War and the Christian Conscience How shall Modern War be Conducted Justly?

Paul Ramsey

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839745942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A fascinating inquiry into the ancient Christian theory of the "just war" and its application today.
"In this volume, a product of the Lilly Endowment Research Program...a competent scholar deals with a major issue in the field of Christian ethics. The central theme of the book is stated in the sub-title, "How shall modern war be conducted justly?" The author seeks primarily to articulate principles of justice relevant to decisions concerning the nature and use of weapons by nations.
At this crucial period in international relations Dr. Ramsey thinks that neither unlimited warfare nor the total abolition of force is the desirable solution of the tension. He is convinced that statesmen should give attention to the kind of weapons that should be prohibited in what Dr. Frank Graham has described as an era of "mortal peril and immortal hope."
In the quest of a rationale for effective armament, the author sets forth a revised version of the "theory of the just war." After a penetrating analysis of motifs in the doctrine of the just war in the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and in contemporary Roman Catholic and Protestant thought, he presents norms by which right and wrong action in warfare may be distinguished. He thinks that there is a basic moral difference between limited and total war and that the exposure of noncombatants—including the children, the sick, and the aged—to indiscriminate bombing can not be justified. He is convinced that the possession or the use of megaton weapons surpasses reasonable and moral limitations of international conflict. He believes that justice requires nations to settle disputes by diplomacy, to explore every honorable way to avoid war, and to prepare for a limited and purposeful defense. He argues that "counter-forces warfare" is the only kind of warfare that can be conducted justly and that present weapons of unlimited power should be eliminated at the earliest possible moment."—Olin T. Binkley

Chapter One—THE PROBLEM OF PROTESTANT ETHICS TODAY

Protestant ethics today comes from a long line of prudent people. The pacifism which between the world wars spread widely in the non-peace churches, the non-pacifism which gradually overcame this as World War II approached and which continues today, the increasing pragmatism of the Niebuhrians, the current increase of “no greater evil” nuclear pacifism, and in general the rejection of natural law and “middle axioms” in favor of contextualism and the study of “decision making”—all this has been largely a matter of determining the “lesser evil” or perchance the “greater good” among the supposed consequences of actions. By calculating the facts and speculating about the expected results, we have sought to find the path along which action should be directed in order to defend or secure some sort of values at the end of the road toward which action reaches, yet never reaches. We have had an ethics derived from some future good (or evil), not in any significant degree an ethics of right, right action or proper conduct. We have understood morality to be a matter of prudential calculation. This is the case even if Christian agape directs the estimate made of the utility of an action to be done. Such an ethic is well calculated to reduce every present reality—people and principles no less than facts—to what may be done to bring in the future.

Against this, it should be affirmed, first of all, that “prudence” has rightly to be understood to be in the service of some prior principle, whether in application of natural-law principles or (if, as I believe, these alone are inadequate) in application of divine charity. Against this, secondly, it should be affirmed that agape does not first and always face toward the future alone. Rather does agape face in the present also toward a man’s existing neighbors and companions in God, seeking to determine what love permits and requires to be now done or not done toward them. Thus, love posits or takes form in principles of right conduct which express the difference it discerns between permitted and prohibited action, and these are not wholly derived from reflection upon the consequences.

In what way, then, should moral decision be based on anticipation of greater good or lesser evil among the consequences of action? Not every action that is licit is therefore to be done; what love permits, it does not without more ado require. For sound judgment to be made that a certain conduct is commanded, the Christian must, of course, also consult the consequences to see as best he can that the good outweighs the evil, or that evil is minimized by his proposed action. Yet, in order to make a decision about what should be done, a Christian would attempt to trammel up the consequences only among alternative courses of action which do not directly violate the love-commandment, or fall outside of the work of love in depositing, informing or taking the form of certain principles of right conduct The good or the best or the lesser evil among the goals of action is to be chosen, yet by action that is not intrinsically and from the beginning wrong in itself.

We must affirm that a wholly teleological ethic—even a wholly future-facing agape-ethic—amounts to the suspension of a great part of morality. If no more can be said about the morality of action than can be derived backward from the future goal (thus unrolling toward the present the path that we shall have to tread by deeds determined by calculating their utility) ethics has already more than half-way vanished, i.e., it has become mere calculation of the means to projected ends. Of course, the ends and values toward which ethico-political calculation or prudence is directed may in themselves be of great importance; and we cannot deny that it makes a great deal of difference what the objectives a society seeks are, especially when, so far as Christian action is concerned, agape is in any measure the director of action toward the greater good or lesser evil (which, of course, means the same as the greatest possible good). Still, to say only this about morality is to say that there is nothing that should not be done which a future-facing calculation seems to require; and no action which can be prudently calculated to produce the described result which should not therefore be defined as a right action. Such a view has to be rejected as the suspension of a great part of ethics, without in any sense minimizing the significance of calculation, in its proper place, both for morality and for political decision.

When, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr writes “To serve peace, we must threaten war without blinking the fact that the threat may be a factor in precipitating war,”{2} It should not first be asked whether the suggested political calculation is right or wrong but whether this is right or wrong calculation. And the answer to the latter question depends in large measure upon the sort of military action, or the conduct of war, that was threatened and the threat in turn foreknown perhaps to precipitate. That peace was thought to be served (however good that end may be), and a precarious calculation of the mixed tendency our actions may have to produce peace, do not provide an entirely adequate determination of right action. There is little to be gained from questioning the accuracy of such realistic, prudential political judgments, when the real issue to be raised concerns the establishment of moral and political judgment also upon some other, and logically prior, ground. In undertaking to state the moral grounds for political action, this book will attempt, at one and the same time, to distinguish between right and wrong calculation and to locate the proper place for prudential consideration of consequences. This must be done before asking the question whether a given calculation of the expected results of an action is correct or not. In the past an ethics that attempted to determine right action and the proper conduct of affairs may have been too rigid, too certain in its statements about legitimate means; and “moralism” may often have prevented good people from being sufficiently wise or free or flexible in their deeds or in the choice of political programs. However, this should not blind us to the fact that rigid moralism has long since been overcorrected; and that today Protestant ethics points every which way in search of the useful and prudent thing to do. We call by the name of “social ethics” our wanderings over the wasteland of utility since the day we completely surrendered to technical political reason the choice of the way to the goals we seek.

Morality, including political morality, has to do with the definition of right conduct, and this not simply by way of the ends of action. How we do what we do is as important as our goals. An “idealist” in politics is one who goes on his way and finds his way under the lure of such goals as the greatest happiness of the greatest number, etc. A “realist” is one who knows that there are many ways that may reasonably be supposed to lead there, ranging all the way from the noblest to the most wicked political decisions and actions; and he reminds the calculative idealist that in politics he had better know more than this about right and wrong conduct. No properly ethical statement has yet been made so long as our moral imperatives are tied to unlimitedly variable ends. Nor has a properly ethical statement yet been made so long as the means are unlimitedly variable that are supposed to lead to fixed, universal ends, even the ends determined by agape.

Of course, ends and means mutually interpenetrate each other. But surely the means-end relationship should always be read both ways. Surely war will never be kept a just endurable human enterprise if it is sought to be kept limited only by political objectives and therefore limited in terms of the weapons employed. Limited ends do tend to moderate the means ventured and the cost paid and exacted in warfare. But not only does the military force made possible by modern technology work against our being able to achieve the control of warfare by aiming at modest ends, but also the endless restless aspiration of the human spirit, which displays its want of heaven even in man’s towering attempts at grandeur and wickedness with which history is replete. The interpenetration of means and ends should also be stated: limited (or unlimited) means or weapons are available and resolved to be used, and therefore limited (or unlimited) political objectives may be thought to be proper goals in war. Calculative morality and politics cannot dispense with exhortations to whole peoples to adopt only limited goals. It must therefore rely upon a revival of this aspect of the moral tradition of civilized warfare.{3} At the same time (if means and ends interpenetrate), there is need for a recreation, in both thought and feeling, of the moral tradition of civilized warfare in the right conduct of war and the moral limitation to be placed upon means. Surely, the immunity of non-combatants from indiscriminate, direct attack may come again to govern the consciences of men as readily or with as great improbability as they will set limits to the political objectives they pursue.

The morality of means referred to in the “justified” war theory meant more than the inert weapon as such; it meant the conduct of war as such, the action as a whole and its nature, which had a morality or an immorality not wholly swallowed up in consequences or in motive to ends believed to justify any action that might be thought to have military decisiveness. This was an application of the Christian love-ethic in principles of right, and not only, as today, an application of Christian love through prudence teleologically oriented toward ends only.

A wholly future-facing love-ethic necessarily produces some version of the opinion that the end justifies the means, and a reading of the means-end situation only from the end backward. Nevertheless, an emphasis upon the significance of means, and upon principles of justice and right conduct, need not neglect concern with the good and evil consequences. For while the end may never justify the means, one effect often justifies another effect that is linked with it. Thus, moral theology has long taught that an unavoidable evil effect may be produced if that is the only way, by an action not wrong in itself, to secure some very good result. Now only at this point do we come to the proper work of calculation, in the comparison of the mixed effects of right or neutral actions, weighing their gravity, estimating the sufficiency of the reasons for them, and balancing greater against lesser goods or lesser evils.

It was a late Spanish schoolman, Francesco Vittoria, who first made explicit the teleologically prudential criterion in the just-war theory. To be finally justified there should be some reasonable expectation that a war can produce more good than evil, or at least achieve a lesser evil than not resorting to arms would lead to. To be justified, Luther said, a war must not, like fishing with a golden net, involve more risk of loss than realistic hope of gain. This, of course, requires calculation to determine whether warfare, already and on other grounds believed to be licit, should in fact be undertaken. It seems to me of the highest significance that discussion of the problem of war in Protestant circles today consists so largely of the principle of expediency alone out of the ancient theory. Thus prudential pacifism, prudential non-pacifism, and now prudential nuclear pacifism emphasize in the main our responsibility for judging concerning greater good or lesser evil among the consequences of political decision. Their conclusions disagree, of course, but the ethical orientation is the same.

If pacifism as an analysis of the right Christian conduct is wrong, it is wrong not first of all because it is imprudent, but because it has mistaken the principles of right political conduct and of justifiable war in which Christian love should take form, today as in the past. If non-pacifism is correct, it is correct not first of all because we can foreknow that there can be no greater evil than the consequences supposed to follow from non-resistance to tyranny and aggression, but because there is a perennial truth in the just-war doctrine which in every epoch of our human history Christian love, of its own inner logic, will be impelled to affirm and renew as proper Christian action, even in face of a great deal of ignorance of what the actual consequences will be. Of course, a balance of greater evil over the good expected to result would render unchoiceworthy an action otherwise right in itself. Calculation of the consequences may in any given instance be sufficient to prove that an act of justified warfare cannot effectively, and therefore should not, be undertaken; but this alone would never establish the rightfulness of such action as legitimate or permitted by love in the first place. By the same token, moral limits upon military action that is licit spring from the same source that allows it to the Christian. If today nuclear pacifism is correct in any of its conclusions, the reason is not first of all that there can be “no greater evil” than the event of nuclear destruction but that there can be no greater evil than an act of all-out nuclear warfare. This is not only or first because of the destructiveness of it but because of the intrinsic immorality of indiscriminate, direct killing; and that was all along the teaching of that product of agape in Western thought, the doctrine of the just war.

It is striking that Christian theories of justified war in the past have directed attention at least as much to the conduct as to the ultimate and large-scale consequences of military action. In Chapter III we shall attempt to answer the historical question: Whence came the prohibition of indiscriminate killing in warfare? It is also significant that, at least at the outset, the just-war theory did not suppose that men possess the ability to discriminate between social orders at large by means of clear and certain principles of justice so as to declare one side or social system to be just and the other unjust in universal terms, in a case of conflict. Augustine does not seem to have needed to believe this as premise for a confident enough judgment as to a Christian’s responsibility for action in justifiable (if not unambiguously just) war. To demonstrate this conclusion will be our concern in the next chapter. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from this is that Christian ethics has reason to know more clearly and certainly the moral limits pertaining to the armed action of a man or nation than we can claim to know about the overall justice of regimes and nations; and still more reason for knowing something significant about proper conduct than we have the competence to count up all its remote effects, subject as these are to the erosions, reversals, and glacial changes of history yet to come.

Before we attempt to recount the historical development of the just-war theory, however, and the moral and political wisdom to be drawn from it, two conclusions may be drawn from the foregoing analysis—one for the Christian public official and another for the shape (or lack of shape) of Protestant Christian ethical theory today. The Christian statesman who is responsible for policy decisions lives in a realm where “the science of the possible” is definitive for all his actions so long as he remains convinced that politics is his vocation. Politics is also, for the Christian, a realm of “deferred repentance.” This means that there is not an essential difference between private morality and public morality. Murder, or the intentional, direct killing of persons not immediately involved in force that should justly be repelled, means the same whether this is done by individuals or by states. Moreover, readiness and preparation to kill the “innocent” partake of the crime of actually doing so. Therefore, the Christian statesman has no escape from his evil necessities in the assertion that his nation’s power to retaliate against whole peoples is for the purpose of deterrence. No ethics—least of all Christian ethics—gives us leave to kill another man’s children directly as a means of weakening his murderous intent. Preparation to do so—if that is the real and the only object of our weapons—is intrinsically a grave moral evil.

But politics and military planning may be a realm of deferred repentance. Whatever is immoral an individual, in his private capacity, should cease doing at once. But there should be statesmen who themselves are quite clear as to the immorality of obliteration warfare (and as well the wrong of deterring evil by readiness to do the same thing) who are still willing to engage in negotiation directed to the end of limiting war to justifiable means and ends through a period of time in which they may have to defer their nation’s repentance. This may be better than keeping personal conscience clean by getting out of office. Thus, it may be that a “just war” Christian may sometimes find himself supporting a nation’s preparations for unjust warfare—as there have been pacifist Christians in public office who have been willing to vote for a military appropriation. The important thing is to make clear and keep clear in the public conscience the moral context of political action that should surround every specific policy decision and should be the aim of political practice and of negotiation between nations. Just war must be made possible, and only just war should be allowed as a possibility. Meantime, repentance may have to be deferred. This is the main difference between public and private morality; and no case can be made for the view that what is wrong for a man may be right for a government. Only the statesman who knows this may be trusted not to defer his nation’s repentance forever; and he will have the most powerful incentive to guide the thrust of political action into ways that are right, and toward international agreements and institutions that prevent wrong-doing on a national scale.

Finally, we must conclude that today Protestant theories of politics have a very odd shape indeed. Those theologians who most stress the fact that Christian ethics is wholly predicated upon redemption or upon the Divine indicative, and who say that decisive action is made possible by virtue of justification in Christ and by God’s forgiveness, are often precisely the thinkers who strip politics of norms and principles distinguishing between right and wrong action. For them policy decisions are always wholly relative or “contextual,” pragmatically relating available means to ends. On their view, a policy may be inept or erroneous, but it is difficult to see how decision could be wrong. This makes it difficult to see what there is in need of forgiveness, except inner motives. Even the politics of deferred repentance is made quite impossible, where there is nothing in violation of fundamental principle to repent of, and to negotiate out of the realm of possibility. It would seem that an ethics grounded in justification in Christ has no such urgent need to avoid m...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Introduction
• Chapter One-THE PROBLEM OF PROTESTANT ETHICS TODAY
• Chapter Two-THE JUST WAR ACCORDING TO ST. AUGUSTINE
• Chapter Three-THE GENESIS OF NON-COMBATANT IMMUNITY
• Chapter Four-THE JUST WAR IN CONTEMPORARY ROMAN CATHOLIC THOUGHT
• Chapter Five-THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES STUDY DOCUMENT ON “CHRISTIANS AND THE PREVENTION OF WAR IN AN ATOMIC AGE”
• Chapter Six-JUSTIFIABLE REVOLUTION
• Chapter Seven-THE JUST WAR IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN PROTESTANT THOUGHT
• Chapter Eight-A THOUGHT-EXPERIMENT: CANNOT THE USE OF UNLIMITED MEANS OF WAR SOMETIMES BE JUSTIFIED?
• Chapter Nine-THE POLITICS OF FEAR, OR THE END IS NOT YET
• Chapter Ten-NUCLEAR TESTING
• Chapter Eleven-TWO DEEP TRUTHS ABOUT MODERN WARFARE
• Chapter Twelve-RATIONAL, POLITICALLY BENEFICIAL ARMAMENT
• Afterword