Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate

“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” was printed on the punch cards that fed data into IBM computers in the 1950s, when those primitive calculating machines could occupy the entire floor of a building.

That admonition came to mind when, as has happened with depressing frequency over the past four decades, the just war tradition of moral analysis was folded, spindled, and mutilated—not to mention distorted, inverted, and rendered unrecognizable—in a lot of the secular and religious commentary on the military action undertaken by Israel and the United States in Iran in June.

Let me try to repair some of the damage with a few reminders of what the just war method of moral analysis isn’t and is.

Fallacy #1. The just war way of thinking begins with a “presumption against war.”

No, it doesn’t. Augustine’s just war theory did not “begin” there, Thomas Aquinas’s just war theory didn’t begin there, and no serious contemporary just war theory begins there.

Rather, the just war way of thinking begins with a legitimate public authority’s moral obligation to provide for the security of those for whose lives it is responsible. That obligation can be met in several ways. One of them is the proportionate and discriminate use of armed force.

The “presumption against war” starting point distorts the inner logic, the structure of moral reasoning, within the just war tradition. It turns just war reasoning into a series of hoops ethicists demand that public authorities jump through, or boxes that decision-makers must serially tick off.

Rather, the just war way of thinking is a template for collaborative reflection by ethicists, the public, and government officials responsible for the common good on when and how proportionate and discriminate armed force may serve the ends of peace, justice, and freedom. It helps, of course, if all three parties to this reflection have some knowledge of, and respect for, that template. Churchmen who declare that “wars are always unjust” do not foster that knowledge.

Fallacy #2: The just war theory precludes preemptive military action or striking the first blow.

No, it does not.

As those who’ve seen the 2019 film Midway know, Admiral William Halsey and the USS Enterprise battle group were returning to Hawaii on December 7, 1941, after delivering Marine fighter planes to Wake Island. The Kido Butai, the mobile striking force of the Japanese First Air Fleet under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, eluded the Americans. But suppose Halsey had found the Japanese fleet? It could be reasonably assumed that Nagumo wasn’t barreling toward Hawaiian waters to explore real estate options on Waikiki Beach; Japan’s aggressive efforts to enlarge its empire had been clear since its brutal invasions of China in 1937 and its invasion and occupation of French Indochina in 1940. Had the SBD Dauntlesses of Enterprise’s Scouting Six found the Japanese fleet, Halsey would have been entirely justified, from a just-war standpoint, in launching a preemptive attack to prevent an assault on Pearl Harbor. Japanese aggression was already underway, even though the torpedo planes and bombers marked with the Rising Sun had not yet been launched.

Iran has been making war on the United States (‘the Great Satan”), Israel (“the little Satan”), and, more broadly, the West, for decades. At least 1,000 Americans have been killed as a result. A totalitarian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics wasn’t seeking nuclear weapons—and persistently lying about its progress toward that goal—for purposes of deterrence or chest-thumping. Depriving the Iranian regime of the vast, destructive capability of nuclear weapons was imperative, morally and strategically. In this case, when diplomacy had clearly failed, various forms of aggression were underway, and the regime’s intentions were quite clear, preemption was morally justifiable, even if the medium and long-term outcome of that justifiable action cannot be known with certainty now.

Fallacy #3: “Last resort” is the first principle in the just war tradition.

No, it isn’t.

The just war principle of “last resort” cannot logically mean that every conceivable means of conflict-resolution must be exhausted before proportionate and discriminate use of armed force is morally justifiable.

Why? Because it’s impossible to know with certainty when the “last” option has been reached. One more negotiating initiative, one more “red line,” one more sanction can always be imagined—as commentators on the isolationist right and the functionally pacifist left recently demonstrated.

So the just war criterion of “last resort” cannot be conceived as the terminus of a sequence whose beginning and end are known. Rather, in response to an aggression that must be addressed, to decide that all non-military options have failed is a matter of informed, prudential judgment, not arithmetic.

These principles should be better known, the world being what it is.