Weekend Quiz: What's Most Persuasive

They were skinny, college students I suppose. D.C. was unseasonably warm; the four wore seemingly identical black t-shirts with unreadable logos. No paper mache, only placards: "Peace at Any Price," "No More War," "Bring the Troops Home," "US-Imperialists." They sing-song shouted the same; a service to the blind, I guess.

Perched at an intersection on my customary path, I passed within a foot, intending neither debate nor distain. Suddenly, resolve faded, and I paused and asked: "Have you ever heard of the 'Just War Doctrine?'" No answer from see-, hear- or speak-no-evil; after a pause, the fourth answered, "War is never Just."

Instinct is powerful. Mouth agape, brain engaged, tongue primed, a rumble (verbal) was inevitable--but no, it wasn't worth the fight. Flight won, and I scurried a square-out and shuffled home. On my doorstep, finally, teeth and fingernails unclenched.

Quit mumbling; stop Googling--my DSM category is a debate for another day. Instead, I'm channeling frustration by launching a contest. The quiz question is this: "if peacenik agreed to read, what text (book, article, anything) would you select to maximize moving to maturity?" Pick your anti-Peter Pan potion in comments. Automatic disqualification for choosing your own blog.

My off-the-cuff answer addresses inaction in wartime, a long-time obsession. It's a short article by George Weigel, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called Moral Clarity in a Time of War, 128 First Things 20 (January 2003):

As a tradition of statecraft, the just war argument recognizes that there are circumstances in which the first and most urgent obligation in the face of evil is to stop it. Which means that there are times when waging war is morally necessary to defend the innocent and to promote the minimum conditions of international order. This, I suggest, is one of those times. Grasping that does not require us to be "pagans." It only requires us to be morally serious and politically responsible. Moral seriousness and political responsibility require us to make the effort to "connect the dots" between means and ends.

Thus the just war tradition is best understood as a sustained and disciplined intellectual attempt to relate the morally legitimate use of proportionate and discriminate military force to morally worthy political ends. In this sense, the just war tradition shares Clausewitz’s view of the relationship between war and politics: unless war is an extension of politics, it is simply wickedness. For Robert Kaplan, Clausewitz may be an archetypal "pagan." But on this crucial point, at least, Clausewitz was articulating a thoroughly classic just war view of the matter. Good ends do not justify any means. But as Fr. Murray liked to say, in his gently provocative way, "If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?" In the classic just war tradition of statecraft, what "justifies" the resort to proportionate and discriminate armed force–what makes war make moral sense–is precisely the morally worthy political ends being defended and/or advanced.

That is why the just war tradition is a theory of statecraft, not simply a method of casuistry. And that intellectual fact is the first thing about the just war tradition that must be retrieved today if we seek a public moral culture capable of informing the national and international debate about war, peace, and international order.

The second crucial idea to be retrieved in the contemporary renewal of the just war tradition is the distinction between bellum and duellum, between warring and "duelling," so to speak. As intellectual historian and just war theorist James Turner Johnson has demonstrated in a number of seminal works, this distinction is the crux of the matter in moral analysis. Bellum is the use of armed force for public ends by public authorities who have an obligation to defend the security of those for whom they have assumed responsibility. Duellum, on the other hand, is the use of armed force for private ends by private individuals. To grasp this essential distinction is to understand that, in the just war tradition, "war" is a moral category. Moreover, in the classic just war tradition, armed force is not inherently suspect morally. Rather, as Johnson insists, the classic tradition views armed force as something that can be used for good or evil, depending on who is using it, why, to what ends, and how.

Thus those scholars, activists, and religious leaders who claim that the just war tradition "begins" with a "presumption against war" or a “presumption against violence” are quite simply mistaken. It does not begin there, and it never did begin there. To suggest otherwise is not merely a matter of misreading intellectual history (although it is surely that). To suggest that the just war tradition begins with a "presumption against violence" inverts the structure of moral analysis in ways that inevitably lead to dubious moral judgments and distorted perceptions of political reality. . .

If the just war tradition is a theory of statecraft, to reduce it to a casuistry of means–tests that begins with a “presumption against violence” is to begin at the wrong place. The just war tradition begins by defining the moral responsibilities of governments, continues with the definition of morally appropriate political ends, and only then takes up the question of means. By reversing the analysis of means and ends, the “presumption against violence” starting point collapses bellum into duellum and ends up conflating the ideas of “violence” and “war.” The net result is that warfare is stripped of its distinctive moral texture. Indeed, among many American religious leaders today, the very notion of warfare as having a “moral texture” seems to have been forgotten.

Like freedom of the seas, anti-genocide and similar customary international law, just war was both liberal and liberating. Once upon a time, lefties proudly stood with humanity and freedom.

No more. At best, today's progressives don't care. So let's launch the lefty desert island book list in comments, voting 'till Monday. Think of it as America's strategic persuasive reserve. It's foolproof--unless species Moonbats can't read.