Every life is sacred. The only reason the Church can even consider violence done in self-defense is that your own life is sacred, too; because of this, the amount of violence it takes to defend yourself can be permitted, (1) when only violence will stop an attacker from killing or injuring you. The same principle is applied to countries by extension, and this is essentially what Just War Theory consists in. The conditions laid down by JWT are, in substance, a more detailed articulation of these principles. I’d like to go over the conventional conditions laid down by JWT proponents and see how each one relates to this central thesis.
1. The damage the aggressor would inflict has to be lasting, serious, and certain. (2) Small injuries, or damages that will quickly pass, don’t qualify as grounds for war. In those cases, the injury is being used as a pretext, or the injured party is seeking revenge rather than just redress by resorting to violence.
Note also the condition that the damage must be certain. Obviously there is only so much certainty we can have about the future, and the theory is not calling for a mathematically certain proof; rather, the idea here is one of moral certainty—the same kind you would need to convict someone of murder. This, too, is designed to prevent wars being waged on the pretext “Well they’re probably gonna attack us!”; I would argue that it rules out all so-called preëmptive attacks, since they are by definition not dealing with a certain threat.
2. All other means of resolving the conflict between the aggressor and the defender must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective. Sometimes conflicts cannot be resolved through talking it out, but most of the time they can. An aggressor might, of course, take advantage of this—as Hitler did with Chamberlain—to obtain concessions or time, and then promptly break his word. This would, in a particularly unpleasant way, show that diplomacy is not effective in this case; but that can’t simply be assumed. It has to be shown. Otherwise, once again, you’re resorting to violence before you know it’s required, to satisfy anger or greed or pride rather than to protect yourself.
3. There must be a serious prospect of success. Embarking on a war you know you can’t win is, essentially, suicide on a national scale. Laying down your life is one thing; throwing it away is quite another. And throwing your countrymen’s lives away is, as has been said, Not It, Chief.
4. Resorting to violence must not produce evils that are worse than the evil the defender is trying to avoid. This is an application of what’s called the principle of proportionality: you can only use the amount of force it takes to defend yourself. For example, if someone tries to punch you, swiping his hand off with a machete is going too far, and the fact that he tried to hit you first doesn’t excuse it. Likewise, if your military campaign is going to be more devastating to any people—not just your own people, any people, because remember, we are all made in the image of God, and protecting that is the only possible Christian ground for JWT—anyway, if your campaign is going to be more devastating than that “lasting, serious, and certain” evil we discussed above, you can’t wage that campaign.
This is particularly relevant to the use of nuclear weapons. Nukes, because of how they work, produce uncontrollable and even unpredictable results, and their effects last for decades if not longer. For instance, nuclear fallout contaminates any local water supply very quickly, starting from radioactive ash and dust that pollute surface water, and from there slowly affecting groundwater as well: once reached, an underground aquifer would remain contaminated by radiation for hundreds of thousands of years. That kind of devastation is disproportionate and uncontrollable—and therefore can’t seriously be classified as self-defense.
And note, these are only the conditions required for going to war to be potentially licit. Conduct within a war, including the terms on which a peace is settled, are something else again, which I’ll address in my next. But even applying these terms alone, every war the United States has been involved in, except World War II and maybe the War of 1812, has been unjustified. (3) The philosophical stringency that that represents should make an impression on us, and we should always presume that waging a given war is probably wrong, if we’re working from historical precedent on sincerely held Catholic principles.
(1) As a reminder, this violence is permitted, not obligatory. The example of Christ and all the martyrs shows quite plainly that you can lay down your life rather than resort to violence to defend it.
(2) I’ve rephrased these a little from the way they’re expressed in the Catechism, mostly by trading quasi-technical terms for terms that are a little clearer in English (e.g., using “serious” instead of “grave”).
(3) Yes, I’m including the Revolutionary War here. I am not saying that the behavior of the British government in the late eighteenth century was beyond reproach; it most certainly wasn’t. But as modern libertarians and internet trolls have pointed out, nearly everything the Declaration of Independence paints as shocking corruptions of power on the part of the British are standard practices not only of governments in general—taxes, for example—but of the U.S. government today; and injustices on the part of the government are not necessarily grounds for revolution. It’s very questionable whether the Revolutionary War met conditions 1 and 2.
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