Edward Feser's Moral Universe

I asked Chrome AI Mode, which I've been finding is a generally even-handed and informative tool with the proviso that you carefully avoid using any triggering key words, "What might a Catholic priest say to a penitent who comes to the confessional and says, 'Bleass me, Father, for I have sinned -- President Truman committed a war crime when he used nuclear weapons on Japan.'" It answered,

A priest would likely respond with pastoral care, focusing on whether you are seeking absolution for a personal burden or engaging in a theological discussion.

While the Catechism of the Catholic Church and various Popes (notably St. John Paul II and Pope Francis) have condemned the use of atomic weapons as a "crime against God and man," a priest might guide the conversation in the following ways:

. . . He may gently clarify that "sin" in the confessional usually refers to your own actions. He might ask if your distress over this event reflects a burden on your conscience or a struggle with your faith.

What I find when I read recent pieces by Edward Feser, for instance, on his blog, is this sort of non sequitur. As a Catholic convert, now for almost 15 years, I'm discovering that the day-to-day parish Catholicism I find at mass and in the confessional focuses on developing habits of virtue like examination of conscience, prayer, and humility. It has very little to do with whether presidents, either contemporary or historical, have waged just wars.

In fact, the potential list of which wars the US has fought might be characterized as "unjust" is enormous. I asked the oracle, "Can you privide a list of wars, declared or undeclared, that the US has waged that could be characterized as 'unjust'?" It replied,

Whether a war is "unjust" is a matter of significant historical and ethical debate, often analyzed through Just War Theory, which evaluates conflicts based on criteria like just cause, last resort, and proportionality. While the U.S. has formally declared war only five times in its history, it has engaged in numerous undeclared military actions that scholars, international bodies, and the public have characterized as unjust.

The following conflicts are frequently cited in historical and scholarly critiques:

Mexican-American War (1846–1848)
Spanish-American War (1898)
Vietnam War (1955–1975)
Invasion of Iraq (2003)
Interventions in Libya and Syria (2011–Present
Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen

To which we might now add, certsainly with Prof Feser's agreement, the removal of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran. And the list above is sketchy indeed: we could add President Theodore Roosevelt militarily abetting Panama's secession from Colombia in 1903, Commodore Matthew Perry's "gunboat diplomacy" opening Japan to foreign trade in 1853-54, the 1915–1934 occupation of Haiti by the US Marines, or Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818.

Academic careers have been, and certainly still are, made by arguing all these cases and more, of which Prof Feser's is only one recent example. The biggest problem I see is that whichever of these instances might be adjudged an "unjust war", or indeed all of them, it matters not one whit to me, even at mass, even in the confessional. As we saw just above, if I were to try to confess to President Truman's sins, a priest would more than likely gently steer me back on track.

In fact, the typical response, even by the putatively devout, to the problem of the US fighting unjust wars is performative. As the oracle suggested later in the answer I quoted above in a passage I omitted, a priest might urge a penitent to pray for peace as a positive response to the problem, but this isn't the sort of thing most objectors to unjust war actually do. Philip and Daniel Berrigan, for instance, were brothers and Catholic priests who poured a mixture of blood and red paint on Selective Service records or burned them with homemade napalm to protest the Viet Nam War.

This accomplished absolutely nothing to end the war and probably didn't even make the Berrigans feel better. Nor, it seems to me, do various declarations of "unjust war" or "stolen land" have any effect on anyone. I asked the oracle if Edward Feser has ever declared the Mexican War to be unjust, and it replied, "There is no record of Edward Feser declaring the 19th-century Mexican-American War (1846–1848) to be unjust." As far as I can see, he'd better not, since he lives and works in California, which became part of the US as a result of that unjust war of territorial expansion.

In fact, if he truly wished to live in the spirit of his convictions, his choices of residence in the US would be pretty limited -- to avoid territory that hadn't been "stolen" via wars of expansion and such, he might be limited perhaps to the easternmost reaches of the original 13 colonies, though even then, he moight be forced back across the Atlantic to seek out some obscure place that had never been invaded by anyone.

But his judgment isn't necesarily always accurate. Most recently, he's been forced into backtracking over his predictions, before they took place, that the actions in Venezuela and Iran would be unjust:

First, the Venezuela case was very limited, without widespread bombing or the attempt to destroy the entire state apparatus with nothing to put in its place. It was in fact a far more limited venture than the liberationist rhetoric used to sell it actually implied. So, it isn't…

— Edward Feser (@FeserEdward) March 2, 2026

In fact, I would say that at this point, certainly in reference to his most recent denunciations of Trump's policies, his problems have involved running off at the mouth. But from a logical standpoint, I've begun to think his arguments have two basic errors: one, which I've already discussed, is hypostatization, treating an abstract, amorphous concept with many divergent individual expressions, "just war doctrine", as a single, concrete entity that can always and everywhere demonstrate that any particular war is just or unjust.

More recently, I've begun to think he also has a philosphical problem with category error, "An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player's role, asking which player performs the 'team spirit'."

I asked the oracle, "Did General Sherman say, 'War is hell?'" It answered,

Yes, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman is credited with the phrase "War is hell," most notably during an address to Michigan Military Academy graduates on June 19, 1879, where he declared, "I tell you, war is Hell!". He often used this sentiment to describe the brutality of war, having previously written that "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it".

It seems to me that Prof Feser, a professor of philosophy no less, is looking at war, and, picking out specific wars or threats of war, he's looking at each and asking, "Where is the justice in this war?" It's no different from looking at the players in a team sport and asking which covers the team spirit, or in the more famous example, looking at the invididual deparments of a university and asking where the university is. In Feser's case, he's looking at war and asking where the justice is. Category error, non sequitur.