At the Christianity and National Security Conference, Joseph Capizzi spoke about Catholic social teaching on the just war tradition. The following is a transcript of the lecture.
The comments were great; the questions were phenomenal. I sat there thinking in particular about the question about the relationship of just war and natural law. I was thinking I just want to scrap my text and respond to that question, and actually, I will begin by responding to that because I want to step back for a second and simplify what we’re up to.
One thing you’ll see, and you even heard it when the three before me were speaking, is that all of us are trained in a similar tradition. The convergence of Catholic and Protestant Theology in the Anglo-American world has been ongoing for decades, and Nigel, Mark, Dan, and I all work in a tradition that is drawing on each other all the time and drawing profitably on each other. Ramsay is as important to me as he is to them, even though he was a Methodist theologian. I actually studied at a Methodist seminary before my Catholic education, so Ramsay’s an influence for me, and Oliver O’Donovan, influenced by Ramsay, is an influence for me as well.
But we reify the just war thing too much; we speak about it as though it’s some apparatus. It’s not an apparatus; this would be my claim in response to the question of its relationship to natural law. The natural law too can be thought of as a kind of apparatus; it’s really just practical reasoning.
When Catholics talk about natural law, they’re talking about practical reasoning. It’s something we all engage in; it’s built into who we are as creatures of God gifted with intelligence. When we understand the first principle of natural law, which is to do good and avoid evil, we’re just describing what human beings do, and in a way, as Opinion and others pointed out, we’re kind of describing what animals do—they identify certain goods and pursue them. There’s a rabbit; I’m a fox. What do I do? I chase the rabbit. I’m a fox; there’s a bear. What do I do? I flee. Human beings are more or less the same. So, as we talk about just war theory, remember we’re just discussing how to understand moral activity—what should I do now, who makes the judgment about what we should do now? And that’s all just war theory is really doing over time. It has built up into an apparatus for thinking through fundamental questions about what is moral to do now.
So, let’s get Catholic for a few moments. Nigel mentioned some figures in the tradition. I’ll focus on Robert Bellarmine, whom Nigel did not mention. Bellarmine was a theologian a little after Luther and after Francisco de Vitoria. I’ll begin with the catechism of the Catholic Church. Luther had a shorter catechism; Catholics produce catechisms every once in a while, and ours is about this thick.
I’ll start us in the middle of it. It begins its discussion of killing by pointing to the fifth commandment’s prohibition: Exodus 20:13 tells Jews and Christians, “You shall not kill.” The catechism points out that the prohibition finds specification later in scripture. So, Exodus 20:13 says, “You shall not kill.” In Exodus 23:7, the deliberate murder of an innocent person is contrary to the dignity of the human being, the golden rule, and the holiness of the creator. This is the catechism of the Catholic Church, number 2261. If you want to look it up, it says that taking innocent life is prohibited. You see a specification of moral action—what can or can’t we do? We can never take innocent life. Innocence and guilt are components of the commandment’s prohibition. The Catholic tradition asserts that deliberate killing of the innocent is understood as a malum in se—an evil in and of itself; it cannot be made right.
Nothing justifies the deliberate or intentional taking of innocent human life. What scripture prohibits is the intentional killing of human beings, but legitimate defense can be permitted. The catechism says immediately after this that respect for human life and the commandment have so far only been negative: never take innocent life, do not attack the innocent. Legitimate defense begins to fill out the requirements of the commandment beyond the prohibition. The prohibition tells us not merely what not to do but also enjoins certain behavior from us positively. The catechism connects this prohibition to love.
There’s a great question: how does this relate to charity? The catechism makes the connection—an act respecting a prohibition may or may not be moved by love. Nigel’s point about the intentionality of action helps us understand what kind of act we’re dealing with. The commandment is brought to perfection, Pope John Paul II says, when it culminates in the positive commandment obliging us to be responsible for our neighbor as for ourselves: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” John Paul II says. The prohibition on killing innocent life carries with it the injunction to care for those threatened by others.
You’re all on social media, you’re young, you have phones. Have you ever seen awful videos of people beating others? As Christians, we have to ask ourselves, “Am I the kind of person who would sit there and videotape someone being beaten, or would I intervene?” Love requires more than that we not murder; it requires love of self and neighbor, to the point of becoming responsible for their well-being, trying to help them. Contrary to some views influenced by contemporary pacifist thinking, killing in legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. Killing in legitimate defense is a different kind of act; in the killing of the aggressor in self-defense, the act’s intention is ordered toward defense of the victim.
Killing in self-defense requires no special authorization of those responsible for the community, nor need it entail inordinate self-love. Killing in self-defense, the catechism continues, can express appropriate self-regard to which we are called by Christ or by nature. By nature, we defend ourselves; by natural law, we defend ourselves.
Love towards oneself is a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore, it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow—number 2264 of the catechism. I’m going to skip a little bit now. The catechism points to Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, second part of the second part, he defends self-defense as the catechism has been describing. He speaks of a kind of double effect. Any act that one does can have more than one effect. I give a student a bad grade; it damages their GPA and may cause distress. I didn’t intend to make the student cry. I might know they will, but no one would say I made the student cry by grading. My act has two effects: one I intend, the other I don’t. Nobody would say I intended it.
So that’s all Thomas is saying—some acts have multiple effects, one we’re responsible for. If I wanted to make the student cry, you might say, “You claim you didn’t want to, but you did.” The important point is acts can have multiple effects, and that’s the case in legitimate defense. The apparatus of moral analysis is trying to figure out what you intend. What are you trying to do? If someone insults me, and I pull a gun out and shoot him, claiming self-defense, people would say, “You wanted to take them out; you were using this as a rationalization.” Most situations of self-defense aren’t like that.
Just war theory carries that kind of analysis. Aquinas presupposes the same kind of analysis you see in the tradition. He explains that the judicious use of force necessary in duress to preserve a genuine good, like life, is okay. Existence and bodily integrity are legitimate goods, but they can only be preserved in manners proportionate to them. Christians recognize life as a great good, but it’s not the greatest. There are goods greater even than our physical lives. Those goods help us understand the proportionality appropriate to using certain means to defend our lives.
Skipping ahead, the consistent teaching of the church on self-defense recognizes it as a right that derives from love, love of self, in fact, a love of self that relates to our love of God. Because we are to love ourselves as part of God’s creation, we value our lives. The justice we owe God as created beings sets limits on that love. As individuals, we can recognize goods higher than our own self-preservation, like the goods of other human beings, life and community, and also the good of religion itself. We may allow our lives to be sacrificed for those goods.
The justice we owe to God may demand that we sacrifice our lives for those other goods. While there is a right to legitimate self-defense, we can recognize superior obligations limiting our recourse to that right. It is reasonable sometimes when people say, “I’m not going to defend myself here; I choose to die in this situation to preserve some goods we recognize as superior to the good of my mortal existence.”
That is not true, however, for those in governing authority. The catechism says in the very next paragraph of the ones we’ve been looking at—this is 2265—that legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one responsible for the lives of others. The situation changes; when I’m thinking about my own life, I can say, “I’m going to sacrifice it for something else.” But when public authority faces a threat, it has an obligation in certain circumstances to defend itself.
The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility. For those in governing authority, the use of force is more than a permission; it is a responsibility for the care of the community it serves, and that responsibility produces the duty to exercise love and concern, even to the point of using force on its behalf. In this passage, we see the close connection of the justification of the use of force in war to the justification for the use of force in domestic situations. Governing authority is responsible for the care of a civil community. Its care usually requires internal maintenance, policing, and judging associated with the uses of force in domestic governance. That care, built upon principles of judgment and punishment, extends outward when the community faces aggressors.
The very next paragraph of the catechism says, the efforts of the state to curb behavior harmful to people’s rights and the basic rules of civil society correspond to safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense—2266. The logic of the catechism’s discussion of war arises within the logic of community defense by those in authority, the logic of punishment. This is important for the Catholic historical tradition of just war. The framework it’s placed in is the logic of punishment, judgment, and punishment. Just as we accept the government’s responsibility for judging and punishing crimes against the common good, so does that same government have the responsibility for judging and punishing those who threaten it from outside. That’s how this tradition has understood it.
I’ll quickly look at some Bellarmine to make this point. I choose Bellarmine in part because few have heard of him, and certainly outside of Catholicism, people have not heard of him. He was a counter-reformation theologian. He’s a good example to show how stable the tradition of thinking is. When Grotius, who’s not much later than him, picks this up, he’s picking up elements circulating within the same place. Bellarmine places it in the context of punishment. A Christian magistrate may use the sword—the gladio, Latin—on those who disturb public peace.
The defense of capital punishment by Christian theologians like Bellarmine was commonplace. He draws on scripture and theological precedent to defend capital punishment or punishment in general. He points out that this killing is not contrary or exceptional to the commandment not to kill; instead, punishment by death is a different kind of act. He quotes Saint Jerome in his commentary on Jeremiah 22: “To punish murderers and impious men is not shedding blood,” Saint Jerome says, “but applying law.”
You can disagree with him, but note that they’re describing it as a different kind of act. It’s not a violation of the prohibition against murder. Bellarmine confirms his appeal by quoting Augustine: punishing criminals does not violate the fifth commandment. Continuing the logic of killing as a form of punishment, he argues that scripture and tradition prohibit retaliation. Nigel spoke about how vengeance is prohibited; same idea. Retaliation is prohibited. Bellarmine writes that when Christ said, “Do not resist evil,” he did not prohibit legitimate defense, but retaliation. Vengeance is prohibited, not self-defense in punishment and war. In chapter 14 of his work, Bellarmine asks whether war is permissible for Christians. He conditions this on war serving the judgment characteristic of government. War cannot pursue vengeance or retaliation. War, he says, pertains to public justice, not private vengeance. Just as love of enemies, which binds everyone, neither impedes the judge nor the executioner from their offices, it does not impede soldiers or emperors from theirs.
In response to the question about the relationship of this to charity or love, Bellarmine says it’s consistent with charity, with love. This is a specification of the call to love the neighbor. Vengeance, therefore, is incompatible with charity; war, as long as it is not vengeful, is compatible with charity.
From a Catholic perspective and from secular international law, the presupposition of war involves the absence of a common tribunal or political authority that can adjudicate disputes among nations. In a domestic situation, the government has jurisdiction to judge right and wrong. In the international system, there’s no authority above it. War becomes necessary as a means of adjudicating claims. If an overarching authority could make this judgment, it would make war obsolete. That would not make judging and punishing obsolete but would make war, this specific kind of judging and punishing, obsolete. Were that authority in place, it could judge the wrong and levy appropriate punishment; the absence of that authority is a necessary condition of war.
In the past, Bellarmine explains, there were authorities not subject to others in temporal matters who could authorize war. We live in a nation-state system; Bellarmine did not. He lists kings, the Republic of Venice, princes, duchies, and similar entities who could authorize war. A plurality of political types existed then that are not present now. The point is there was no state monopoly on force. Dukes, counts, and princes could authorize war; in a defensive war, anyone could. Bellarmine insists that self-defense is lawful for anyone, not only a prince. I’ll summarize the end: the Catholic claim is a jurisdictional claim. Talking about the domestic and international situation, you find in Catholic documents appeals that say, “Because we are all created by God, all human beings, we are subject to the same laws, which allow us to make judgments of right or wrong.”
One of the most important considerations in thinking about punishment is right judgment, or the judgment of political authority, that a grave wrong has been committed. Not merely a wrong but a certain kind of grave wrong. Someone asked about competing claims; every country thinks its war is justified. The Catholic account presupposes that the claim must be susceptible to reason. If it’s susceptible to reason, we can judge who is more right. The world is fallen, flawed; there will always be plausible claims, but one will be right. This is the basis of international law; it was the basis of Bellarmine, Vitoria, and Grotius’s appeal to the *jus gentium*—the law of nations. Because those claims are susceptible to reason, we can determine who is in the right. One country will be more right, one claim more right, and that is the claim of justice.
Soldiers find themselves in situations where they advance a cause they don’t fully understand, patriotically aligned with their place. This is why laws insist on respecting soldiers’ rights even in war. This is an act of love, consistent with love.
Catholics claim there ought to be a world political authority whose job it is to help judge these situations. You could imagine this in a negative light—a tech giant with means to pull strings—or you could think of it as international law aspiring to be a juridical framework for adjudicating plausible competing claims. We could say, “No, China is in the wrong here,” or “China is right regarding Taiwan,” or “Britain is right” or “Argentina is right regarding the Falklands.” That’s the aspiration from a Catholic perspective. Protestant realists tend to diverge on this point, but we share an approach rooted in fundamental theological claims: we are all created by God.
Dan spoke about the way the world is. Realists begin with the world as it is. For Christians, part of that is that it’s redeemed by Christ, the victory assured by Christ. Whatever we’re doing now won’t change that, and that also informs our analysis. There are certain kinds of goods we might have to sacrifice to be faithful to that givenness of the world as it is. Thank you very much.
Q&A
Capizzi: If you don’t want to come up, I’ll just repeat your question.
Question: [undetected]
Answer: So the question is about capital punishment. I show that the tradition views capital punishment as acceptable, right, and as some of you may know, Pope Francis has continued the line of modern Popes, beginning with John Paul II in *Evangelium Vitae* and extending through Pope Benedict, making a claim that ranges from “capital punishment is no longer necessary” to perhaps even Francis’s doctrinal claim that because of our understanding of human dignity, capital punishment is illicit.
If you read it in the former way, as with John Paul II and perhaps Benedict, you’d say there’s not a doctrinal change here; it’s a doctrinal recognition, which is rooted in Augustine saying to his friends, who happen to be governors, “Hey, I’ve got this situation; what do you think?” And Augustine always replies, “Look, it’s within your right as a governor to punish in this way, and it’s not illicit; however, you’re a Christian, so extend mercy.” That recognition of the state’s right to punish, that punishment by even death can be an apt form of punishment, becomes something carried forward in the tradition.
Look, the pope, who is for us morally authoritative, is challenging that older tradition, and I think it’s a welcome challenge to its internal consistency and to the relationship of mercy and justice. Should we expect the state not merely to be just but also merciful? Issues like time—time is an important element of punishment. Oliver O’Donovan makes this point beautifully in an essay he wrote in response to Evangelium Vitae. It’s a real challenge, and we’re not clear where it’s going to end, though it looks like it’s leaning toward a doctrinal development. Anyway, it’s a long answer. Other questions? Please. Again, you can stay put, whatever.
Question: Hi, I’m Jenna from Liberty University. What is the distinction between punishment or justice and vengeance? Is it more than intention?
Answer: Right. That’s a great question. It’s a great question because everything that I said, and Nigel said, and probably Mark and Dan agree with, presupposes that we can say when we’re punishing somebody, we’re not acting out of vengeance. Vengeance seems to suggest differently.
An easy way out, suggested by Augustine in part, is to think of vengeance as an emotion. I am trying to get back at somebody for something, animated by hatred. Augustine lumps these things together, and the tradition says Augustine is clear that we should not be animated by certain emotions as we pursue justice. If it’s merely that, then you try to evacuate those emotions and say, “What does justice require from me here? What is the right thing to do in this situation as a form of punishment?” Then I do it, and again, I try to make it “It’s business, not personal,” as the Godfather says.
But there’s a chance that it’s more than emotional; there’s a chance that there’s some other component of vengeance that we’re dismissive of, and I think that’s partly what you’re pointing to in the question. I know people who say, “You can’t distinguish retribution and retaliation the way you’re trying.” By etymology, retribution means giving back, like returning something. You did x wrong; I’m giving you not x now, trying to undo the thing that was done by you by handing back to you, which is the lex talionis; it has to be proportionate.
Yeah, and vengeance is more than that. You ever see The Untouchables? There’s the famous “That’s the Chicago way” line where Sean Connery’s character says, “If they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.” That’s retaliation. “I’m gonna get back at you, burn your house down, your village down,” or whatever. There would be some claim that justice is, in fact, animating this and not that secondary thing. But it’s more complicated. Great question, yeah. And there was at least another one. Thank you. I’ll get you next, okay, in the back.
Question: Yeah, so I’m Adriana from Patrick Henry College. I was just wondering whether, in the context of total war, it’s justified to kill civilians?
Answer: Total war? Yes. Well, if I say it’s not justified to kill civilians, it’s no longer total war. This is the stuff LiVecche, Strand, and I argue about. If by killing civilians you mean intentionally targeting them, the answer is no; it’s not just. It’s never just. If by that you mean to foresee, like I foresee the student’s going to cry if I give them a bad grade, that civilians will die, then, yes, it can be justified depending on the circumstances.
The account, as I understand it, presupposes guilt and innocence as the distinction. You can only bring certain harms in punishment of any sort against the guilty. If you punish someone who’s innocent, intending to punish them for some other good—say, “I want to tell everybody it’s wrong to do certain things, so even though I know this person didn’t do it, I’m gonna meet the punishment upon them”—that’s still wrong. From the tradition as I understand it, and certainly the Catholic tradition is clear on this: you cannot intend to kill innocent people.
Yes, okay. The woman in the back, who’s now moving toward the front, so she’s no longer the woman in the back. It’s paradise.
Question: Thank you for your patience as I walked up here. Dr. Capizzi, I was wondering if you or Bellarmine had any ideas about how a nation at war can protect its soldiers from the kind of moral injury we talked about earlier?
Answer: I don’t. That’s a better question for Mark. Nigel and Mark suggested that part of it is to develop a culture that correctly understands the theological presuppositions we’re talking about: that life is a great good but not the greatest good; that even life in community, like a stable nation-state, is a great good but not the greatest; that things can be done to preserve those goods. Sometimes, as Mark would say, horrible things—killing another person—can be done for those great goods. Beyond that, it’s hard.
Nigel’s point was interesting about how other cultures are more comfortable with killing or with certain kinds of victory over other peoples. It is a consequence, arguably, of the Christianizing of our moral communities that we find it a problem in the first place. Things are in disarray culturally, and have been for a long time. I don’t think they’re worse than they’ve been before, but they’re in such disarray that it clouds all this kind of thinking.
Great question. I almost want to invite Mark or Nigel to weigh in, but in a sense, what I’m saying in response is a kind of righting of these cultural mistakes and confusions about what community is for, what life is for, and so on. It’s hard. Thank you.
