G.E.M. Anscombe on Just War

I don’t want to turn this into the “all just war theory all the time” blog, but what’s the point of having a blog if not to indulge my own personal idiosyncratic interests?

To that end, I thought I’d post some excerpts from Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s (1919-2001) essay “War and Murder.”* Anscombe was, in addition to being Ludwig Wittgenstein’s literary executor, a noted philosopher in her own right. She debated C. S. Lewis on whether naturalism was self-refuting, leading Lewis to modify the argument in his book Miracles.

She also had an activist side – she protested Oxford’s granting of an honorary degree to President Truman on the grounds that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted war crimes and later in life became active in the pro-life movement in the UK, once having to be dragged bodily away by police from a sit-in at an abortion clinic.

On the justification of the use of coercive force:

To think that society’s coercive authority is evil is akin to thinking the flesh evil and family life evil. These things belong to the present constitution of mankind; and if the exercise of coercive power is a manifestation of evil, and not the just means of restraining it, then human nature is totally depraved in a manner never taught by Christianity. For society is essential to human good; and society without coercive power is generally impossible.

On the duty of rulers to wage war when necessary:

The same authority which puts down internal dissension [i.e. crime], which promulgates laws and restrains those who break them if it can, must equally oppose external enemies. These do not merely comprise those who attack the borders of the people ruled by the authority; but also, for example, pirates and desert bandits, and, generally those beyond the confines of the country ruled whose activities are viciously harmful to it.

On the injustice of most wars:

Here, however, human pride, malice and cruelty are so usual that it is true to say that wars have mostly been mere wickedness on both sides. Just as an individual will constantly think himself in the right, whatever he does, and yet there is still such a thing as being in the right, so nations will constantly wrongly think themselves to be in the right–and yet there is still such a thing as their being in the right. […]

The probability is that warfare is injustice, that a life of military service is a bad life “militia or rather malitia,” as St. Anselm called it. This probability is greater than the probability (which also exists) that membership of a police force will involve malice, because of the character of warfare: the extraordinary occasions it offers for viciously unjust proceedings on the part of military commanders and warring governments, which at the time attract praise and not blame from their people.

On not attacking the innocent:

What is required, for the people attacked to be non-innocent in the relevant sense, is that they should themselves be engaged in an objectively unjust proceeding which the attacker has the right to make his concern; or–the commonest case–should be unjustly attacking him. Then he can attack with a view to stopping them; and also their supply lines and armament factories. But people whose mere existence and activity supporting existence by growing crops, making clothes, etc. constitute an impediment to him–such people are innocent and it is murderous to attack them, or make them a target for an attack wich he judges will help him towards victory. For murder is the deliberate killing of the innocent, whether for its own sake or as a means to some further end.

On Christianity and pacifism:

To extract a pacifist doctrine–i.e., a condemnation of the use of force by the ruling authorities, and of soldiering as a profession–from the evangelical counsels and the rebuke to Peter, is to disregard what else is in the New Testament. It is to forget St. John’s direction to soldiers: “do not blackmail people; be content with your pay”; and Christ’s commendation of the centurion, who compared his authority over his men to Christ’s. On a pacifist view, this must be much as if a madam in a brothel had said: “I know what authority is, I tell this girl to do this and she does it…” and Christ had commender her faith. A centurion was the first Gentile to be baptized; there is no suggestion in the New Testament that soldiering was regarded as incompatible with Christianity. The martyrology contains many names of soldiers whose occasion of martyrdom was not any objection to soldiering, but a refusal to perform idolatrous acts.

On saturation bombing and “unconditional surrender”:

The policy of obliterating cities was adopted by the Allies in the last war [i.e. WWII]; they need not have taken that step, and it was taken largely out of a villainous hatred, and as a corollary to the policy, now universally denigrated, of seeking “unconditional surrender.” (That policy itself was visibly wicked, and could be and was judged so at the time; it is not surprising that it led to disastrous consequences, even if no one was clever and detached enough to foresee this at the time.)

Anscombe shows how the adherent of just war theory is forever waging a two-front battle against pacifism on one hand and advocates of an “anything goes” approach to warfare on the other.
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*The essay can be found in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics (Blackwell). It has also been widely anthologized.