by the ethical rules — just war theory, international humanitarian law, law of war, whatever — and one doesn’t? Obviously, we don’t want moral practice to be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Failure to abide by the ethical rules does not waive them. But is what the “international community” understands by concepts like “noncombatant immunity” or “proportionality” exactly what the Church does?

Failure to play by the ethical rules also often gives one side advantages denied to the other. How do we compensate for that imbalance? It cannot be merely of question of who prevails, because we then run the risk of “might makes right.” But when an unethical party uses moral cheating to prevail over one abiding by moral principles, how can we protect against acquiescence in the new status quo? Presumably, nonbelligerent parties are not going to want to fight the cheat to change an outcome. But that does not mean they have no stake in maintaining ethical rules, for lack of a better term a “rules-based order,” to regulate conflict. And how are other parties’ abilities to influence a situation affected when the unethical party is or can be argued to be a non-state actor, be it a guerilla force, an insurrection, or a false flag fifth column acting on behalf of another state which may or may not be itself involved in the overt conflict?

We also need to pay attention to how non-moral factors influence warfare. Some have said that the Vietnam War was lost not so much in the jungles of Indochina as on U.S. television’s evening news. I saw Americans watch Gulf Wars I and II not unlike a video game. General Sherman said “war is hell,” something hitherto known to its combatants and those caught in its middle. But modern telecommunications have brought the battlefield into people’s homes, once in their living rooms, now on their desktops. A visual medium, as Réné Ludmann observed with regard to movies, is one tending not towards active intellectual analysis but passive emotional receipt. That, in turn, enhances both the visual medium’s power as propaganda and its purveyors’ power to shape narratives. To what degree does what Sherman branded the “cruelty” of war then cause people to fudge ethical judgments about a conflict’s justice, not because its etiology has changed but because they see what war practically entails?

Without taking sides, I have often asked myself: If World War II were as packaged, conducted, and communicated the way the military operation in Gaza is reported, would the Allies have won, much less unconditionally (another moral question)? Remember that, in the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson’s decisive victory at New Orleans occurred after the Peace Treaty of Ghent was signed but not yet arrived by ship in America.

When fighting wars in the era of the West’s attenuated attention span of visual screen culture, how long before “patience” (i.e., interest) with a conflict runs out, another factor that displaces the justice of the conflict’s cause with the “justice” of its prolongation? These are vital questions because the unethical belligerent then need not “convince” anybody with propaganda about why his cheating is really right. All one has to do is wait out the opponent and/or his allies. And if that belligerent’s approach is already unethical, the expenditure of additional soldiers as cannon fodder or civilians as collateral victims (if not human shields) are just additional, tolerable costs, especially if the international community ostensibly committed to ethical principles in war has no concrete way of imposing costs on that cheat.

Fighting by rules one’s opponent does not follow also prolongs conflicts while imposing additional dangers on your fighting forces. As I’ve noted, conflict prolongation generally is a benefit for opponents because of Western man’s abbreviated attention span. And while belligerents should be expected to bear the additional risk and burden of fighting ethically, one cannot deny that your soldiers don’t necessarily want to die because they took measures exposing them to more risk because they were forced to do that by their unethical opponent (e.g., who uses human shields).

The temptation, in such situations, is to revert to Sherman’s advice: “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” As we said, we don’t want to revert to the least moral common denominator, throwing rules out the window. But we also must be aware of another modern temptation for Western man: the “technological imperative.” The technological imperative basically says, “If I can do something technologically, I may.” The proclivity to resort to technological solutions can run the danger of washing away the ethical, again, an undesirable outcome. It also sometimes tends to blur lines between combatants and noncombatants, e.g., by turning off power, do I merely impede the enemy’s military operations or expose innocent civilians to unjustified harm?

As I said in the earlier essay, I do not so much propose answers as pose questions, questions I think require nuanced moral discussion but are not receiving it because the Church is content to remain at very abstract levels or deep down thinks use of force is not really ever justified today. Both approaches are wrong. It’s time we abandoned them and got to the practical work of moral assessment against the “signs of the times” today. They include the facts that war is not going away and neither is the right to self-defense. Ecclesiastical abstraction and temporizing means the only thing going away is the Church’s ethical leadership.