Because “every human action takes place within the purview of moral judgment . . . moral muteness in a time of war is a moral stance,” declared senior fellow George Weigel in the Center’s second annual William E. Simon Lecture, “Moral Clarity in a Time of War,” given at the Mayflower Hotel October 24. Such muteness is a trap, he said, “a defi cient and dangerous form of moral judgment” that we must challenge by tapping the deep resources of the just war tradition.
Weigel observed that echoes of just war reasoning ring through the national debate over the war against terrorism and possible action against outlaw states armed with weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, among its supposed intellectual custodians—religious leaders,moral philosophers, and theologians—there has been “a great forgetting of the classic just war tradition.” Much of their commentary about U.S. policy toward Iraq has made this painfully evident. Our urgent task, Weigel argued, is “to retrieve and develop the just war tradition to take account of the new political and technological realities of the twenty-first century.”
The first step toward this end is to recall that the just war tradition is a “tradition of statecraft” and an “attempt to relate the morally legitimate use of proportionate and discriminate military force to morally worthy political ends.” It “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.” Weigel suggested that this “is one of those times.”
Secondly, we must resuscitate the crucial just war idea that “armed force is not inherently suspect morally” but rather “something that can be used for good or evil.” Those “who claim that the just war tradition ‘begins’ with a ‘presumption against violence’ are quitesimply mistaken,” Weigel asserted. The tradition holds “that rightly constituted public authority is under a strict moral obligation to defend the security of those for whom it has assumed responsibility. . . . The tradition begins by defi ning the moral responsibilities of governments, continues with the defi nition of morally appropriate political ends, and then takes up the question of means.” Contrary to contemporary misrepresentations, classic just war analysis takes up war-conduct questions of proportionality and discrimination after addressing the prior wardecision questions of just cause, right intention, competent authority, and the like.
A third necessary step is to promote the concept of “the peace of order”—that is, a peace built through the instruments of politics “on foundations of constitutional, commutative, and social justice . . . in which freedom fl ourishes.” Such a peace has been achieved in and among the developed democracies, Weigel said, but it is now gravely threatened by international terrorism, which “is a deliberate assault on the very possibility of order in world affairs. That is why the terror networks must be dismantled or destroyed.” That is why we must help rid the world of the “lethal combination of irrational and aggressive regimes + weapons of mass destruction + credible delivery systems. . . . Peace, rightly understood, demands it.”
In addition to taking these three steps, Weigel argued, we must reconsider such classic categories as just cause, competent authority, and last resort in light of “the political exigencies of a new century, and . . . address the international security issues posed by new weapons technologies.” For example, in circumstances where “non-military actions are unavailable or unavailing, the ‘last’ in ‘last resort’ can mean ‘only.’” The need to develop the just war tradition does not mean that the tradition is obsolete, however. “To suggest that the just war tradition is obsolete is to suggest that politics—the organization of human life into purposeful political communities—is obsolete.” Weigel insisted that, with work, the tradition still has the “capacity to shed light on the irreducible moral component of all political action.”
A reception for the audience of more than three hundred people followed the lecture. To receive a complimentary copy of the complete text, which has been published in booklet form, please contact the Center by e-mail, phone, fax, or mail.
