“Was God On The Side Of The Americans Who Liberated France From The Nazis?"

This is one of the questions Vice President Vance, a Catholic, posed to Pope Leo's assertion that God is "never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs." Vance continued, "Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps?” In effect, he was asking Leo if there can ever be a "just war" under "just war doctrine", because this is actually a key question. By and large, "just war" theorists suggest not. The Jesuit America Magazine reaassured its readers in reporting this exchange:

But Vincent J. Miller, the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton in Ohio, said that the Catholic Church actually does not take an unqualified view of the warfare that took place in World War II.

“The Church condemned the conduct of total war in World War II such as obliteration bombing of cities,” he pointed out.

There you have it; World War II was not a just war. Take that, J D Vance! But Catholic "just war" theology, taken this way, is a bait and switch. Let's take Edward Pentin's review of a January interview given by Edward Feser on the question of whether the US removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro meets "just war" principles:

A military operation to remove President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela could have been justified on just war principles, but the way in which the Trump administration has so far executed it actually violates the ancient criteria.

. . . Taken together, Feser believes the lack of clear just cause, inadequate planning, questionable motives, and constitutional concerns mean that, while such a war could be just in theory, this particular operation falls short of just war standards.

Pentin goes on to quote the entire interview, which begins:

Professor Feser, could the recent US operation to remove President Nicolas Maduro be justified in any way according to just war principles in your view?

The first thing to say is that we have to draw a distinction between the question “Could a U.S. operation of some kind to remove Maduro be justified on just war principles?” and the question “Is the particular way the Trump administration has actually gone about this justifiable by just war principles?” The answer to the first question is Yes, but the answer to the second question is No.

So, what are the specific defects of the operation that make it unjust?

[C]ertain conditions have to be met. For one thing, there must be a realistic hope of success, which includes a well thought out plan to ensure that the government that replaces the tyrant is actually a significant improvement, and that the country being liberated is not plunged into violent chaos.

. . . The question, then, is whether and how a transition to a significantly more just government is going to occur. And the Trump administration has been vague about that.

Let's return to the point I've been making about the CCC 2309: it places the responsibility for evaluating "just war" conditions on the civic authorities, not philosophy professsors. To begin with, war plans are necessarily confidential, and while it might be reassuring to review those plans, there's no requirement that the civic authorities disclose them. He gioes farther afield as well:

Another serious problem is that the rhetoric from some in the administration, and from some of its defenders, goes well beyond anything that could be justified even in principle by just war criteria. For example, there has for over a year now been talk about annexing Greenland, and the president has explicitly refused to rule out military action as a way of doing this. But military action against Greenland, or even just the threat of it as a negotiating tactic, is manifestly contrary to just war doctrine. It would be naked aggression, nothing more than gangsterism.

Wait a moment. We were talking specifically about the operation in Venezuela, but now he's brought Greenland into the question. We haven't invaded Greenland, there's no war there for us to inquire as to its justice, but he's somehow linked it to whether the Maduro operation was just.

Because the president and some of his allies so freely engage in this sort of irresponsible rhetoric, it is very hard to take seriously the suggestion that they are concerned to act justly where war is concerned.

In other words, a good part of the problem is that Trump is Trump. Let's just allow that reasonable people can differ over Trump, but then we run up against the problem of moral certainty. Those evaluating "just war" condiitons must be morally certain of their conclusions, which for Feser and other "just war" theorists leaves much less room for disagreement: it's right vs wrong.

This view was well represented in standard pre-Vatican II manuals of moral theology. For example, in their Moral Theology: A Complete Course, Fr. John McHugh and Fr. Charles Callan write that “the government may not declare war, unless it is morally certain that right is on its side . . . one should refrain from hostilities as long as one’s moral right is uncertain.” Fr. Austin Fagothey’s Right and Reason holds that “not only must the nation’s cause be just, but it must be known to be just . . . one must be sure of a just cause before fighting.”

. . . Exactly what degree of certainty is required, and why does the tradition require it? Both questions are best answered by way of stock examples. Suppose a hunter considers firing into some bushes. On standard natural law thinking, he may do so only if he is certain there is no other hunter behind them. If he considers it merely probable that there is no one behind them and fires anyway, he is guilty of wrongdoing, even if he doesn’t hit anyone. For his action was reckless. Or consider a jury deciding whether to sentence an accused murderer to be executed. They may not do so if they think it merely probable that he is guilty (as opposed to being certain “beyond a reasonable doubt” that he is guilty).

But both of his examples are absurd. A hunter never just "considers firing into some bushes". There are legal and ethical constraints that govern why he's in the field at all that go far beyond whether sonmeone might be behind some bushes; the question of whether someone probably is not behind the bushes is absurdly remote. This is simply an inapt example that clarifies nothing. The example of a murder jury is just as bad: juries deliberate based on highly circumscribed rules of evidence and instructions, and their verdict must be unanimous.

Wartime decisions by their nature aren't based on the level of evidence needed in murder trials, they're seldom unanimous, and in spite of the moral certainty juries must have, verdicts are reversed. We're in mushy territory here, and Feser knows this.

To forestall misunderstandings, note that the claim is not that governing authorities must have absolute or metaphysical certainty (of the kind we have when we know, for example, that 1 + 1 = 2). Nor does the tradition claim that we need to have certainty about every aspect of a war. We need to be morally certain only that a proposed war meets all just war criteria . . . one of the criteria of a just war is that “there must be serious prospects of success” (as the Catechism puts it). Hence, governing authorities don’t need to be certain of the success. However, they do need to be certain that there are serious prospects of success.

"Well, doggone, I thought we had serious prospects of success, I'd have bet my life on it. But I guess we didn't, huh? At least I don't need to go to confession over it!" Feser has said nothing useful here, and he concludes by citing Elizabeth Anscombe, whose position is absurd:

In her essay “War and Murder,” Elizabeth Anscombe adds another important consideration. Pacifism, she argues quite firmly, is not a morally serious position. . . . [But war] involves an unusually high number of occasions in which innocent lives might be put at risk, in which combatants will be tempted to put those lives at risk, and in which they might realistically get away with doing so. Consequently, though there can be such a thing as a just war, in practice, Anscombe judges, “wars have mostly been mere wickedness on both sides” and “the probability is that warfare is injustice.”

Put briefly, pacifism isn't a morally serious position, but no wars are just. So, why are we wasting our time debating just war theory? Rabbi Pesach Wolicki provides a possible answer in the YouTube discussion below, in which he expands on some remarks by Sam Harris on why contemporary leftism and Islamism agree on so many key issues:

Both Marxist political ideology and Islamist political ideology are structured around the rejection of what I call Biblical civilization that says human beings have inheent dignity, . . . that good and evil are real and objective, that power is accountable to a moral standard above itself. Marxism rejects that, because it's atheist. So there's no transcendent moral standard if you're a Marxist. . . . Islamism rejects it, because it insists that the only legitimate authority is Allah, and human beings have no standing to assess the value of a particular act or a particular idea.

They have no ability to make law or hold power accountable on human terms, so they end up in the same place. So when Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist of America and Islamist aligneed organizations like CAIR, when they find themselves on the same side, it's not just strategy, it's that they're both operating in frameworks that are structurally hostile to the same thing, which is the concept of human liberty and objective morality and Biblical Wesern civilization. . . . They don't need to agree on the theology, but they agree on the enemy.

What I've begun to notice is that there's a third strain that's effectively aligned with Marxism and Islamism, and that's the current "just war" apologists who are effectively setting up conditions where no war will meet their exceedingly rigorous criteria -- and indeed, as Feser does above, they're effectively acknowledging this. But the key war, or wars, that they're objecting to are the joint US-Israeli actions against Iran, which is the main exponent of radical Islamism.

Why is this? I think it goes to Rabbi Wolicki's idea of Biblical civilization, but of course, since he's a rabbi, the Bible he's referring to is the Old Testament. I've noted in the past that if any collection of ancient philosophy contradicts "just war" theory, it's the Old Testament, where in cases like the Cities of the Plain, the Siege of Jericho, the Amalekites, the Midianites, and the Canaanites, whole populations are slaughtered in gross violation of "just war" theory.

The reason for those violations, of course, is that those groups were messing with Israel or the Almighty Himself. But as I've also noted here, Rabbi Wolicki raises the eschatological problem of modern Israel: Israel has emerged as a modern nation-state in borders corresponding to Old Testament Israel, with the same Jewish people returning to it as prophesied in the Hebrew Scripture. And it's acting in its own defense in ways corresponding to the ways enjoined by the Almighty for the ancient state.

This is a conundrum that won't go away, on one hand. On the other, "just war" theorists are effectively arguing that, since as a practical matter, no war is just, which we saw Feser acknowledge just above, there's no possible way Israel can be justified in taking military action in its own interest, or indeed, the Almighty's interest, even though there's plenty of justification in the Old Testsment.

So as I've asked before, why do we need an Old Testament if we have natural law? One reason is that natural law proves no war is just, when the Old Testament suggests things aren't actually like that.