I’ve noticed in recent days, mostly in various blog comment threads about the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, that whenever anyone brings up traditional just war notions like proportionality or non-combatant immunity, almost inevitably someone will say, with an air of triumph as if delivering an unassailable argument-stopper, something like “So, you’re saying the Allies were wrong to carpet bomb during World War II or to use atomic weapons on Japan?”

What’s curious about this response is that those who make it seem to be implying that those acts were manifestly right and just and only some kind of kook could possibly think otherwise. But even at the time those were controversial tactics. Maybe it’s because World War II has been enshrined in our national mythology as the “Good War” that people appeal to it as a kind of paradigm of a just war. But a just cause doesn’t guarantee that all the means used to fight will be just.

One thing that might be going on is that people are appealing to an idea of “military necessity” – that if the cause is just, then whatever means are necessary to win are ipso facto just. With respect to the bombing campaigns in WWII, though, there is naturally some debate about whether they were necessary to win.

This exposes a fundamental divide between a consequentialist moral outlook that evaluates actions based on their expected consequences, and a more deontological one that deems certain actions to be intrinsically right or wrong. The just war tradition is deontological in that it forbids certain actions even if they appear to be necessary for victory. To a consequentialist this may look foolish, or even evil, because it might allow a just cause to go down to defeat. This is why I’m skeptical that just war thinking can really effectively function once it’s been detached from Christian moorings (or at least from some other robustly deontological moral perspective).

In his book When War Is Unjust: Being Honest in Just War Thinking, John Howard Yoder argues that the rise of the secular state resulted in the values of “national survival” becoming paramount in thinking about war. Whereas for Christians it was considered preferable to suffer rather than sin, this makes less sense in the context of a materialistic worldview. Once reasons of state became the driving force in national policy, self-imposed restraints during war started to seem irrational. If this life is all there is, then using whatever means seem necessary to protect and prolong it makes more sense. Thus a more consequentialist outlook came to prevail. This obviously has implications beyond questions of war and peace; it’s reflected in debates about using human life in medical research, for instance.

It should be instructive for Christians who think of themselves as being on the “Right” that the Right is where most of the voices for abandoning just war constraints are coming from. The Right is broadly the party of nationalism. I mean that in a more or less morally neutral sense, but it has a tendency to elevate the nation to a transcendent value. And when that happens you end up with wars that are structurally indistinguishable from a “holy” war or crusade: the transcendent value for which we’re suppsed to be fighting justifies using whatever means are available to ensure victory.