Why Is It So Difficult To Find A "Just War" In History?

I gave more thought to Edwwrd Feser's implicit conclusion that I linked in yesterday's post, that no war can be a just war. If that's the case, this would support my tentative view that "just war" doctrine is a category error, "a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property." If no war can be just by its nature, why are we complaining that any particular war is unjust?

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Can you find any wars in history that clearly fit just war criteria?" It answered,

In political philosophy and moral theology, no historical conflict perfectly satisfies all Just War criteria because real-world battlefield actions invariably breach the strict ethical requirements of wartime conduct.

But it then proceeded to give three partial examples, the Allied defensive response in World War II, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 1982 Falklands War. I'm going to leave the latter two aside, because "victories" in both wars weren't lasting solutions: in less than ten years, the US had to refight the Gulf War, and Argentina is currently renewing its claim to the Falklands, while the UK is no longer able to defend them as they barely did in 1982. In addition, Trump won't support the UK now as Reagan did then.

World War II is a different matter. It looks very much as though it's taken on a world imaginative centrality equivalent to the Trojan War, and it presents a real challenge to the "just war" paradigm, which proponents seriously try to address. For instance, I found an abstract of a scholarly article, The last good war?: The lingering impact of World War II epistemology and ontology in conflict and popular culture:

World War II generated a series of now-defunct assumptions about how war is produced, fought, and ended. However problematic these assumptions, they have been replicated in popular cultural representations of war – from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan through to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – illustrating their tenacity and hold on the contemporary imagination. In reality, military epistemology and ontology must move forward to embrace complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty in contemporary conflict, recognizing the elusive and illusory search for fixed solutions.

Postmodernism to the rescue! Nevertheless, on May 25, a matter of weeks, the History Channel will begin a major new series, World War II with Tom Hanks, 20 episodes featuring the star of Saving Private Ryan re-expressing what must certainly be a consensus popular view of Hitler and Tojo as bad guys, Roosevelt and Churchill wearing white hats. In the view of intellectial elites, these are now-defunct assumptions that for whatever reason won't go away.

I noted yesterday that Vice President Vance cited two episodes of the World War II narrative, the liberation of France and the Nazi death camps, as a counterargument to Pope Leo's assertaion that God doesn't support those who make war, and they're in fact a powerful argument, which is why they're not yet defunct. I linked one "just war" response yesterday, a professor of Catholic theology reminding us that the Church condemned the conduct of total war in World War II such as obliteration bombing of cities.

The response of "just war" theorists would be that killing innocent civilians in cases like the firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, or the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are intrinsically evil, and to try to justify them on the basis that they forced the Nazis and the Japanese militarists to surrender is, as Bp Conley put it in my link on Tuesday, a "consequentialist, utilitarian argument. . . But Catholics cannot accept such arguments."

But the popular World War II paradigm of Tom Hanks vs the bad guys prevails, and in fact one of the conditions for "just war" in CCC 2309 is "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated". I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is the just war condition that the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated a utilitarian argument?" Sometimes AI is juist plain on point. It answered,

Yes, this specific condition—known as the criterion of proportionality in Just War Theory—is fundamentally a utilitarian argument.

Why it is Utilitarian:

Consequence-Based: It judges the morality of an action entirely by its future outcomes and results.

Cost-Benefit Balance: It requires a direct calculation of the total goodness produced versus the total harm caused.

Aggregated Well-being: It weighs the collective suffering of a population against the political or moral evil of an enemy.

. . . Because of this rule, modern Just War Theory is considered a hybrid system that mixes absolute moral duties with utilitarian calculations.

So CCC 2309 itself -- i e, the Catholic Church -- enjoins us to mix absolute moral duties with utilitarian considerations. Toward the end of World War II, Japanese massacres of civilians in China and elsewhere continued unabated. The death camps in Europe were only revealed in the closing days of the war, and the Red Army's depredations on German civilians as it advanced would have continued as long as Germany didn't surrender. It is generally understood that the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 was a major factor that showed the Nazis the futility of their position, as did the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for Japan.

In other words, they demonstrably shortened the war. CCC 2309 instructs us to weigh the utilitarian and consequentialist aspects of these attacks in determining how the war met "just war" criteria. Bp Conley is mistaken if he claims that Catholics can't think this way, but he seems to be influenced by Edward Feser or others who share Feser's views in condemning "consequentialism".

Prof Feser has far less excuse in condemning "consequentialism" in "just war" theory, because he's supposed to be teaching students to use precise language and clear reasoning in his philosophy classes -- but I learned a long time ago what happens to students who learn a little too well. Those in his classes, frankly, have my sympathy. He apparently teaches ethics, but I'm not sure if he'd pass an undergradute course anywhere but at Pasadena City College.

But let's take another episode from World War II to tease out another problem in "just war" theory. This post in r/Catholicsm at Reddit raises an intriguing issue:

Going from Augustine to Aquinas to the Thomistic school of Salamanca forward, it seems that no War in history could be said to live up to these requirements.

The closest thing I can think of are a few rare situations where nations surrendered according to Just War's requirements, ie Denmark surrendering to the Nazis when no chance of military victory was conceivable.

I went looking for more information, and I learned that Denmark surrendered to Germany within six hours of its 1940 invasion, which was made simply to give Germany access to Norway. The Danish foreign minister, Erik Scavenius, who became prime minister during the occupation, devised a collaboration policy, samarbejdspolitikken, which had the utilitarian function of minimizing military deaths, since it avoided futile heroics, and preserved quality of life for civilians, who in return for non-resistance received relatively generous treatment from the occupiers.

In fact, occasional British air attacks on Copenhagen seem to have caused more civilian casualties than any German actions. The queston is, of course, why "just war" theorists favor the Danish reponse to Hitler more than, say, that of the French, who finally embraced the same strategy of surrender and collaboration. After all, CCC 2309 says "there must be serious prospects of success"-- if there aren't, surrender and collaborate, right?

But the French executed Pierre Laval, Joseph Darnand, Fernand de Brinon, Pierre Pucheu, and Robert Brasillach for collaboration; Philippe Pétain was sentenced to death but had the sentence commuted to life in prison. 37 Norwegians were executed during the legal purge (landssvikoppgjøret) after World War II for collaborating with the German occupation, including Vidkun Quisling. But although a number of lower-level Danes were prosecuted, and some executed, for collaboration after the war, neither Erik Scavenius nor other high-level figures who devised and advocated the overall collaboration strategy was prosecuted, much less executed.

According to Wikipedia,

Debate continues over [Scavenius's] legacy, and he remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of Danish politics. For example, on the 60th anniversary of the 29 August dissolution of government, prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen chastised his predecessor for his stance, saying that it was naive and morally unacceptable. However, historians like Bo Lidegaard and Søren Mørch contend that it was only through Scavenius's policies that Denmark escaped the worst hardships of the war.

Thus, there are several problems with application of "just war" criteria in cases like Denmark, even if some people feel it correctly followed the principle of "serious prospects of success". In return for German leniency it simply allowed the Wehrmacht to pass straight through Denmark to invade its neighbor Norway, where conditions under occupation were much worse. More importantly, it solved the limited moral dilemma posed by CCC 2309 and other "just war" principles, but it simply ignored the overall problem of World War II, which was a world problem.

What we're beginning to see in trying to find wars that in any way can be considered "just" according to "just war" criteria is that the only remotely clear-cut cases involve highly specific circumstances that either exist in unique, remote environments, like the Falklands War, or circumstances that are actually just temporary and limited solutions to larger problems that aren't resolved, such as the 1991 Gulf War or Denmark's capitulation to Germany.

The nature of war is so complex and so thoroughly bound up with human nature -- again, the Old Testament gives ample illustration of this -- that trying to apply half a dozen or so general principles to determine whether a war is somehow "just", when even "just war" theorists despair of ever finding a clear example of such a thing, strikes me as a naive and feckless effort. I'm more and more inclined to believe it's a category error.